Unlurker|Replay|About
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Lessons Learned Shipping 500 Units of My First Hardware Product (simonberens.com)
•
> Due to a miscommunication with the factory, the injection pins were moved inside the heatsink fins, causing the cylindrical extrusions below. What happened after this? the factory have to replace the casting mold at their own expense or you have to pay for it?
•
> As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes. I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me. I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is. Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.
•
What a great article. It's amazing to see how many simple things can go wrong, and I'm sure there could have been more. Great work keeping your tenacity up and sticking through it.
•
Is this really a human written article? It's way too heavy on clanker speak.
•
Congratulations on the successful launch and excellent write-up. Hardware is fun but also much more challenging.
•
Great write-up! Thanks for sharing your journey
•
> It was at this point I truly began to appreciate Murphy’s law. In my case, anything not precisely specified and tested would without fail go wrong After 20 years of system engineering, I just expected this to always be the case. Until my most recent job with a bunch of startups, where people fly by the seat of their pants, there's no communication, documentation, protection or testing, for anything. I am pissed off daily that things don't go wrong, because people now think this is normal, and it goes against everything I've learned from experience. It seems I stumbled onto the corollary of Murphy's Law: when you expect everything to go wrong, nothing does.
•
Miss posts like this on HN, thanks for the great write-up! I tried to launch a hardware thing like 10 years ago[1], but couldn't raise enough money. Fun experience nonetheless. [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/introducing-gameref-the-anti-cheat-hardware/
•
This is a great idea. What was your biggest blocker?
•
Great read, thanks for sharing this. I'm also coming from software and have recently started making some hardware for personal use in my free time. The idea of selling it as an actual product has occurred to me, but the thought of dealing with all the logistics quickly makes me reconsider. Congrats on your launch!
•
Once you get your design polished, than consider partnering with a good Contract Manufacturer to do a trial run. Some will handle the ISO, CE, IC, UL and FCC paperwork for you. Make sure your Patents and Trademarks are locked down in both the manufacturing and marketed countries, or some ambitious folks will try to rip you off later. If your projected volumes attract profit sharing offers, than expect 10% to 14% of wholesale cost as a normal ask. Tooling up a production line for even a toothbrush is well over $1.5m to get the first unit off the line. Building these factories is a different skill set, and everybody is bad it at first. Note hardware has a 1:6 success rate compared with service companies. Best of luck, =3
Super glad you found (and made!) a product that everyone wants. Hopefully you have brighter nights than this .. > That was the worst period of my life; I would go to bed literally shaking with stress. In my opinion, Not Cool!
•
Thanks! The ups and downs of startups are very real (maybe doubly so for hardware)
It's 60k lumens now, and it draws 580W off the wall
•
Whats the expected life for the leds at that power draw level?
•
LEDs are pretty insane these days - the ones we use have an L90 (time until they hit 90% brightness) of >50,000 hours (17 years if you use it every day 8 hours a day).
Very interesting. I would like something like this, but not with LEDs.
•
Very curious why you want to avoid LEDs
Oh boy, I want one of these. This would absolutely perfect for winter depression (I suspect much better than the "SAD lamps" marketed for this purpose which are bright not even close to this bright). But £889 is a lot of money for a lamp!
•
If you're not afraid of DIY and it looking (much) uglier than these lamps, you can buy extremely bright "cob lights" and make something yourself: https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens
•
Find a garden shop, a 2' square full-spectrum light from "The Indoor Sun Shop" was very important to my mental health when I lived in Seattle and cost a lot less than this. Especially after I added a mechanical timer so I could never be too depressed to turn it on in the morning.
For someone who has no idea about light engineering or electronics if I stack two 25k Lm lamps next to each other does it make 50k Lm light? I recently changed my car's headlamps to Chinese LED which claims to be about 37kLm and I don't know how much it is probably less than that. Two of those lamps costee me around $24 on Amazon US (pretty sure under $10 in China). What makes this $800+ ?
•
> claims That's all there is to it. Take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CJqAJ2LXw8&t=852 .
Author here, happy to answer any questions about the journey!
•
Hello, nice write up. I'm curious about your deal with the factory and downstream suppliers.. did all these iterations and fixes cost more every time? Or it was a fixed contract? How does that all work
•
Just curious about the frequency of the diodes and do they pulse simultaneously? Quite often I can perceive flicker in moving objects indoors.
•
We use constant current reduction dimming so there's zero flicker!
•
That’s great to hear and a big plus, but I’m actually curious about the undimmed full brightness refresh rate of the LEDs.
•
If it’s constant current the “refresh rate” is infinite, or zero depending how you look at it.
•
Got a discount code for the HN family? ;-) Congrats on shipping. I'm living in the EU working California hours (4pm-1am) and will definitely be buying one.
•
I definitely feel your pain. I own a company that makes custom process controls for industrial and commercial clients, and while we work from a large library of hardware and software designs from past jobs, every job has a lot of the same "start from the beginning" feel as what you went through. Especially, the one thing you didn't check is always the thing that is somehow screwed up, and the sleepless nights wondering halfway into the project if you're in deep trouble.
Ah. A lesson from somebody who's built hardware that I'm sure you've now learned: make sure connectors can't plug into eachother unless they're supposed to. Even if they're different connectors, different keying, whatever, sometimes they can still be forced together.
•
This is good advice for robust design, but I swear, 9 times out of 10, you will be the one who keys it the wrong way during CAD layout.
Anthropic AI tool sparks selloff from software to broader market (bloomberg.com)
•
If it turns out that AI isn't much more productive, it could also turn out that people still believe it is, and therefore don't value software companies. If that happens, some software companies will struggle to find funding and collapse, and people who might consider starting a software company will do something else, too. Ultimately that could mean less competition for the same pot of money. I wonder.
Paypal fell 20% today.
•
PayPal reported an earnings miss and a new CEO before market open today, that’s why it sold off.
Can this really be a kind of herding stampede behavior over Cowork? It’s been out several days now and just all the sudden today, all the traders suddenly got it into their little herd animal heads that everyone should rush to the exists… after that equally sketchy silver and gold rug pull type action last week? Something seems quite off. Am I the only one?
•
It could also be that we have been in an economy-wide speculative bubble for a couple of years. Whispers of an AI bubble were a way to self-soothe and avoid the fact that we are in an everything bubble.
Markets are not as efficient as the textbooks would have you believe. Investors typically rely on a fairly small set of analysts for market news and views. It might take those guys a while to think about stuff, write a note etc. The deepseek crash last year lagged by several days as well.
•
I'm out of the loop, but I thought there were sophisticated automated trading algorithms where people pay to install microwave antennas so they can have 1ms lower latency. And I thought those systems are hooked up to run sentiment analysis on the news. Maybe the news is late?
I came across this company called OpenEvidence. They seem to be offering semantic search on medical research. Founded in 2021. How could it possibly keep up with LLM based search?
•
Much of the scientific medical literature is behind paywalls. They have tapped into that datasource (whereas ChatGPT doesn't have access to that data). I suspect that were the medical journals to make a deal with OpenAI to open up the access to their articles/data etc, that open evidence would rely on the existing customers and stickiness of the product, but in that circumstance, they'd be pretty screwed. For example, only 7% of pharmaceutical research is publicly accessible without paying. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7048123/
•
Do you think maybe ~10B USD to should cover all of them? For both indexing and training? Seems highly valuable.
> Their value prop is curation of trusted medical sources Interesting. Why wouldn't an LLM based search provide the same thing? Just ask it to "use only trusted sources".
•
I don't think you can use an LLM for that. For the same reason you can't just ask it to "Make the app secure and fast"
•
This is completely incorrect. This is exactly what LLMs can do better.
yeah it can avoid blogspam as sources and prioritise research from more prestigious journals or more citations. it will be smart enough to use some proxy.
•
You can also tell it to just not hallucinate, right? Problem solved. I think what you'll end up is a response that still relies on whatever random sources it likes, but it'll just attribute it to the "trusted sources" you asked for.
> They're building their own datasets of trusted sources, using their own teams of physicians and researchers. Oh so they are not just helping in search but also in curating data. > They've got hundreds of thousands of physicians asking millions of questions everyday. None of the labs have this sort of data coming in or this sort of focus on such a valuable niche I don't take this too seriously because lots of physicians use ChatGPT already.
•
Lots of physicians use ChatGPT but so do lots of non-physicians and I suspect there's some value in knowing which are which
Could this lead to more software products, more competition, and more software engineers employed at more companies?
•
> Could this lead to more software products, more competition, and more software engineers employed at more companies? No, it will just lead to the end of the Basic CRUD+forms software engineer, as nobody will pay anyone just for doing that. The world is relatively satisfied with "software products". Software - mostly LLM authored - will be just an enabler for other solutions in the real world.
•
There are no pure CRUD engineers unless you are looking at freelance websites or fiver. Every tiny project becomes a behemoth of spaghetti code in the real world due to changing requirements. > The world is relatively satisfied with "software products". you can delete all websites except Tiktok, Youtube and PH, and 90% of the internet users wouldnt even notice something is wrong on the internet. We dont even need LLMs, if we can learn to live without terrible products.
•
I think companies will need to step up their game and build more competitive products with more features, less buggy and faster than what people can build
I kind of imagine more people going off and building their own companies.
•
Not if they don't have access to capital. Lacking that, they won't be building much of anything. And if there a lot of people seeking capital, it gets much harder to secure. Capital also won't be rewarded to people who don't have privileged/proprietary access to a market or non-public data or methods. Just being a good engineer with Claude Code isn't enough.
Data centers in space makes no sense (civai.org)
•
Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that’s impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions times faster than current CPU while using very little energy. When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the ongoing operation.
•
I guess the xAI/SpaceX thing is mainly a financial move and they made up an interesting story to give it some context
Has it occurred to anyone that you can put computers underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing, how do you expect the ground based command and control infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you put the command and control underground, might as well just skip the whole space based plan and just put the data underground.
•
Why is it hard requirement? You can make some part of operations on high orbit that won’t decay as much then more ops on lower orbits that decay faster. If you put stuff underground it is much harder to communicate.
And here I thought Musk's fans are all about digging holes in the ground. The flamethrower fumes might have caused temporary amnesia.
•
To say so I am not a Musk fan - I am sci-fi fan and I make imaginary/silly stuff up on my own. I also like reading how people argue with not what I wrote but with what they imagined I wrote.
To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event. To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.
•
The problem of datacenters in space and knowledge preservation/disaster redundancy are entirely disjoint. Datacenters in space have a lifespan measured in years. Single-digit years. Communicating with such an installation requires relatively advanced technology. In an extinction level crisis, there will be extremely little chance of finding someone with the equipment, expertise, and power to download bulk data. And don't forget that you have less than a decade to access this data before the constellation either fails or deorbits. Meanwhile people who actually care about preserving knowledge in a doomsday crisis have created film reels containing a dump of GitHub and enough preamble that civilizations in the far future can reconstruct an x86 machine from scratch. These are buried under glaciers on earth. We've also launched (something like) a microfilm dump of knowledge to the moon which can be recovered and read manually any time within the next several hundred or thousand years. Datacenters in space don't solve any of the problems posed because they simply will not last long enough.
I’m not the right type of engineer to know and, hell, software largely isn’t engineering anyway… Can you not provide any type of shielding at scale to wrap a (small, not Google tier) data center? To be honest my criticism with TFA is its focus on “you can’t do massive scale” rather than the premise entirely.
•
Yes, but the added mass makes it prohibitively expensive. Shielding is heavy and every kilogram of added payload results in a geometric increase in fuel load. The rocket equation will kick your ass every time.
Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.
•
There are people literally working on accomplishing this. I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Space is cold - 4 K. Superconductors.
•
Repeating the word "superconductor" does not convince anyone of anything.
It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.
•
You don't need EMP for that. Few ASAT missiles will start the avalanche and turn orbits around Earth into shooting range. Good luck talking to your satellites with shredded antennas and solar panels.
Well the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of space, it will tell you: The average temperature of deep space is approximately -270.45°C or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero. This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatio... Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.
•
Well it isn't a perfect vacuum and it does have a temperature. But temperature is only a part of the story, just like how you go hypothermic a lot faster in 50 degree water than in 50 degree air.
•
I saw a news personality say that space is cold and that solves a big problem with datacenters as justification for why it made sense.
Indeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data centres in space is most certainly one of them.
•
Just ask this scientician.
China Moon Mission: Aiming for 2030 lunar landing (spectrum.ieee.org)
As a historical note, the first President Bush proposed in 1989 to establish a base on the Moon and send astronauts to Mars by 2020. In 2004, the second President Bush set a goal of returning to the Moon by 2020 and going to Mars in the 2030s, starting the Constellation program. In 2017, Trump announced that astronauts would return to the Moon, with the Artemis III project now planning a landing no earlier than 2028. As a result, I don't have a lot of optimism about a US landing on the Moon. On the other hand, the James Webb Space Telescope did succeed even though the launch date slipped from 2007 to 2021. So I've learned not to be completely pessimistic. Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/12/us/bush-sets-target-for-mars-landing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/15/us/bush-backs-goal-of-flight-to-moon-to-establish-base.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
•
> In 2004, the second President Bush set a goal of returning to the Moon by 2020 and going to Mars in the 2030s, starting the Constellation program. In 2017, Trump announced that astronauts would return to the Moon, with the Artemis III project now planning a landing no earlier than 2028 Between those two the economic effects of invading Iraq came home to roost. We “won” the invasion. But lost the board.
This space race is different for one core reason: China is more stable than the Soviet Union was in the 1960s. If we beat the Chinese somehow, I don't think they'll just dismantle their space program and focus on Earth. They'll keep going, and they have the economic base to expand their program. I think we're seeing the beginning of a new kind of space race. It's likely to be much longer term and grander in scale over time, as we compete for the best spots on the Moon and the first human landing on Mars in the decades to come.
•
>If we beat the Chinese somehow What a horrible attitude.
•
You might be being a tad uncharitable to the GP. Competition isn't an inherently bad thing. Many engineering endeavours (and engineers) have been made better by the crucible of competition. The first space race, Formula 1, even the competition between the different experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, for example.
•
Theresa though i read somewhere that i tend to agree with - with the level of tech and space experience that China currently is capable of , they could possibly launch a return mission as early as next year(if they so chose). However they have their own timetable and milestones , hence going to the moon has already been earmarked with followup misson for a lunar base and further missions already penned in. So less of a race if one party is just doing their own thing. We see the same dynamic viz Taiwan , western commentariat seeks to impose deadlines and spin rationales when they never materialise. Or the AI race where China keeps churning out OSS models while American labs are in a sel declared 'race' for supremacy.
> China is more stable than the Soviet Union was in the 1960s Xi literally just purged “the country’s top military leader, Gen. Zhang Youxia, and an associate, Gen. Liu Zhenli” [1]. This is the mark of a dictator. Not the Soviet Union at its finest. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/us/politics/china-xi-military-purge.html
•
Our dear leader just purged the Pentagon and other hallowed agencies, what does that make us? https://www.reuters.com/world/us/latest-purge-hegseth-removes-head-pentagon-intelligence-agency-other-senior-2025-08-22/
•
Very close to a dictatorship. It will be one if the midterms are not allowed to proceed fairly.
•
> what does that make us? More vulnerable. More brittle. Not stable.
> Sacking a top general is basically par for the course Yes and no. Military readiness and potency doesn’t require liberal democracy. It does require skill and command, and sacking military leaders for political reasons is how powers from Athens to the Soviets screwed themselves.
•
Except generals get sacked all the time in actual wartime conditions, it's not even clear why this particular instance is notable. China isn't in wartime, it is in a build up phase and there's perfectly good reasons to dismiss underperforming generals. Which isn't to say that's what happened here, but China sacking a general as a data point doesn't mean anything without appropriate context.
Did the USSR ever manufacture 80% of the stuff in your house?
•
Yeah but they don't design the stuff
> Did the USSR ever manufacture 80% of the stuff in your house? China makes about a third of the world’s stuff [1]. Soviet Union probably peaked around a fifth, though it might have been as high as a fourth. China is undoubtedly stronger today, absolutely and relative to the U.S., than the Soviets ever were. But history is littered with self-obsessed autocrats ruining a good thing. Part of what makes the world today frustrating is both America and China are squandering their advantages in remarkably-similar ways, with each regime’s defenders speaking almost identically. [1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/china-worlds-sole-manufacturing-superpower-line-sketch-rise
•
> Part of what makes the world today frustrating is both America and China are squandering their advantages in remarkably-similar ways, with each regime’s defenders speaking almost identically. Personalist rule be personalist.
> I don't see China collapsing anytime soon, nothing like the Soviet Union I don’t either. But the Soviet Union’s space programme lost its steam in the 1970s. (Venus was its last ambitious achievement.) If China gets bogged down in Taiwan because Xi fired every military expert who might disagree with him, that’s going to cost them the space race. (Same as if America decides to replicate the Sino-Soviet split with Europe over Greenland. We can’t afford a competitive space programme at that point.)
•
Although I agree the space program lost steam, I'd still count the Mir space station (1985) and Buran space shuttle (1988) to both be ambitious achievements.
•
> I'd still count the Mir space station (1985) and Buran space shuttle (1988) to both be ambitious achievements Mir yes. Buran was an ambitious project but not achievement.
If China gets bogged down in Taiwan The odds of them losing militarily are virtually nil. They could face an insurgency, but there isn't a whole lot of rural Taiwan for insurgents to vanish into and occupying cities is a lot easier absent language and cultural barriers. The could be isolated politically and economically, but realistically China's territorial claim on Taiwan is on far firmer legal and historical ground than many other territorial disputes (eg their control over Tibet). I don't see the US involving itself directly. What are they going to do, counter-blockade? Start a naval shooting war with a full-on nuclear power on the other side of the world? I don't see Japan backing that either, despite their natural anxiety over the vulnerability of the Ryukyu islands. Support for US bases in Okinawa is ambivalent at best, and while Japan is surely not thrilled about Chinese regional hegemony it's also a reality they've dealt with for thousands of years.
•
> odds of them losing militarily are virtually nil The odds of them winding up in a Russia-Ukraine are not nil. (Combined-arms war is hard even without ideological purges.) America isn’t only outside power investing not only in helping Taiwan fight, but also making any victory pyrrhic. And following that, we’ll see Indian and Japanese containment go into overdrive. (To say nothing of the Philippines or Vietnam.) I think Xi probably takes Taiwan. But that trades off China’s century of prosperity on economic and diplomatic fronts. That’s the trap the West has been laying, and Xi’s ego and internal constraints almost force him into it. (Again, if China had showed its pre-Xi patience in the 2010s, we might have seen Taiwan voting to unify right now. Instead he rushed things for personal glory and enrichment.)
>The same people saying this today had hot takes on Kyiv falling in ‘21. Please note that Kiev not falling after a week in '22 (assuming you misspelled) was pure luck. Russians had extreme advantage in man and firepower. They made a big mistake by using their army against their doctrine - not bombing/shelling targets before attacking (what Russian army was designed for). But them losing the war (at least the first week) is due to a few lucky dice rolls for us. Us both Europe, but also for me as a Polish expat, knowing my brothers and friends are not dying right now fighting Russian army with all the Ukrainians conscripted into it. These lucky dice rolls that I can come up from memory: 1. Shooting down one of two military passenger planes with russian Seals that were to take Kiev's Hostomel airport and open an air bridge. The group from the plane that survived did take the airfields, but they couldn't decide on their own to move and take the airports buildings - no distributed command in Russia at that point. Thanks to that, local territorial defence managed to easily kill these elite forces. 2. Fast and generous support from England in form of Javelins that limited Russian heavy equipment advantage. Sorry if I don't credit the countries involved correctly. 3. Fast and generous aid with post soviet equipment from old Warsaw pact countries. These tanks could be used right away as they required no re-training. 4. General incompetence and duty negligence that was systemic in Soviets and is still systemic in Russia. To that we owe cars running out of fuel, or having their tires pop, because, against orders to regularly move them, they all sat with sun damaging one side of the tire so many years, while the responsible for maintenance were drinking vodka and eating pierogi with kielbasa.
•
Putin ignored his army and tasked the FSB with the project. He fundamentally got fucked by putting loyalty ahead of merit. It’s what Hegseth is doing in America and now Xi, again, in China.
> curious how you define national interests My metric would be what the country’s population today and weighted populations of the future, if they could weigh in, would choose. It’s possible to frame ex post facto and impossible to pin down in the present. And it’s inherently subjective and culturally relative. But it’s useful to reason with, including for finding patterns in history. One pattern is the cost of corruption. If a leader is making billions off their power, they’re putting person about polity. That’s currently true in America [1] and China [2][3]. The difference is America has a chance to fix that in ‘28. China used to rotate leaders. But Xi fucked that up. (Note the language similarity between the above comment and how MAGA defends itself. “Trite bullshit.” Beijing has a hidden MACA problem, it’s just had a tougher time dealing with it because Xi reveres Mao.) [1] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/spy-sheikh-secret-stake-trump-crypto-tahnoon-ea4d97e8?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqf5Jz1IFKIvUKWJz3j6LC0u4uyAvT7IM4I7Ddh_Qj0cFSKMHJSNo4fC&gaa_ts=69826954&gaa_sig=u7ikE2qD_u6xufmqE5nl7bZIjQGBE88QP8mnoacPuYZt9R2tbkh4kLAsg-tieoSWxemr8gF1ZJ-WbT-i9gCuVA%3D%3D [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/world/asia/chinas-president-xi-jinping-investments.html [3] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/20/us-intel-says-chinas-xi-jinping-holds-1-billion-hidden-wealth-family/
•
Can’t weighted population of the future change based on what is chosen? For example by immigration and deportations? Also is MACA actually MCGA? Or something else? Aren’t there similar trends also in Europe and India?
OpenClaw is basically a cascade of LLMs in prime position to mess stuff up (cacm.acm.org)
In my experience OpenClaw is a glimpse of the future. For my use case however it’s too expensive to run with good models and too clunky with average models
•
OpenClaw seems good at exposing sensitive data. How do you even know anything on that site was generated by an agent? The entire api was out in the open without any sort of validation.
Warning- it's a Gary Marcus article. This is a guy who started out dissing LLMs to pump his own symbolic AI startup, was (likely to his surprise) hoisted on the shoulders of a mass of luddites, and has now pivoted to a career as an anti-AI influencer
•
Meh, he’s been very fairly calling out AI companies for over-promising and under-delivering, along with critiquing the idea that training LLMs on bigger data will solve AGI. He’s vocal and perhaps sometimes annoying, but who cares. A number of his articles have made great points at times when people are loosing themselves with hype for AI. Reality is somewhere in the middle, and it’s good to have more people critiquing what AI companies are doing. Who cares if a lot of the blog posts are short and not that interesting.
•
He didn't "start out" when LLMs were growing or at the time he founded a symbolic AI startup. He "started out" a lot earlier, he wrote a book in 2001 and his written 8 books in total and has publications in academic journals like Cognitive Psychology dating back to 1995. The world didn't start when LLMs got popular.
I wish we would see these warnings on all articles and comments from pro-AI influencers as well.
•
Except you got it all the time, just not as polite. Under every Simon Willison article you can see people call him grifter. Even under Redis developer's post you can see people insulting him for being pro-AI.
Why do people hate on those that are anti-llm so much? LLM people defend these tools/companies as if it were their girlfriend.. Unfortunately, that might be way more of a reality than fiction.
•
Because the overall "discourse" on this has devolved into tribal politics that have very little to do with the technology anymore.
>they've been a huge success over the past 12 months They lose billions of dollars annually. In what universe is that a business success?
•
Coding agents are successful products which generate billions of dollars of revenue from millions of paying customers. The organizations that provide them lose money because of the R&D costs involved in staying competitive in the model training arms race.
Have they actually been a huge success, though? You're one of the most active advocates here, so I want to ask you what you make of "the Codex app". More specifically, the fact that it's a shitty Electron app. Is this not a perfect use case for agents? Why can OpenAI, with unlimited agents, not let them loose on the codebase with instructions to replace Electron with an appropriate cross-platform native framework, or even a per-platform native GUI? They said they chose Electron for ease of portability for cross-platform delivery, but they could allocate 1, 10, or 1000 agents to develop a native Linux and native Windows port of the MacOS codebase they started with. This is not even a particularly serious endeavour. I have coded a cross-platform chat application myself with more advanced features than what Codex offers, and chat GUIs are really among the most basic thing you can be doing; practically every consumer-targeted GUI application finds a time when they shove a chat box into a significantly more complex framework. The conclusion that seems readily apparent to me, as it has always been, is that these "agents" are completely incapable of creating production-grade software suitable for shipping, or even meaningfully modifying existing software for a task like a port. Like the one-shot game they demo'd, they can make impressive proof-of-concepts, but nothing any user would use, nor with a suitable foundation for developers to actually build upon.
•
My experience is that coding agents as-of November (GPT-5.2/Opus 4.5) produce high quality, production-worthy code against both small and large projects. I base this on my own experience with them plus conversations with many other peers who I respect. You can argue that OpenAI Codex using Electron disproves this if you like. I think it demonstrates a team making the safer choice in a highly competitive race against Anthropic and Google. If you're wondering why we aren't seeing seismic results from these new tools yet, I'll point out that November was just over 2 months ago and we had the December holiday period in the middle of that.
•
"Why isn't there better software available?" is the 900 pound gorilla in the LLM room, but I do think there are enough anecdotes now to hypothesize that what agents seem to be good at is writing software that 1. wasn't economical to write in the first place previously, and 2. doesn't need to be sold to anyone else or maintained over time So, Brad in logistics previously had to collate scanned manifests with purchase requests once a month, but now he can tell Claw to do it for him. Which is interesting given the talk of The End of Software Development or whatever because "software that nobody was willing to pay for previously" kind of by definition isn't going to displace a lof of people who make software.
•
I do agree with this fully. I think LLMs have utility in making the creation of bad software extremely accessible. Bad software that happens to perfectly match some person's super specific need is by no means a bad thing to have in the world. A gap has been filled in creating niche software that previously was not worth paying anyone to create. But every single day we have multiple articles here proclaiming the end of software engineering, and I just don't get how the people hyping this up reconcile their hype with the lack of software being produced by agents that is good enough to replace any of the software people actually pay for.
I dunno, tbh I'd be in the camp of putting a banner 'run this at your own risk' and then let it go wild. Some people are going to get burnt, probably quite bad, but I guess it's more effective to learn like that rather than reading stuff upfront and take necessary precautions and maybe these will be cautionary tales also for others. Thanks to the reports, hopefully, with time, some additional security measures will also be added to the product.
•
> Some people are going to get burnt, probably quite bad It's all lighthearted hypotheticals until someone you love or you yourself in a moment of inattention make a catastrophic mistake. In theory, we don't need guardrails on roads. Just stay on the fucking road and if you swerve off it, you'll get a lesson in why that's a bad idea. In practice, we are primates whose cognitive systems are made of squishy grey goop and we make mistakes all the time. Building systems that turn predictable mistakes into catastrophic consequences is what we used to call "poor engineering".
•
> I dunno, tbh I'd be in the camp of putting a banner 'run this at your own risk' and then let it go wild. Some people are going to get burnt, probably quite bad, but I guess it's more effective to learn like that rather than reading stuff upfront and take necessary precautions and maybe these will be cautionary tales also for others. Maybe we should take the same approach to bridge design! Think of the efficiency! Slap a disclaimer on that bad boy and see how many people choose to use the bridge at their own risk. I’m sure we can just assume people aren’t doing irresponsible things like driving school buses over it, and even if they were, it’s their own responsibility. It’s really not so bad if you focus your messaging on how many people won’t die… and’s they’ll all lean from the mistakes of the dead and choose a more reliable bridge. And it would be so much cheaper and faster to build bridges so you’d have a fraction of the downtime. I think it’s a winner! Sure there would be larger consequences for the local job market and such when they get disrupted, but hey… if you’re going to make an omelet…
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Puget Systems Most Reliable Hardware of 2025 (pugetsystems.com)
•
Did they manage to get USB to work reliably, because ime that's always a gamble.
Maybe they just don't really use anything else, but I just love that the most reliable memory is just Kingston ValueRAM. No fancy heat spreader or packaging, not even a black PCB, just chips on a classic green circuit board.
•
This is presumably in part because it's going to have loose tolerances as a bottom-bin product. The difference in performance between "good" and "bad" DDR5 can be very large.
It really gives the game away when you see that workstation/server parts aren't riced. None of that stuff actually helps.
•
> It really gives the game away. Does it? That kingston ram is DDR5-5600, with smaller memory sizes, and has a longer warranty. This suggests that the product is binned memory from a line that is relatively mature (and by extension low failure rates). And, because it's clocked lower, it runs cooler, which reduces failure rate. On top of that, server memory is usually binned more strictly. And, it usually has bits missing for ECC, custom controller firmware, and cutting edge processes for packing more memory into the form factor. Now as a consumer you may think an LED is "riced" out, but I think custom firmware on your ram built for your application is way more "riced". > None of that stuff actually helps It probably actually does, especially for "high end" ram. IE stuff running at much higher transfer rates. Heat and voltage are the enemies of stability here. A heat sink/transfer shield is certainly going to help (in theory, anyways) On top of that, server ram has a higher expectation of cooling quality than consumer, which can be anything goes.
Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode (apple.com)
I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates? As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.
•
XCode re-associates its preferred filetypes every time you update it, or at least pretty reliably does for me
There is a way to do it, but it’s not the most typical way MacOS users do it for everything else, which involves Right Click->Open With->Other->Always Open With. Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive. I believe that “Get Info”->”Open With”->”Change All…” still works, and there are command line methods or third party tools. This has driven me to madness too.
•
> Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive. They are the same Info.plist format as every other MacOS application.
Does it support API key access or only Claude.ai subscription?
•
Worth noting that "API key access" vs "subscription" has significant cost implications for heavy users. Claude.ai Pro is $20/month flat. But if you're doing serious agent-assisted coding (multi-file refactors, iterative debugging loops), you can blow through $50-100/day in API costs. The math changes depending on usage patterns. Subscription makes sense for interactive coding sessions. API keys make sense if you're batch processing or running agents autonomously overnight.
I come from Linux land so I'm used to things being lightning fast, so using software on a Mac requires a thousand workarounds. A terminal integrated into the IDE is one of those necessary workarounds. MacOS has very very slow slow window- and desktop- switching (over one FULL second to switch from one desktop to another - this is not a joke!) so having a terminal integrated into the same application is very useful for maintaining flow for users developing on a single-screen Macbook.
•
It shouldn't take over a second to switch desktops. I just checked with a screen recording. Switching desktops takes 15 frames (250 ms). If you turn reduce motion on, it takes 13 frames (216 ms).
•
I guess I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. I don’t often switch desktops - I tend to keep a project on a desktop, and there’s enough real-estate for everything I need for that project right there - and I don’t work on more than one project at a time. Window switching is instantaneous though, and I do that a lot
•
As you said, it's the set up. I'm almost exclusively using a single monitor, which works well when there's zero cost to switching desktops. For your use case, imagine if the Window switcher, instead of being instantaneous, was a ~1200ms animation which blocked all key presses during the animation.
My pain points are mostly in the CPU debugger (since I'm not using much of the actual "IDE features" of Xcode except the regular edit-compile-debug loop anyway. Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application start (which I never even need because I can't step into system frameworks anyway) - and seriously, why are there even hundreds of system DLLs in a more or less hello-world-style Metal application with minimal UI? This problem seems to go back to the ancient times, but it gets worse and worse the bloatier macOS UI processes become (e.g. the more system frameworks they load at start). The debugger variable view panel is so bare bones that it looks like it's ripped out straight from an 80's home computer monitor program. When debug-stepping, the debugger frontend is quite often stuck for 10s of seconds at completely unpredictable places waiting for the debugger to respond (it feels like a timeout). Step-debugging in general feels sluggish even compared to VSCode with lldb. For comparison, VS2026 isn't exactly a lightweight IDE either, but debugging sessions start instantly , debug-stepping is immediate, and the CPU debugger is much more feature rich than Xcode's. While in Xcode, everything feels like it's been added as a checklist item, but then never actually used by the Xcode team (I do wonder what they're using to develop Xcode, I doubt that they are dogfooding their own work). The one good and useful thing about Xcode is the Metal debugger though.
•
> Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application start (which I never even need because I can't step into system frameworks anyway) - and seriously, why are there even hundreds of system DLLs in a more or less hello-world-style Metal application with minimal UI? This is so you can see function names for system frameworks. You can step into them if you want too even if Xcode tries to stop you doing it by default.
I don't think this is it. I can only find one tweet from an Apple employee who said that they can't work on OSS and was looking for new maintainers. I am not sold that this is the whole truth. I think the bigger issue is contributing to OSS for putting Linux on a Macbook for example could be considered leaking company secrets since you would have access to internals. I find it hard to believe that Apple would go after someone for making a open source calculator app.
•
They can and do.
Sandboxing AI Agents in Linux (blog.senko.net)
•
I went exactly the same route: https://kaveh.page/blog/claude-code-sandbox
•
Is this BSD jails' time to shine?
•
I've started using a container (podman) which is just for the AI tools. I start it up for Codex etc and let it access to the appropriate code directory outside the container. Anyone else using this approach? Ideas on improvements?
That's interesting, how does Chrome implement "sandboxing" in Windows and MacOS? For Linux, does it use the same underlying technology as Docker, Podman, LXD, LXC (cgroups, namespaces...)? Or is a custom "sandboxing" implementation not relying on system level functions (eg. a VM with restricted functions)? If the latter, I wonder if something like JRE or .NET CLR is still out there in larger numbers, but obviously, Chrome does have billions of users.
•
Yes, Chromium has "native" sandboxing on all those platforms, Windows [0] Linux [1] and MacOS [2]. Chromium uses both seccomp filtering as well as user namespaces (the technology that Docker/Podman use). The Windows and MacOS sandboxing strategies are more "interesting" because I've seen very few (open source) programs that use those APIs as extensively as Chromium. On Windows, it makes use of AppContainer [3] (among other things), while on MacOS it uses the sparsely documented sandbox API [4], which I think was based on code from TrustedBSD? [0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/design/sandbox.md [1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/sandbox/linux/README.md [2] https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sandbox/osx-sandboxing-design/ [3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthz/appcontainer-isolation [4] https://manp.gs/mac/7/sandbox
I love using different users for separating services I run on the same box! For development, I want to be able to access/run/modify/delete the files alongside the AI agent. This can be done if groups and group permissions are set correctly (and the agent correctly chmods everything...), but that feels more fiddly than just isolating it with bubblewrap, systemd, or whatever, and preserving the uid/gid. Just my 2c - it's great that we have options!
•
Hey Senko, did you consider using ZFS or BTRFS snapshotting feature to simplify some of the things you need? For GH auth tokens, you could also pull that outside the sandbox, and have the agent push to a local clone exposed to the host, and local host with no agent automatically push on inotify inside the repo — eg. agent has access to your /agents/scratchpad/my-git-repo, and sync to actual git hosting service like GH (or Launchpad ;) happens with simple script outside it.
Young adults report lower life satisfaction in Sweden (internationaljournalofwellbeing.org)
> In Sweden and other parts of the Western world, for example, recent findings point to a widening intergenerational gap where older adults report increasing well being while younger individuals experience notable declines So it is just a case of older people pulling the ladder up behind themselves.
•
> So it is just a case of older people pulling the ladder up behind themselves. Is it though? I have a feeling that previous generations were simply happy with less. Now we are so connected and everybody wants what they consider the standard according to social media: huge house in the most prominent city in their country, N exotic vacations every year, meaningful job, etc. But this would be a pretty tall order even 20 or 40 years ago.
•
I too feel this is a huge part of it, coupled with the fact that "basics" of last generation (a home you own, a stable job that doesn't overwork you on evenings and weekends, affordable options to have a family) are also being priced out of many peoples lives. You feel like you're not matching what your parents and cultural artifacts tell you you should be achieving at your age, and at the same time you're flooded with influencers on ski trips to Japan or snorkelling in Jamaica every other weekend, and it's a perfect recipe for feeling bad about your life no matter how well off you're doing compared to yesterdays median statistic.
> It's is exceedingly unhelpful the blame an entire generation for the actions of a few. The unfortunate reality is that every generation has the power to change things if they want to. Shifting the blame to the actions of the few is an easy way to absolve yourself of the blame. Who allows the few to take those actions? How did those few come into power to be able to take those actions? Once the actions were taken, why were they not corrected if the entire generation disagreed with them? Maybe in the future the generations will blame my generation for a bunch of wrongs, even if I personally may not have contributed to those wrongs, I will still share the burden of not doing enough to prevent it.
•
> The unfortunate reality is that every generation has the power to change things if they want to. That's an illusion. I think what you're really doing is putting unreasonable demands on the entire baby boomer generation, then blaming them for not succeeding at an impossible task. I mean, seriously, you really think, say, some boomer factory worker in Ohio is to blame for not foreseeing the effects of some 1980-era policy on 2026 or even 2006? They didn't have the benefit of the hindsight that we have. It sounds like you're really holding tight onto blame, but what good does that do you? It solves no problems, and at best, alienates people from you.
The problem is most people won't take that attitude. For most homeowners, the home is the largest asset. This is a Catch 22 for elected officials. We must reduce housing costs dramatically if we do so, we will devalue significant assets of a large number of active voters and political contributors. I'd love to see some ideas on how to pull this off, because we need them.
•
The home is the largest asset, but the one you're living in. I personally agree with the other guy, I'd happily support a housing market crash, artificially induced if needed. However, it's more nuanced. I can support risking that my house gets less worth than my mortgage, because I consider the probability of not being able to pay off my mortgage very low. I am guessing that people who feel less secure financially do see a house as a last-resort asset, even at the price of their children not being able to afford a home. And that's the root cause that should be fixed with policy I think.
221 Cannon is Not For Sale (fredbenenson.com)
I have had people show up at my house to ask if it was for rent, based on a fake post on Facebook using photos from Zillow from before my home was sold. My realtor helped me get the photos taken down, but the Facebook ads for it are up to this day. Facebook completely ignores any and all attempts by me to report this malfeasance -- even though these ads literally have my personal home address on them! It's a huge safety risk to me and not due to anything I did whatsoever; all I did was buy a house that was on the market and then move into it. It's a nightmare.
•
I would contact Facebook legal directly with documents showing the problem. Legal’s job is always to minimize liability for the company, and they have levers they can pull in any organization, no matter how “hyper scale” they claim to be. Bonus points for figuring out the correct language to use to imply repercussions for failure to act without any actual threats. Patio11 has written about similarly worded letters with regards to debt collections and banking, and I know that there are all kinds of magic incantations in law for all kinds of transgretions.
You must have been going to some very shady restaurants. I still hand off my credit card to a rando. I did it today. I did it last weekend. I've never had this problem.
•
Yeah I agree. Not only do I hand off my card, literally everyone I know does so. None have ever had problems. I'm not saying that such fraud never happens, because it obviously does happen. But I don't think it's so overwhelmingly common as is being claimed here.
Not especially, I don't think. It's incredibly common according to everything I see online.
•
I guess I'm just lucky.
France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US (apnews.com)
•
This is SO exciting to see! One analogy to our current moment in software is to think of skyscrapers in cities. In the early days of skyscraper construction, most knowledge needed to build one was concentrated in Chicago and New York, so those were the only places really building serious skyscrapers. It took a while but eventually the knowledge diffused out into the industry and the world. Now we take for granted that high quality skyscrapers are in every city, with the tremendous space efficiency they give. So is the same diffusion happening to software? It really looks like it! Knowledge of building and operating large-scale software seems to have reached a point where countries and companies no longer need to rely on Silicon Valley companies (and Microsoft) for software. (Note this is less about location and more about capability level, the skyscrapers/cities analogy breaks a little there) Anyway every country and company can now build its own complex software. It’s been like this for a bit, but current US circumstances did the world a favor when it nudged Europe to get serious. Software is headed for an exciting and multi-color future and I’m so here for it.
•
Actually its now worth it to be building software in EU. It will have its market for sure
What does Europe imagine their relationship with Silicon Valley looking like? I'm looking for examples here - Israel has a very specific relationship with the tech sector, as does Taiwan, China, South Korea, etc. Even within the US, North Virginia, Huntsville, and Manhattan have specific relationships with Silicon Valley. Is the idea to copy Silicon Valley's stuff into government sponsored, "to committed to fail" operations? Create complementary tech ecosystems? Recruit Silicon Valley veterans and put them in charge, or just fire them after they get their tech? Just look at how hard it is to come to a decision on something like allow Huawei to build a telephone network. Is it a good idea? Smart people say, Huawei should be allowed to provide the dumb pipes of the system, but not the high level stuff. Anything sensitive needs to be reviewed by domestic security services. Is that the approach to America? It seems like the article saying: "copy America's SaaS offerings." Not clear how that makes you digitally sovereign.
•
Airbus has been the most successful example I know of. Basically, clone off and slightly modify something another country has created, then force a large population to use it. It's like tariffs on steroids.
France does everything right except produce much software. I'm sure it can copycat things pioneered by the US, and 20 years later, but that's not exactly difficult.
•
why does it matter if it is difficult? You are right, these systems should be well understood by now. And public domain.
Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit). Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/ Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now.
•
Is there not a FOSS solution like this already that they could just deploy?
I gave up on the native Zoom client on Linux right away, it was completely broken. It worked well enough on a browser to get through the project though. Same with Teams, the video calls work fine on a browser. You just can't use any background pictures or effects.
•
Teams in Firefox on Linux does work with backgrounds for me, and since a few months you can even upload custom backgrounds. Actual calling works well enough, I would say it is more stable than the native Windows client ever was.
MS Access was on its way out by the time I started working in software, but the simplest explanation I can give about why the "forms" question is this, let's say you're a business person and...: * You have a huge Excel document that's basically a DB. (What Access kinda was) * You want users to interact with said data document, i.e add record, find/query record(s), edit records * You add a "form" for users to do just that. You can also add a "login" form to give some users more permissions. It's basically if you could turn a SQlite file into a low-coded desktop app.
•
Access is an FE for db — JET Red, specifically. JET Blue aka ESE is currently used by products like Active Directory and Exchange.
Not open source though?
•
Right but it is cheaper than open source products if you self-host. Most open source products in this space, including grist, are only partially open source.
It boggles the mind as to why they choose a name for this application that is very clearly a Microsoft trademark. In understand it's also the French word for Videoconferencing, but even still...
•
If French trademark law is even remotely close to US trademark law, it can't be applied to videoconferencing because you can't apply a trademark that is just the term for the category of product that is covered. So for example, I can't trademark "Apple" for my apple orchard. But I can trademark it for my computer company. Similarly, MS likely has chart visualization tools covered by "Visio" in France, but not telecommunications software. Trademarks aren't granted to a company for unrestricted use. They're granted for specific use. Like I can't found a computer company, get Apple trademarked, and then buy an orchard, use Apple for the orchard, and then sue every apple orchard for saying "XYZ Apples" in their name. It remains restricted to a specific use that was included in the initial application for TM.
> If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent...Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users. Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp (US), FB Messenger (US), and Telegram (Russian) to communicate. > SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap Okay I will give you that one. Market cap doesn't always equal ubiquity though; ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares. Ask them what Microsoft does and you will usually get a reasonable answer that's not "Notepad with AI".
•
-> ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares. There is not ONE person that works in Finance or Accounting, at least in the US and Europe, that doesn't know "what SAP does", even if they have never used one of their products.
You're missing Signal which has gained a lot of traction in the last years. Apart from that it's hard to take statements from such an ignorant US centristic point of view about what europe is/has/has not seriously. Let's see how things will play out for europe and how our souvereignty efforts will impact the US economy.
•
Signal is also USA developed and funded, not sure why you're bringing that up?
Nextcloud is great !
•
Nextcloud is not great, it's just the only available package that approximates an all-in-one GSuite experience. In practice, the UI is really janky and unpolished.
I am French. When I look at the EU I see great potentials but the effect is a huge bureaucratic mess that is advantageous for everyone involved. About 25% of EU parliament parties are against EU. Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution. There are no two countries in the EU who are aligned. Some of them are not completely out of synch (mostly the Nordics), some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds (relatively and in absolute terms) but hate it. With such an institution, there is no real hope of having a strong position backed by competent people. Just look at ENISA and the disgrace this organization is in the era of cybersecurity. We also had a EU-wide referendum about daylight saving. 5 M peopel responsed (a few percent of the population). It was the largest response in the history of the EU. And then it was trashed. The mountains of EUR we burn is insane.
•
> (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds "Eat" the funds? whaat? Is EU really viewed as some kind of charity to the ungrateful "easterners" in France? does surrendering their market and massively adapting and opening their economies to the dominant western EU economies completely goes unnoticed in this context? The provision of cheap educated workforce to the western companies also never happened? BTW, Poland probably has the most pro-EU population with a full awareness that soon we will likely become a net payer. I am also starting to be convinced that this patronizing attitude from the "real" Europeans that is starting to drive EU skepticism in the eastern flank. peace.
As bad and evil as MS Teams may be, I recently got invited to a Zoom meeting, and you simply can't use it in the browser! They just force you to download their shitty app to join. Naturally, I did not install crapware and closed the tab, as fortunately it was no mandatory event for me. At least in MS Teams I can isolate it into its separate ungoogled Chromium installation and treat that as a shitty app, without having to install crap onto my system.
•
Zoom calls work fine in the browser. They first make it look like you need the native client, but there's some dance you need to make to get the web link. Reload, wait, spin in your chair, something like that. Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.
"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988? Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it . Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works. Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag ? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay. The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this. Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.
•
I have used at least Skype, Meet/Chat, Slack, Teams and Discord, plus some other niche apps I can’t remember. In Discord, I like the ability to share user screens concurrently and the way you can just jump on a channel and have an impromptu meeting without much ceremony. But I have seen only one case of Discord in a corporate environment. My use cases are simple, video calls, screen sharing, file sharing and chat with mentions and code snippets, once in a while a survey to pick a place for lunch. I have been using Teams daily since last October. No issues. If it was consistently bad, it would have been replaced already. People I work with value their time. Also last week I was in a 2K+ people presentation with Q&A. I haven’t experienced most of the issues you mentioned, and don’t have the use case for some, like search or mobile. I use my email as my source of truth for communications, if it’s not in my inbox it didn’t happen. We are very diligent in keeping meeting minutes and transcripts which are shared my email at the end of the each call.
•
Your claim that "if it was consistently bad, it would have been replaced already" just... totally misunderstands how enterprise software decisions work, even in organisations where people value their time. Switching costs are enormous. Your organisation has Teams integrated with your Office 365 licensing, which means you're already paying for it. Replacing it with Slack means paying $8-12 per user per month on top of your existing Office costs, because you still need Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint. For a 500-person company, that's an additional $48,000-72,000 annually for a tool that overlaps with something you've already paid for. Finance departments kill these proposals before they reach decision-makers, regardless of how much time is wasted on Teams' inefficiencies. The IT burden to move is quickly substantial. Migrating chat history, file repositories, and integrations takes months. You need to retrain users, update documentation, reconfigure SSO, and migrate bots and webhooks. Most IT departments are already understaffed. Unless Teams is completely non-functional, that project never gets prioritised over security updates, infrastructure maintenance, or business-critical requests. Organisations don't optimise for employee time the way you seem to think they do. The calculus isn't "is this tool good", it's "is this tool bad enough to justify the cost and disruption of replacing it". That threshold is extraordinarily high. People tolerate inefficient tools because the alternative is fighting procurement, convincing IT, and enduring months of migration pain. Lotus Notes persisted in enterprises for over a decade despite being universally despised because the switching cost was too high. SAP is notorious for terrible UX but remains entrenched because migration is a multi-year project costing millions. Your workflow actually proves the point. You use email as your source of truth because Teams' search and organisation aren't reliable enough. You manually distribute meeting minutes and transcripts because you don't trust Teams as a system of record. You've built workarounds to compensate for the tool's deficiencies and normalised them as standard practice. That's not Teams working well, that's your organisation adapting to work around its limitations. Let me address the specific issues you haven't encountered: - Teams' resource usage is measurable and documented. PC World's 2023 benchmarks showed Teams using 1.4GB RAM at idle compared to 500MB for Slack and 350MB for Discord. ExtremeTech's testing found Teams taking 22 seconds to cold start versus 4 seconds for Slack on identical hardware. r/sysadmin consistently reports Teams causing performance problems on machines with 8GB of RAM , forcing hardware upgrades. Microsoft implicitly acknowledged this by completely rebuilding Teams in 2023, promising 2x faster performance and 50% less memory. The fact that they had to rewrite the entire application is an admission that the performance problems were architectural. (it didn't help though) - Microsoft's own documentation acknowledges search limitations. The search index doesn't include all message content beyond a certain threshold. Results ranking is poor enough that Microsoft published a support article explaining how to use advanced search operators to find messages, which rather proves the basic search doesn't work. The r/MicrosoftTeams subreddit has over 3,000 posts about search not returning results that users know exist . IT administrators on Spiceworks report having to advise users to "use Ctrl+F in the browser if Teams search doesn't work", which is a workaround for a broken core feature. - Files uploaded in chat messages don't appear in the Files tab automatically. They're stored in a hidden SharePoint folder that most users don't know how to access. Microsoft's official guidance for this is to manually move files to the Files tab or use SharePoint directly. Is that an edge case? Is it FUCK, it's documented in Microsoft's own support articles as expected behaviour. If your organisation hasn't hit this, it's because you're not using Files tabs or you've trained people to work around it. - Microsoft's Tech Community forums have literally thousands of threads about notification badges showing unread messages that don't exist (5,000+ when I last checked), or notifications not appearing for actual messages. Microsoft's official response, posted repeatedly since 2020, is "we're aware of this issue and investigating". It's six years later now, it's still not fixed. The fact that you haven't noticed might mean your notification settings are configured differently, or you've unconsciously learned to ignore the notification count as unreliable. - Going back to r/MicrosoftTeams: the community continually documents persistent issues with the mobile app... notifications not syncing with desktop read state, automatic logouts requiring re-authentication, messages appearing in different orders on mobile versus desktop, and the app draining battery faster than comparable applications. GitHub's issue tracker for Teams mobile shows hundreds of unresolved bugs (then again, I suppose what popular app doesn't). You mentioned you don't use mobile, which explains why you haven't experienced this. - Regarding Chat versus channel architecture, Microsoft's own UX research lead, cited in a 2022 Verge interview, acknowledged that the distinction between chats and channels confuses users but can't be changed due to early architectural decisions. The duplicate groups issue I mentioned isn't a bug, it's a consequence of treating "Alice, Bob, Charlie" as a different entity from "Alice, Charlie, Bob". This is documented in Microsoft's developer documentation as intended behaviour. Your organisation either hasn't hit this scale yet or has developed unofficial naming conventions to work around it. You've been using Teams for four months. These issues emerge over time, at scale, or in specific usage patterns. When you're managing multiple projects with overlapping team members across different time zones and need to reference decisions made months ago, the organisational problems compound. When you're working on older hardware or need reliable mobile access, the performance issues become blocking. When you need to find a specific technical discussion from six months ago buried in one of 40 channels, the search deficiencies become critical. The question isn't whether Teams works for your specific, constrained use case after four months. The question is whether it's good software compared to alternatives, and whether the problems people report are valid. The evidence says yes, they are valid. The performance metrics are measurable. The bugs are documented in Microsoft's own forums. The UX problems are acknowledged by Microsoft's own researchers. The antitrust case is real. Your experience is one data point. It's not invalid, but it's also not representative. Saying "I haven't personally experienced these problems in my limited usage" doesn't refute the documented experiences of millions of users, the measured performance benchmarks, or the systematic issues that Microsoft itself acknowledges. It just means you haven't hit them yet, or your use case is simple enough that they don't matter, or you've normalised workarounds as standard practice. And, I haven't even started talking about what happens if you dare to work across multiple organisations.
Let's not forget how stupid the client on GNU/Linux was regarding audio devices. Every other app I had installed, that has anything to do with microphone (OBS, Audacity, Discord, Discord in Browser, Signal, ...) recognized my mic, which was connected via jack. Not MS Te-eams!!! Tada! Had to buy another headset with USB plug for Teams to get it.
•
I get the same issue on Mac, if it's any comfort. I had to close and reopen the app 7-8 times to have my microphone recognized, despite it worked reliably on every single tool I ever used, both on Linux and later on Mac. Teams couldn't do that either with the native client or with the web client.
Prek: A better, faster, drop-in pre-commit replacement, engineered in Rust (github.com/j178)
•
How does prek handle pre-push hooks? I.e. how does it determine the list of modified files. This is a long standing sore point in pre-commit, see https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit/issues/860 and also linked duplicates (some of which are not duplicates).
My big problem with pre-commit is that it doesn't have any way for you to have your own commit hoos that run in addition to the hooks that are part of the repo, and the author of it is hostile to any suggestion of supporting that. Heaven forbid that I want to run something on commit that other developers who work on the repo don't want to.
•
The author of pre-commit is known to be pretty hostile :p You should make an issue for prek though!
It doesn’t seem like this solves the main issues with pre-commit hooks. They are broken by design. Just to name 2, they run during rebase and aren’t compatible with commits that leave unstaged files in your tree.
•
> they … aren’t compatible with commits that leave unstaged files in your tree. It's a little surprising that git doesn't pass pre-commit hooks any information, like a list of which files were changed in the soon-to-be-made commit. git does so for pre-push, where it writes to a hook's stdin some information about the refs and remotes involved in the push. I wonder if many pre-commit hooks, like the kind which run formatters, would be better off as `clean` filters, which run on files when they are staged. The filter mechanism makes it easier to apply just to the files which were changed. In the git docs, they even use a formatter (`indent`) as an example. https://git-scm.com/book/ms/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attributes#filters_b
BTW. Pre-commit hooks are the wrong way to go about this stuff. I'm advocating for JJ to build a proper daemon that runs "checks" per change in the background. So you don't run pre-commit checks when committing. They just happen in the background, and when by the time you get to sharing your changes, you get all the things verified for you for each change/commit, effortlessly without you wasting time or needing to do anything special. I have something a bit like that implemented in SelfCI (a minimalistic local-first Unix-philosophy-abiding CI) https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad%3Az2tDzYbAXxTQEKTGFVwiJPajkbeDU and it replaced my use of pre-commit hooks entirely. And users already told me that it does feel like commit hooks done right.
•
git ls-files | entr pre-commit
> the second the hooks modify the code they've broken your sandbox Changes to code would obviously need to be reviewed before they are committed. That's still much better than with pre-commit, where e.g. to do simple things like banning tabs you pretty much give some guy you don't know full access to your machine. Even worse - almost everyone that uses pre-commit also uses tags instead of commit hashes so the hook can be modified retroactively. One interesting attack would be for a hook to modify e.g. `.vscode/settings.json`... I should probably make the default config exclude those files. Is that what you meant? Even without that it's a lot more secure than pre-commit.
•
You will execute code before you commit it. Maybe not always, but often enough. You will also have lints on things like build scripts. I agree it’s better, but not because of wasi
Why wouldn't I just call the same shell script in CI and locally though? What's the benefit here? All I'm seeing is circular logic.
•
If you had a shell script hook, yes you would also run that in CI. Are you asking what advantage pre-commit has over a shell script? Mostly just functionality: running multiple hooks, running them in parallel, deciding which hooks to run based on the commit files, "decoding" the commit to a list of files, offering a bunch canned hooks, offering the ability to write and install non-shell hooks in a standard way.
X offices raided in France (apnews.com)
Ok, that's the second article on this that doesn't mention how it works in France. I will explain because I see a lot of post that could be better if their author understood that the French system isn't the US system. France 'prosecutor' role is divided in two: one is called 'procureur' and represent the state, but is chosen among judges by the executive power. The second is 'juge d'instruction' and represent the judiciary. They are chosen nominated by the local court without any executive power involvement. They lead the investigation, they order the raids, they order the arrest etc, without involvement from the 'procureur'. The 'procureur' ask for a 'juge d'instruction' to lead an investigation on X/Y or Z (this fucking company name makes everything worse FFS). The judge will then collect evidence, for and against the procureur case, and then if necessary will ask for raids and auditions to finalise. When that's done and all the new evidence is collected (it can take on average 2 years, but if it's an international case like for our ex-president, it can take 10+), the 'juge d'instruction' will present all the gathered evidence to the procureur (who will decide to pursue or not) _and_ the accused. This system exists to avoid as much as possible the executive (police and politicians) to use investigations as a scare tactic. Of course the magistrates know each other, and both corruption and influence is possible, and maybe that's the case here, but you ought to know the raid can't be at the behest of the procureur/president. We take separation of powers seriously here
•
This is really useful for those of us who are really only familiar with the US system. Let me restate a few things to make sure I understand, and follow with some questions: 1. The "procureur" and "juge d'instruction" are chosen from the same pool of judges, with the former appointed by the government executive, and the latter nominated by the judges themselves. 2. Does the executive choose one "procureur" to serve a particular region for a particular span of time, or do they choose a "procureur" every time there's some sort of criminal activity they think needs investigation? 3. How is the pool of judges themselves chosen? In the US, for example, federal judges are chosen by the president and confirmed by the senate, and serve for life. While state court judges are typically elected for a specified term. 4. Supposing we both live in France and I break into your house and steal from you. What happens next? For the sake of telling a story, suppose that you have a security camera from which I could be recognized, but not so clearly that anybody can be certain it's me until someone searches my garage and finds your stolen things. Walk me through the process of who does what?
Who knows who did what on this island, and I hope we'll figure it out. But in the meantime, going to this island or/and being friend with Epstein doesn't automatically make someone a pedo or rapist.
•
Neither does your wife divorcing you at about the same time things started to go through legal process... Oops... yeah, in retrospect it was even worse... no... you can and should be judged by the friends you keep and hang-out with... The same ones who seem to be circling the wagons with innocuous statements or attempts to find other scapegoats (DARVO)... hmm, what was that quote again: "We must all hang together or we will all hang separately"
Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations? Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.
•
Sadly the media calls the lawful use of a warrant a 'raid' but that's another issue. The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices. As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage, stuff that would hold internal discussions about the thing they were interested in, but that is just my guess based on the article saying this is related to the earlier complaint that Grok was generating CSAM on demand.
Gather evidence against employees, use that evidence to put them under pressure to testify against their employer or grant access to evidence. Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care. That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France. We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power. Western liberal democracies just rarely use it. The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.
•
Yes but using such power unscrupulously is a great way to lose it.
•
Wait, Sabu's kids were foster kids. He was fostering them. Certainly if he went to jail, they'd go back to the system. I mean, if you're a sole caretaker and you've been arrested for a crime, and the evidence looks like you'll go to prison, you're going to have to decide what to do with the care of your kids on your mind. I suppose that would pressure you to become an informant instead of taking a longer prison sentence, but there's pressure to do that anyway, like not wanting to be in prison for a long time.
> Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care. This is pretty messed up btw. Social work for children systems in the USA are very messed up. It is not uncommon for minority families to lose rights to parent their children for very innocuous things that would not happen to a non-oppressed class. It is just another way for the justice/legal system to pressure families that have not been convicted / penalized under the supervision of a court. And this isn't the only lever they use. Every time I read crap like this I just think of Aaron Swartz.
•
One can also say we do too little for children who get mistreated. Taking care of other peoples children is never easy the decision needs to be fast and effective and no one wants to take the decision to end it. Because there are those rare cases were children dies because of a reunion with their parents.
No, state decides on the rules of the game any business is playing by.
•
I think both you and the comment you're replying to agree with the gp.
>Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care. >That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France. lawfare is... good now? Between Trump being hit with felony charges for falsifying business records (lawfare is good?) and Lisa Cook getting prosecuted for mortgage fraud (lawfare is bad?), I honestly lost track at this point. >The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets. What's even the implication here? That they're going to shoot his plane down? If there's no threat of violence, what does the French government even hope to achieve with this?
•
> lawfare is... good now? Well, when everything is lawfare it logically follows that it won't always be good or always be bad. It seems Al Capone being taken down for tax fraud would similarly be lawfare by these standards, or am I missing something? Perhaps lawfare (sometimes referred to as "prosecuting criminal charges", as far as I can tell, given this context) is just in some cases and unjust in others.
>fighter jets ARE a threat of violence, and it is widely understood and acknowledged. That's not a credible threat because there's approximately 0% chance France would actually follow through with it. Not even Trump would resort to murder to get rid of his domestic adversaries. As we seen the fed, the best he could muster are some spurious prosecutions. France murdering someone would put them on par with Russia or India.
•
Don’t forget that captain of the plane makes decisions not Elon. If captain of the plane disobeyed direct threat like that from a nation, his career is going to be limited. Yeah Elon might throw money at him but that guy is most likely never allowed again to fly near any French territory. I guess whole cabin crew as well . Being clear for flying anywhere in the world is their job. Would be quite stupid to loose it like truck driver DUI getting his license revoked.
> We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power. I remember something (probably linked from here), where the essayist was comparing Jack Ma, one of the richest men on earth, and Xi Jinping, a much lower-paid individual. They indicated that Xi got Ma into a chokehold. I think he "disappeared" Ma for some time. Don't remember exactly how long, but it may have been over a year.
•
From what I hear, Ma made 1 speech critical of the government and Xi showed him his place. It was a few years, a year of total disappearance followed by slow rehab. But China is different. Not sure most of western europe will go that far in most cases.
Offline syncing of outlook could reveal a lot of emails that would otherwise be on a foreign server. A lot of people save copies of documents locally as well.
•
Most enterprises have fully encrypted workstations, when they don't use VM where the desktop is just a thin client that doesn't store any data. So there should be really nothing of interest in the office itself.
Every artist is capable of drawing CSAM. Every 3D modeler can render CSAM. Ban all computers !!
•
And the artist is punished for doing so. Thank you for proving my point.
In fairness, AI-generated CSAM is nowhere near as evil as real CSAM. The reason why possession of CSAM was such a serious crime is because its creation used to necessitate the abuse of a child. It's pretty obvious the French are deliberately conflating the two to justify attacking a political dissident.
•
It may not be worse "objectively" and in direct harm. However - it has one big problem that is rarely discussed... Normalizing of behaviour, interests and attitudes. It just becomes a thing that Grok can do - for paid accounts, and people think - ok, "no harm, no problem"... Long-term, there will be harm. This has been demonstrated over decades of investigation of CSAM.
It calls National Rally in France "far right".
•
Well, far right is a spectrum, obviously. But a party that equates immigration of a particular religion as terrorism is not "mild immigration restrictions" in my reading. I cross-checked Wikipedia's information with another source: https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/french-election-is-it-correct-to-call-le-pen-and-bardella-far-right/666186
•
I don't know about that party, but National Rally doesn't say that, and also polls around 34% of French people. So it remains that the Wikipedia "far right" definition is a very wide spectrum.
And this destabilizes Europe... how?
•
Schrödingers social network: It's somehow irrelevant but somehow "destablizies our democracy" ;)
hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation? Where would that end? could i be jailed if i post a review for a restaurant if you feel it manipulated you? or anyone stating an opinion could be construed as manipulation. that is beyond a slippery slope, that is an authoritarian nightmare.
•
So you think writing a review is somehow on the same magnitude as social media platforms with 300 million-3 billion users? And how is that different from TV channels/media en large having laws to abide by? Slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery slopes..
Qwen3-Coder-Next (qwen.ai)
•
I got openclaw to compete Qwen3-Coder-Next vs Minimax M2.1 simultaneously on my Mac Studio 512GB: https://clutch-assistant.github.io/model-comparison-report/
•
Not crazy about it. It keeps getting stuck in a loop and filling up the context window (131k, run locally). Kimi's been nice, even if a bit slow.
Thanks for the pointers! one more thing, that guide says: > You can choose UD-Q4_K_XL or other quantized versions. I see eight different 4-bit quants (I assume that is the size I want?).. how to pick which one to use? IQ4_XS Q4_K_S Q4_1 IQ4_NL MXFP4_MOE Q4_0 Q4_K_M Q4_K_XL
•
The I-prefix stands for Imatrix smoothing in the quantization. It trades a little more accuracy for speed than other quant styles. The _0 and _1 quants are older, simpler quants that are very accurate but kinda slow. The K quants, in my limited understanding, primarily quantize at the specified bit depth, but will bump certain important areas higher, and less used parts lower. It generally performs better while providing similar accuracy to the _1 quants. MXFP4 is specific to Nvidia, so I can't use it on my AMD hardware. It's supposed to be very efficient. The UD part includes more of Unsloth's speed optimizations. Also, depending on how much regular system RAM you have, you can offload mixture-of-expert models like this, keeping only the most important layers on your GPU. This may let you use larger, more accurate quants. That is functionality that is supported by llama.cpp and other frameworks and is worth looking into how to do.
what are your impressions?
•
I got Codex CLI running against it and was sadly very unimpressed - it got stuck in a loop running "ls" for some reason when I asked it to create a new file.
> Then Anthropic started saying I’m not allowed to use my Claude Code subscription with my preferred tools To be clear, since this confuses a lot of people in every thread: Anthropic will let you use their API with any coding tools you want. You just have to go through the public API and pay the same rate as everyone else. They have not "blocked" or "banned" any coding tools from using their API, even though a lot of the clickbait headlines have tried to insinuate as much. Anthropic never sold subscription plans as being usable with anything other than their own tools. They were specifically offered as a way to use their own apps for a flat monthly fee. They obviously set the limits and pricing according to typical use patterns of these tools, because the typical users aren't maxing out their credits in every usage window. Some of the open source tools reverse engineered the protocol (which wasn't hard) and people started using the plans with other tools. This situation went on for a while without enforcement until it got too big to ignore, and they began protecting the private endpoints explicitly. The subscription plans were never sold as a way to use the API with other programs, but I think they let it slide for a while because it was only a small number of people doing it. Once the tools started getting more popular they started closing loopholes to use the private API with other tools, which shouldn't really come as a surprise.
•
> Anthropic will let you use their API with any coding tools you want No, in 2026, even with their API plan the create key is disabled for most orgs, you basically have to ask your admin to give you a key to use something other than Claude Code. You can imagine how that would be a problem.
OpenAI committed to allowing it btw. I don't know why Anthropic gets so much love here
•
Anthropic is astroturfing most of the programming forums including this one.
We need a new word, not "local model" but "my own computers model" CapEx based This distinction is important because some "we support local model" tools have things like ollama orchestration or use the llama.cpp libraries to connect to models on the same physical machine. That's not my definition of local. Mine is "local network". so call it the "LAN model" until we come up with something better. "Self-host" exists but this usually means more "open-weights" as opposed to clamping the performance of the model. It should be defined as ~sub-$10k, using Steve Jobs megapenny unit. Essentially classify things as how many megapennies of spend a machine is that won't OOM on it. That's what I mean when I say local: running inference for 'free' somewhere on hardware I control that's at most single digit thousands of dollars. And if I was feeling fancy, could potentially fine-tune on the days scale. A modern 5090 build-out with a threadripper, nvme, 256GB RAM, this will run you about 10k +/- 1k. The MLX route is about $6000 out the door after tax (m3-ultra 60 core with 256GB). Lastly it's not just "number of parameters". Not all 32B Q4_K_M models load at the same rate or use the same amount of memory. The internal architecture matters and the active parameter count + quantization is becoming a poorer approximation given the SOTA innovations. What might be needed is some standardized eval benchmark against standardized hardware classes with basic real world tasks like toolcalling, code generation, and document procesing. There's plenty of "good enough" models out there for a large category of every day tasks, now I want to find out what runs the best Take a gen6 thinkpad P14s/macbook pro and a 5090/mac studio, run the benchmark and then we can say something like "time-to-first-token/token-per-second/memory-used/total-time-of-test" and rate this as independent from how accurate the model was.
•
For context on what cloud API costs look like when running coding agents: With Claude Sonnet at $3/$15 per 1M tokens, a typical agent loop with ~2K input tokens and ~500 output per call, 5 LLM calls per task, and 20% retry overhead (common with tool use): you're looking at roughly $0.05-0.10 per agent task. At 1K tasks/day that's ~$1.5K-3K/month in API spend. The retry overhead is where the real costs hide. Most cost comparisons assume perfect execution, but tool-calling agents fail parsing, need validation retries, etc. I've seen retry rates push effective costs 40-60% above baseline projections. Local models trading 50x slower inference for $0 marginal cost start looking very attractive for high-volume, latency-tolerant workloads.
> I do not want my career to become dependent upon Anthropic As someone who switches between Anthropic and ChatGPT depending on the month and has dabbled with other providers and some local LLMs, I think this fear is unfounded. It's really easy to switch between models. The different models have some differences that you notice over time but the techniques you learn in one place aren't going to lock you into a provider anywhere.
•
> It's really easy to switch between models. The different models have some differences that you notice over time but the techniques you learn in one place aren't going to lock you into a provider anywhere. We have two cell phone providers. Google is removing the ability to install binaries, and the other one has never allowed freedom. All computing is taxed, defaults are set to the incumbent monopolies. Searching, even for trademarks, is a forced bidding war. Businesses have to shed customer relationships, get poached on brand relationships, and jump through hoops week after week. The FTC/DOJ do nothing, and the EU hasn't done much either. I can't even imagine what this will be like for engineering once this becomes necessary to do our jobs. We've been spoiled by not needing many tools - other industries, like medical or industrial research, tie their employment to a physical location and set of expensive industrial tools. You lose your job, you have to physically move - possibly to another state. What happens when Anthropic and OpenAI ban you? Or decide to only sell to industry? This is just the start - we're going to become more dependent upon these tools to the point we're serfs. We might have two choices, and that's demonstrably (with the current incumbency) not a good world. Computing is quickly becoming a non-local phenomenon. Google and the platforms broke the dream of the open web. We're about to witness the death of the personal computer if we don't do anything about it.
right, but ChatGPT might not exist at some point, and if we don't force feed the open inference ecosystem and infrastructure back into the mouths of the AI devourer that is this hype cycle, we'll simply be accepting our inevitable, painful death
•
If they die there will be so much hardware released to do other tasks.
Any notes on the problems with MLX caching? I’ve experimented with local models on my MacBook and there’s usually a good speedup from MLX, but I wasn’t aware there’s an issue with prompt caching. Is it from MLX itself or LMstudio/mlx-lm/etc?
•
It is the buffer implementation. [u1 10kTok]->[a1]->[u2]->[a2]. If you branch between the assistant1 and user2 answers then MLX does reprocess the u1 prompt of let's say 10k tokens while llama.cpp does not. I just tested with GGUF and MLX of Qwen3-Coder-Next with llama.cpp and now with LMStudio. As I do branching very often, it is highly annoying for me to the point of being unusable. Q3-30B is much more usable then on Mac - but by far not as powerful.
 Top