Thoughts from a younger generation.. [LWN.net]

Thoughts from a younger generation..

Posted May 19, 2026 16:11 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Thoughts from a younger generation.. by malmedal
Parent article: RIP Peter G. Neumann

Switching from one LLM to another on the other hand is trivially easy

Perhaps today (though even that, I'm not sure of), but I expect there will be consolidation in the LLM space and we'll be left with 3-4 giants who will all adopt the Broadcom strategy. It wouldn't make sense not to.

Thoughts from a younger generation..

Posted May 19, 2026 19:12 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

As an example of local models, I have two AMD graphics cards with 64Gb total RAM and Qwen 3.6 was able to autonomously write an implementation of LTFS (a filesystem for tape drives) in Go, given the spec from SNIA and the reference implementation in C. In about 7 days.

I just wrote a detailed plan and left the agent to its own devices inside a sandbox. It first used a flat file backend to validate itself against the C implementation and then fuzz its own code. It found several security bugs in the C implementation, huge surprise. It's now working on adding real device support via iSCSI to a real tape drive.

All of this on hardware that is available for casual hobby users, no unobtanium-level hardware. Even _this_ level of competency from models is enough to seriously affect the way software development works.

And free models are still getting better. Qwen 3.6 is just 35B parameters, this is the level where you can feasibly _train_ a model from scratch independently without being a hyperscaler. It'll still cost you hundreds of thousands, but it's not out of reach for a non-profit or a crowd-funded startup.

Which cards?

Posted May 19, 2026 22:10 UTC (Tue) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link] (1 responses)

Would you mind sharing which AMD cards?

Which cards?

Posted May 19, 2026 22:44 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Sure, I have a pair of AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700. They were retailing for $1100 when I bought them last year but went up a bit after the RAMPocalypse. I like them because they don't require any special support and "just work" in the most recent Fedora.

I can see that the agents were using 300W on average for the whole machine (a mid-level Xeon-based server with 128Gb RAM, that I was lucky to get 2 years ago). I probably can do the same at a fraction of the time with OpenAI/Anthropic models, but that's just boring.