Managing Partner

In this talk Bill will introduce Kronk, a new SDK that allows you to write AI based Go apps without the need of a model server. If you have Apple Metal (Mac), CUDA (NVIDIA), or Vulkan, Kronk can tap into that GPU power instead of grinding through the work on the CPU alone.

To dog food the SDK, Bill wrote a model server (KMS) that is optimized to run your local AI workloads with performance in mind. During the talk, Bill will use KMS, OpenCode, and the Gemma4 model to write a simple tic-tac-toe game. Then bill will refactor that tic-tac-toe game and integrate Kronk to be Player2. After this talk you will know how to leverage Kronk in your own applications.

Kronk: Hardware accelerated local inference

Freelance Reality Consultant

Like many hackers from the 80s I started coding in my bedroom with the limited BASIC and operating system which could be crammed into 16KB of ROM on an 8-bit Home Micro. Computer Science wasn't on our radar, and we learned our craft by typing in listings from magazines and books, writing dumb little programs that amused us, and figuring out how to hack save games or bypass the copy protection on the compact cassettes traded in the playground. What started as a hobby became a decades long career.

The world has changed a lot since then, and CompSci is now a standard part of the school curriculum. A standard, tedious, academic imposition on a generation surrounded by locked down consumer electronics. But those save games still need hacking, and no matter how turgid the school curriculum, inquisitive minds still want to know how the machine works. Why the machine works.

My son dislikes programming. Or at least he thinks he does. School tried to teach him python but it didn't stick. Instead he rewrote the JavaScript for their web pages, found creative ways to bypass their network blockades, got linux working on the locked down chromebook in the library.

Can learning Go change his mind about programming? And if so, just how deep down the CompSci rabbit hole can we go with just a text editor, the standard packages, and a little misapplication?