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Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs by tgma on Thursday April 16, 2026 @03:19AM (#47789740)
You'd think to bootstrap a marketplace you'd spend your own money to feed fake requests (or perhaps allow free chat so that they induce requests).

Still, absolute zero is an unacceptable number. Had this running for more than an hour.

Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs by splittydev on Thursday April 16, 2026 @03:34AM (#47789848)
I kind of see your point, but I also kind of don't.

Sure, it would be great if you'd immediately get hammered with hundreds of requests and start make money quickly. It would also be great if it was a bit more transparent, and you could see more stats (what counts as "idle"? Is my machine currently eligible to serve models?). But it's still very new, I'd say give it some time and let's see how it goes.

If you have it running and you get zero requests, it uses close to zero power above what your computer uses anyway. It doesn't cost you anything to have it running, and if you get requests, you make money. Seems like an easy decision to me.

Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs by tgma on Thursday April 16, 2026 @03:38AM (#47789876)
Well I already made the Ctrl+C decision. Yours may have been different, but I suppose only one of us installed it, and that one counts.
Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs by subroutine on Thursday April 16, 2026 @03:50AM (#47789957)
Copy?
Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs by oneeyedpigeon on Thursday April 16, 2026 @03:52AM (#47789980)
SIGINT
Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs by yard2010 on Thursday April 16, 2026 @04:23AM (#47790205)
I went with the ctrl z approach.
Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs by jagged-chisel on Thursday April 16, 2026 @04:51PM (#47799340)
Hopefully you also set it running in the background.
Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs by usrusr on Thursday April 16, 2026 @06:07AM (#47790977)
Bootstrapping will be near-impossible (or incredibly costly) unless they offer inference consumers models with established demand arriving at some least-cost router service where they can undercut the competition (if they actually can). And then dogfood the opportunistic provider side on their own Macs, but with a preference to putting third parties first in the queue. Everything else is just wishful thinking.
Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs by hamiltont on Friday April 17, 2026 @09:41AM (#47805867)
> We're not taking funds from customers yet — we're personally paying for all the provider requests during this phase. Credit purchases are disabled.

This appears on their credit purchase page right now, but you have to email them to get credits (everyone starts with zero)