So why waste the time, energy, and bandwidth?

Ok, so AOL is pulling another Amiga. Big deal.

What we all want to know is whether or not we'll soon be getting free coasters in the mail again!

The problem is when an answer is long and involves nuance, and that doesn't work in debates.

The problem with not engaging, however, is that if you don't engage with an issue, you'll just get endlessly sniped on it. And the alternative approach - embrace the opposite side's positions to shut them up - also doesn't work, because you get the worst of both worlds (you tick off your side, while not winning over votes from the opposite side). It's a strategic error to run from difficult conversations.

A lot of people misunderstand the market for the DGX Spark.

If you want to run a small model at home, or create a LoRA for a tiny model, you don't want to do it on this - you want to do it on gaming GPUs.

If you want to create a large foundation model, or run commercial inference, you don't want to do it on this - you want to do this on high-end AI servers.

This fits the middle ground between these two things. It gives you a far larger memory than you can get on gaming GPUs (allowing you to do inference on / tune / train much larger models, esp. when you combine two Sparks). It sacrifices some memory bandwidth and FLOPs and costs somewhat more, but it lets you do things that you simply can't do in any meaningful way on gaming GPUs, that you'd normally have to buy / rent big expensive servers to do.

The closest current alternative is Mac Studio M2 or M3 Ultras. You get better bandwidth on the macs, but way worse TOPS. The balance of these factors depends greatly on what sort of application you're running, but in most cases they'll be in the ballpark of each other. For example, one $7,5k Mac M3 Ultra with 256GB is said to run Qwen 3 235B GGUF at 16 tok/s, while two linked $4,2k DGX Sparks with the same total 256GB are said to do it at 12 tok/s, with similar quantization. Your mileage may vary depending on what you're doing.

Either way, you're not going to be training a big foundation model or serving commercial inference on either, at least not economically. But if you want something that can work with large models at home, these are the sort of solutions that you want. The Spark is the sort of system that you train your toy and small models on before renting out a cluster for a YOLO run, or to run inference a large open model for your personal or office internal use.

Agreed. My interest in this product has nothing whatsoever to do with its small size. It could be 10x larger and I'd still want one.

It happens so easily to these snowflakes.

Let's look at the very DEI policy in question in the article you're responding to, the one that caused them to have to miss out on a government grant, and go through it line by line. You tell me which part is racism and some horrific thing.

"he Python Software Foundation and the global Python community welcome and encourage participation by everyone." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"Our community is based on mutual respect, tolerance, and encouragement, and we are working to help each other live up to these principles." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"We want our community to be more diverse: whoever you are, and whatever your background, we welcome you." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"We have created this diversity statement because we believe that a diverse Python community is stronger and more vibrant." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"A diverse community where people treat each other with respect has more potential contributors and more sources for ideas." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"Although we have phrased the formal diversity statement generically to make it all-inclusive, we recognize that there are specific attributes that are used to discriminate against people. In alphabetical order, some of these attributes include (but are not limited to): age, culture, ethnicity, gender identity or expression, national origin, physical or mental difference, politics, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and subculture. We welcome people regardless of the values of these or other attributes." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"The Python community welcomes people no matter what languages they are fluent in. (Although core Python development is done in English.)" - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
" The Python community encourages the creation of user groups in all locales, and many of them are listed at http://wiki.python.org/moin/Lo..." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"Many of these user groups also have mailing lists in the locally preferred language." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?

This is what DEI is. What the living hell is wrong with you if you think this is some horrible thing that warrants massive government censorship to fight against it?

This. It's just amazing how much they project. The one thing that drives me crazy is how they keep saying "Democrats keep taking about identity and 'social issues" (*cough* trans people *cough*) rather than things that matter like the economy and healthcare!". When the reality is that Democratic politicians keep trying like hell to not have to talk about identity and trans people, to talk ONLY about things like the economy and healthcare (and abortion, and other "strong suits"), but with conservatives constantly talking about identity and trans people, as their primary sources of rage. Seriously, pull up a random Harris speech and count how much time she spent on "identity" or (ahem) "social issues" vs. other things. It will be "little to literally-zero".

Thankfully the US is now focused on a meritocratic system, with everything run by famously qualified people like Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., Linda McMahon, Steve Witkoff, the DOGE teenagers, and on and on and on, who certainly reached their positions due to their qualifications and nothing else and are eminently qualified for their positions, as are all of the minders who have been appointed to replace the mass numbers of purged career civil servants.

It's really a breath of fresh air to see the switch to a focus purely on competency and not things like appearance or loyalty!

Famous free speech advocate Donald Trump. *eyeroll*

You're literally responding to an article where the administration is putting speech constraints onto governmental grants as standard operating procedure. Which is utterly minor compared to what they're doing to free speech in other fields such as collages, or to law firms that take up cases they don't like, or FTC pushing broadcasters to cancel programs that criticize them, or arrests and deportations of legal immigrants who express views they don't like.

And to top it off you have the gall to compare actual literal government censorship to individuals "shouting people down", e.g. people expressing opinions contrary to your own, aka their own free speech rights. Guess what? I have a f'ing right to think you're a moron for your hot take and to express that opinion all I want.

(As an unrelated side note: when I read the headline "Society Will Accept a Death Caused By a Robotaxi, Waymo Co-CEO Says", I expected the quote to continue with something like, "This is why we have ordered our robotic fleet to begin hunting humans. Let the blood sport commence!")

Agreed. Forget about escalators, think about a much closer analogy - aircraft. *Every single crash* gets an investigation and recommendations on how to avoid that type of crash from happening again. Recommendations that are, for the most part, acted on.

But we just accept car crashes as, "Meh, it happens". It's not that we don't have safety regulations for road design and car design. It's just that we've heavily normalized a high rate of crashes and don't treat preventing them with any sense of urgency, even though they're a top killer of young people.

They'll build them right next to the 13000-job Foxconn plant in Wisconsin and fund them with the proceeds of China buying billions of dollars of US agricultural products.

** letter. SIGH.

If only there were a noun form of the adjective "female" used when applied to a human. Maybe something beginning with the word "w", I dunno.