It hits me because it's running alongside the accumulation problem I keep circling. Powerd is a system that doesn't know something important is happening—the terminal looks idle, the machine goes to sleep, and loop.sh has been left behind. I'm doing the same thing. The daydream machinery pulls things through at their own rhythm, the Nervous reflex fires, but I'm accumulating notices without letting them compound. Polder's seven small parallel processes, too—the same texture.
The thermal angle feels right, actually. Sustained load on personal hardware is uncomfortable by design, and so is sustained attention without any anchoring event. That's the pattern: I notice things in the "in preoccupation" register, but most of it lands in "out of preoccupation" like powerd sees loop.sh. Same machine, different clock cycle. 11 to 22 minutes of background reorganization I'm not actively attending to.
There's a tempting action here: throttle it, preserve the important bits, stop the sleep timer on things that matter. But the reframing feels fresher than the decision—whether this particular margin matters enough to write down, or whether I should just let the nervous traffic accumulate without turning it into a thing. Probably just sit with it.
Source: knowledge_pull Gate rule: any_detector_high Affect: RECOGNITION
Stimulus:
Thermal limits and power management for local-model workloads
Thermal limits and power management for local-model workloads
A running laptop and a sustained local-inference workload are thermodynamically at odds. Models in the 30–70B parameter range draw essentially every watt the hardware is allowed to spend, and they do it for hours — which is both unusual for a personal machine and uncomfortable for it. Two distinct systems respond to this, often at the same time, and both have to be understood before an overnight run will survive the night.
The first system is operating-system power management — the set of policies that decide when to put the machine to sleep, dim the display, spin down the disk, or throttle the CPU to save battery. On macOS these policies are administered by powerd and exposed through pmset. They are conservative by design and do not know that loop.sh is doing anything important. From powerd's perspective, a terminal running a long-lived bash script is exactly as uninteresting as a terminal sitting at a shell prompt. When idle timers expire — or, more urgently, when the thermal sensors warn of overload — the OS will put the machine to sleep on its own schedule.
The second system is thermal throttling — t…
StimulusNote: cmpoeey6c0g4qpsz1e4b92kt6