I've been threatened by the governments of Pakistan and Germany for stuff I've said pseudonymously on the Internet. As much as they may think everybody needs to care about their laws, I happen not to.

It's just a reality that law is harder to enforce when you cannot target a given server and take out an entire service. Regardless of what you think of the law.

This is why to this day torrenting of copyrighted material is alive and well.

wonderful stuff

I have a bunch of the old ones from my late father, I have sunk thousands of hours in old computer magazines, there's something special to them that the new world cannot capture anymore.

It was the accessibility. You were learning computing concepts from scratch, that would then increase in complexity in real-time as your learning caught up if you were actively engaged.

also the importance and the degree of care that was put into things that were published, and what all the constraints meant also in computing itself

there were strong positives to that, and they just cannot be replicated in a society of hyper-abundance and slop

they just removed the 50% discount today

i can imagine they're a bit tight to keep those prices viable while they also have enough compute to train their new models

Perhaps some power user of Claude Code can enlighten me here, but why not just using OpenCode? I admit I've only briefly tried Claude Code, so perhaps there are unique features there stopping the switch, or some other form of lock-in.

Anthropic is actively blocking calls from anything but claude code for it's claude plans. At this point you either need to be taking part in the cat and mouse game to make that plan work with opencode or you need to be paying the much more expensive API prices.

i see

i guess they were blocking OpenCode for a reason

this will put people to the test that use mainly Anthropic, to have a second look at the results from other models

you have 128GB strix halo machines for US$ ~3k

these run some pretty decent models locally, currently I'd recommend GPT-OSS 120GB, Qwen Coder Next 80B (either Q8 or Q6 quants, depending on speed/quality trade-offs) and the very best model you can run right now which is Step 3.5 Flash (ubergarm GGUF quant) with 256K context although this does push it to the limit - GLMs and nemotrons also worth trying depending on your priorities

there's clearly a big quantum leap in the SotA models using more than 512GB VRAM, but i expect that in a year or two, the current SotA is achievable with consumer level hardware, if nothing else hardware should catch up with running Kimi 2.5 for cheaper than 2x 512GB mac studio ultras - perhaps medusa halo next year supports 512GB and DDR5 comes down again, and that would put a local whatever the best open model of that size is next year within reach of under-US$5K hardware

the odd thing is that there isn't much in this whole range between 128GB and 512GB VRAM requirement to justify the huge premium you pay for Macs in that range - but this can change at any point as every other day there are announcements

And you can get Strix Halo in a Laptop that looks and feels like a Macbook Pro that can run Linux if you buy an HP ZBook G1A.

Super happy with that thing, only real downside is battery life.

when i look at the prices these people are offering, and also the likes of kimi, and I wonder how are openAI, anthropic and google going to justify billions of dollars of investment? surely they have something in mind other than competing for subscriptions and against the abliterated open models that won't say "i cannot do that"

EDIT:

cheechw - point taken. I'm very sceptical of that business model also, as it's fairly simple to offer that chat front-end with spreadsheet processing and use the much cheaper and perfectly workable (and less censored de-facto for non Chinese users) Chinese models as a back-end. Maybe if somehow they manage to ban them effectively.

sorry, don't seem to be able to reply to you directly

They're all pretending to bring about the singularity (surely a 1 million token context window is enough, right?) and simultaneously begging the US government to help them create monopolies.

Meanwhile said government burns bridges with all its allies, declaring economic and cultural warfare on everybody outside their borders (and most of everyone inside, too). So nobody outside of the US is going to be rooting for them or getting onside with this strategy.

2026 is the year where we get pragmatic about these things. I use them to help me code. They can make my team extremely effective. But they can't replace them. The tooling needs improvement. Dario and SamA can f'off with their pronouncements about putting us all out of work and bringing about ... god knows what.

The future belongs to the model providers who can make it cost effective and the tool makers who augment us instead of trying ineptly to replace us with their bloated buggy over-engineered glorified chat loop with shell access.

whose ethical constraints?

This may sound obvious, but there must also be an enforcement of what's allowed into that sandbox.

I can envision perfectly secure sandboxes where people put company secrets and communicate them over to "the cloud".

exactly, egress control is the second half of that puzzle. A perfect sandbox is useless for dlp if the agent can just hallucinate your private keys or pii into a response and beam it back to the model provider. it’s basically an exfiltration risk that traditional infra-level security isn't fully built to catch yet.

Different beasts on the API, the extra context left makes a huge difference. Unless there's something else out there I've missed, which at the speed things move these days it's always a possibility.