Ok, big breakthrough in #Altivec Intelligence tonight! Gemini helped me build a modern-ish version of libcurl and openssh in a way that can build for iOS 4.3+ and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger+. So with this, it is possible to make an app that can do modern networking with TLS 1.2 support. Something that these old systems could not dream of doing
The Mac version has a universal binary with 4 slices (PPC, x86, x64, and arm64)... so these are the most universal apps ever 😎
See the screenshots, you can see the app running and checking the library versions on iOS 6, Tiger PowerPC, and Sequioa Apple Silicon
https://github.com/jeffreybergier/AltivecIntelligence/pull/2
Thinking Different, Thinking Slowly: LLMs on a PowerPC Mac [The Resistor Network]
http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2025/03/thinking-different-thinking-slowly-llms.html
#Mac #vintageMac #PowerBook #PowerPC #PPC #AltiVec #G4 #G5 #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #AI #LLM #machinelearning #coding #Apple #tech #blog #programming
I landed some improvements and small optimizations to #pixman's AltiVec code. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pixman/pixman/-/merge_requests/136
It was fun working with a new (to me) instruction set and trying to figure out how to puzzle together the pieces into something that improved the `pix_multiply()` function (which is kind of the core primitive of most fast paths).
I couldn't figure out a way to use the `vec_mradds`/`vmhraddshs` instruction. Maybe you can? (see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pixman/pixman/-/merge_requests/136#note_2699795)
I fixed an issue in pixman's Altivec code the other day -- https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pixman/commit/?id=207626180d0282bb14a50f2e494174f54ac8a6ce
And in the process, I read through the Altivec docs and discovered that there are vector instructions that pack and unpack between a8r8g8b8 and a1r5g5b5 formats (but nothing fo r5g6b5).
Any clues why? Was a1r5g5b5 really common on Mac OS or something? I don't think I've seen a1r5g5b5 used anywhere.
Wayfarer 6.0 browser for #MorphOS has been released at https://wayfarer.icu
The changes include:
• Rebased to #WebKitGTK 2.40.2
• Implemented Bookmarks filtering
• Password manager now stores port numbers too, making it possible to have multiple services requiring login handled on the same domain (as a side effect, all old passwords have been promoted to port 443/https)
• Added a popup if audio initialization has failed
• Added a way to manually add passwords in the Password Settings
• Youtube MSE playback improvements
• Fixed HTTP authentication popup saving credentials for a wrong host in case of redirection
• Fixed a redraw issue when opening print panel while page is still loading
• Fixed to default mimeType to text/html if missing in response from server
• Fixed a couple of minor memory leaks
• Updated libnix and libpng16 both with additional Altivec optimizations
• Updated libxml2, libwebp
My humble contribution in this release was implementing the new #AltiVec acceleration.
Jeffrey Bergier
Blake Patterson
mattst88 
Harry Sintonen