// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Show HN: Running 104GB Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on 48GB Mac with at ~12 tok/s
Run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on a Mac that can't hold it. The model is a
125B-parameter mixture-of-experts, 104 GB on disk at 4-bit; slotstream streams
it from SSD and runs it in whatever memory you give it. One Swift binary, no
Python; it speaks the Ollama and OpenAI chat APIs, so your existing tools work
unchanged.
Apple Silicon, macOS 14+, and ~110 GB of free disk. Disk bites first: whatever
your memory, a 512 GB Mac is the realistic minimum.
Auto-sizing never takes the whole machine. What each tier gets:
These rows come straight from slotstream doctor --sim-ram N, so you can
reproduce them. Only the 48 GB row is measured on real hardware; the others
are estimates from its curve, and smaller Macs also have slower SSDs. Run
slotstream doctor before downloading anything — it prints your machine's
plan and whether the disk can hold the weights.
Installs a prebuilt binary to ~/.slotstream/bin and puts it on your PATH.
Re-run the same line to upgrade; uninstall with rm -rf ~/.slotstream.
Releases are built by CI from the tagged commit with signed provenance, so you
can verify an asset instead of trusting the download:
Or build it yourself — Command Line Tools are enough, no Xcode needed:
The binary is small; the weights are not — 103.8 GB across 24 files, one time.
serve and run offer the download on first use, or slotstream pull does
it directly. Before transferring anything it prints the size, the destination,
and your free disk, waits for a yes, and refuses outright if the disk can't
hold it.
A real install took 35 minutes. Hugging Face caps the transfer at roughly
36–57 MB/s however many connections you open, so past ~400 Mbps the wait is
Hugging Face's day, not your link. At 100 Mbps plan on ~2 h 20; at 25 Mbps,
~9 h.
Interrupting is safe: pull resumes exactly where it left off, and all
24 files are checked against sha256 hashes compiled into the binary, so a
truncated or corrupted download can't reach the engine. pull --verify
re-hashes an existing copy any time — 8 s here.