The title should probably be edited to specify "M1 Max" instead of "M1 Mac". You aren't running K3 on a base M1 anytime soon. Either way, still a very impressive project.
The iPhone Upgrade Program was a 24-month 0% financing program for iPhones. The replacement Apple Upgrade<https://www.apple.com/shop/apple-upgrade> is a leasing program that also covers iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches.
Instead of automatically owning the device after making all payments, you can choose return/upgrade/buy it at the end of the lease. The new program is backed by Klarna instead of Citizens Bank, uses a soft credit check, and no longer includes AppleCare+ by default.
The fact that the page is not particularly clear about any of this should tell you everything you need to know about this change.
On the other hand, that is a way to hide a price increase. Also, those doing this are almost obliged to take AppleCare, as (https://www.apple.com/shop/apple-upgrade):
“What do I do if my device gets lost or is stolen?
If you have AppleCare+ Theft and Loss for your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, you can file a claim at mysupport.apple.com/theftandloss.
If you don't have AppleCare+ Theft and Loss coverage and your device is stolen or lost, you'll need to close out your lease by paying the early termination fee or choose to pay the purchase option fee (plus any applicable taxes and fees). You can do that at an Apple Store, or through the Klarna app. You can then start a new lease with Apple Upgrade, finance with Apple, or buy your next device with a one-time payment.
You will continue to be charged your monthly lease payments until you either pay the early termination fee or purchase option fee. If you take no action, Klarna will continue to charge you your monthly lease payment through the extension period, and you will be charged the purchase option fee through Klarna.”
So if the target demographic, the person that does not have money to buy an iPhone outright, is mugged, they need to essentially buy the iPhone outright or they start racking up interest and fees.
(I don’t care if they say the target demographic is “people who upgrade every 2 years” instead. If that were really the case, you don’t need financing, just a buy-back program)
It’s not the same. With a mobile carrier, you could just continue to make monthly payments as normal, and at the end of your contract, the payments stop.
With this program, you can either pay a lump sum to cancel the lease early, or you can continue making monthly payments, but at the 24-month mark, since you can’t return the phone, you’ll still owe them $430.
Fairly certain there is no forgiveness with lease terms. Also, Im surprised that Apple Care is not a requirement, but it seem more like a decision to put the risk on the lender rather than Apple in the case of loss. I would expect a majority of people to buy the apple care for a few dollars more per month.
Great, lets remove the option of refined sugar, alcohol, saturated fats, detached single family homes (due to it resulting in individual cars, the leading cause of injury and death, and expenses that leads to "debt slavery"), etc.
Also, no more leasing/renting cars, or really any kind of borrowing at all, as people should not have the option to become liable in the future, for anything. Because if a $1,000 to $2,000 lease puts them in a spiral of debt slavery, anything more than that surely will.
You’re being sarcastic, but I actually kind of agree.
Not that these options should be removed, but that they should be priced according to their costs to society.
You see that with alcohol and cigarettes in developed countries.
Leases should be more tightly regulated and require full coverage insurance. It already works like that for cars.
Borrowing is fine insofar as the payments or debt don’t interfere with your ability to survive. A bad credit score shouldn’t prevent you from living under a roof or getting a job. UBI would make this much easier in practice.
>Leases should be more tightly regulated and require full coverage insurance. It already works like that for cars.
Not by law, but because the lender requires it. In this case, the lender doesn’t. There is no evil or not evil, it’s just a business decision based on the value of the collateral and likelihood of loss.
Given that the median household income in the US is $83k, I don’t think that losing $1k on a busted phone is likely to put many into “spiraling debt slavery”
It's not specifically the option to skip insurance, it's the option to finance something so prone to damage without insurance. And yeah, it's bad for that to be an option.
Mugging is not a good example. If the phone is stolen that would typically be covered under the personal property coverage included on most homeowners or renters insurance.
Yes, this appears to be entirely about raising the price of iPhones without raising the cost of iPhones. Most people don’t buy it out right so they need a way to ease the prices raised by keeping the monthly payments around the same. The difference is you have to return the phone at the end instead of owning it.
Man, the concept of leasing a phone is grim. The way hardware gets locked down these days, it feels like you never really own it in the first place. Leasing makes it explicit: you don't.
You'll own nothing and you'll feel weird about it.
I think from a technical perspective, newsletters are a solved problems with lots of options as you've mentioned.
Substack thrives because it's built a reputation for having well-reasoned or engaging voices in a newsletter format. They pushed a big campaign to onboard writers like Bill Bishop (Sinocism) onto the platform early on. Because of that, newer writers are likely seeking to tap into the network effects/discovery systems that comes with having big names on the platform.
People log onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, etc. because the people they're interested are already on the platform, and the platform provides a recommendation system that allows newer "creators" to tap into an existing audience for others in their niche.
I get that we all want people to be on open platforms but I feel like the really staunch part of the open platforms only crowd is not taking the time to understand why people like platforms like substack.
I agree, very aware it's way more than just the publishing / email tools! Also posted a top-level comment about building alternatives with https://leaflet.pub and https://standard.site - and yes I think really important to consider the full list of things you get with Substack: blog + email, easy to customize, monetization, social features + network, all in one platform, long tail of features…
Did a short talk on this at a local meetup recently, basically on how we might collectively re-create the entire stack of what Substack offers, in an open ecosystem, with a strong focus on network / distribution, more so than just features.
It's a tall order but I do think there's a big opportunity here beyond what any single app can or should tackle, in building an open alternative to the whole longform publishing stack, combining the tools and the social network side. AT Protocol and the Atmosphere (ecosystem of folks building on it) are pretty well positioned here. Lots of nice ways to get autonomy and ownership with web publishing + distribution and social affordances at the same time.
Of course a big challenge in bootstrapping the network and building the cultural footprint and giving folks flexible ways to make money and reach new readers, but I'm encouraged by how much progress we've made collectively just this past year.
I wonder if any of the three other students did use AI, but removed the Madagascar signal? So many students not proofreading suggests that they just want to make it look like they did the work but don't care about the grade, which is surprising for a midterm.
It's also a little ironic that he's showing all of this while wearing Ray-Ban Metas.
Porforr<https://porffor.dev> has been working towards the same goal for a while. The creator, CanadaHonk<https://honk.foo>, is extremely talented and the project still only passes ~68% of Test262. I'm more than a little suspicious of how Vercel has made so much progress so fast, unless I'm misunderstanding the scope of this project.
Christ. Imagine if bridges, skyscrapers, dams, cars, airplanes were designed and built like that.
I vibeslopped thousands of pages of blueprints, nobody reviewed them, but another team of digital monkeys with the intellect of an ant have already built the bridge, and it seems to not have collapsed yet, so we're already directing traffic there.
I can't imagine actual engineers feeling anything but deepest contempt for this industry.
"Actual engineers" don't really care about software engineering, much less a strong emotion at all like the "deepest contempt" and many of them already vibe code today for their work anyway.
Oh no, we do, because the software world has been abusing what engineering means for decades, in order to inflate job titles. Most people are programmers, not software engineers, and that's OK.
What we do is absolutely engineering, there’s just a lot less credentialing upfront and rigor before something is released, because usually people’s lives do not depend on it and it’s easy to release updates.
The credentials and rigor are what Professional Engineering is supposed to include. The credentials help give bite to Ethics Boards and other tools used to keep the entire profession honest and safe. The rigor is supposed to include things like making sure that you are solving the right problems.
Many people's lives do depend on software today. Insurance software dictates who gets treatment and who doesn't; that's real lives at stake. Finance software controls access to things like food and shelter; that's real lives at stake. Firmware in prosthetics and diabetic injectors and so on and so forth. Software runs the world, we pat ourselves on the back saying, but forget the world is full of real lives.
Sure, I think many of us are doing the best engineering work that we can given the industry situation. I've also seen so many of my peers, some of our brightest minds, waste their careers on stuff that a proper Ethics Board might stop or at least ameliorate. I can work to be the best engineer I can be and still wish we were an industry that actually respected engineering, not just used the title like a party favor that has no inherent meaning.
Maybe you're an outlier seeing as you're even on this forum. Most other non software engineers I know do not give a single thought about "title inflation," it does not even register in their minds as a topic to think about.
My resume includes a bunch of time at a primarily Civil Engineering firm and one of the things I took away from that was also some respect for this "title inflation" issue. That company would not allow any "Engineer" in a title that didn't involve someone without up-to-date PE credentials. Technically my title the whole time there was "Senior Software Developer". I still feel guilty switching my resume back to "Senior Software Engineer" to not have to explain that "gap" to software interviewer who somehow think "Developer" is a less important title than "Engineer" and don't understand title inflation in our industry.
(At one point I even debated the value of getting PE credentials at my age for extra leverage in that company.)
> already built the bridge, and it seems to not have collapsed yet, so we're already directing traffic there.
“Actual” engineering went through a phase where bridges and other structures did collapse due to structural flaws - it’s not like they magically figured out ahead of time how to avoid that.
Now, they can build structures that are some specified tolerance away from collapsing, but that’s only the case because the edges of what was possible were explored.
That makes sense. It also seems like this uses a lot more dependencies and tiers of compilation whereas Porforr is trying to do everything from scratch.
I don't actually see any dependencies other than node and typescript (and the optional quickjs package) (maybe they inlined dependencies? But the package.json files don't indicate any npm dependencies)
Putting aside the whole “team of professionals putting out a product vs solo dev fine tuning their opus” of it all:
Can you clarify what about the architecture is ‘idiotic’? Not trying to catch you or demand a defense, just looking for a vague description. I don’t even know how to start examining the architecture of something like this.
As far as I can tell they pull in QuickJS (actually quickjs-ng) only in the case where the program has untyped dependencies that still need to be run by an interpreter - and they chose that library because it's pretty small (620KB). Did I miss something, are they using it outside of that purpose?
They won't have untyped dependencies for situations where someone used Scriptc as a way to build a fast binary executable for some custom-written TypeScript, which was the first use-case that came to mind for me.
Being able to build small, fast binaries without writing them in C or Rust - if you're already fluent in TypeScript - seems like a valuable capability.
Yes, being able to build small and fast binaries in TS would be a valuable capability, which is why basically all of us who work in this space have thought of this idea and rejected it after going deep on it. This isn’t a new idea.
CanadaHonk has gotten further than the rest of us. It’s surprising and impressive.
You’re only replying to the quickjs issue I raised, but it’s not the only issue. Their approach to numbers is broken. Their approach to measurement is broken. The quickjs thing raises another red flag: it suggests to me that they are using reference counting, not GC. That’s guaranteed to make them too slow to be useful. (If they weren’t using RC, then they’d have a hard time on the boundary to quickjs.)
As to the `any` issue, let me explain it in a way you’ll appreciate. I asked Claude how likely it is that TS code uses any, and it found:
- 79.5% of TS repos use any explicitly. So, about 4/5 chance that newly written dep-free TS code will use it.
- the explicit any type is about as common as Boolean and void.
- a third of inferred types are any. That’s huge.
So, if you don’t believe me, then at least believe Claude: any is a super common type, so they will be falling off into quickjs a lot.
Oh, and in case it isn’t clear, quickjs-ng is no better than quickjs. They’re the same thing for the purpose of perf
If you’re writing Typescript with zero dependencies and trying to target native I feel like it makes more sense to write it in a different language like Rust or Go. The main reason for this I think is getting cheap perf wins by running existing code natively.
Personally i can kind of see a use case here. I've shipped some simple server side packages as a "compiled" Node single executable written in TS, but you're stuck with the big overhead of Node.
I've just been teaching myself Go, also a single binary but without the overhead. But in Go i miss the expressiveness of the TS type system sometimes.
Devil's advocate - this is for the backend. You get to control your dependencies there, and I'd say Vercel controls its own stack, so they can replace deps as they go by submitting patches/slopforking projects to remove incompatible features.
1. TS only has a "number" type. But what type of number is it? This is doable safely via keywords (or known markers), or sometimes via analysis, but I couldn't find it in the README.
> Our mitigation against context menu discoverability is to place the same actions in the detail view behind a regular dropdown menu.
This is a pattern I'd like to use myself and see more commonly—the context menu as a shortcut but not the only method makes a lot of sense as a balance between the average user and power users.
The only downside I see is that you're losing the browser's native context menu, but this is solved by behaviors like in Helium where `Shift+RightClick` forces the native menu[^1]. I'm not sure which other browsers if any implement that, however.
> Claude Opus 5's default user-facing responses run longer than prior Opus models'.
The benchmarks do show Opus 5 as slightly more expensive than 4.8, although the scores are much higher.
This still feels like a step in the wrong direction, though, especially with OpenAI making so much progress with the efficiency of their models. Fable's token efficiency made it seem like Anthropic would start following OpenAI's approach but that doesn't seem to have carried over to their other models.
On a small, easily digestible task, I compared Fable to Opus and the cost of Fable was easily 2x despite being fewer tokens, and the output was not really better. Obviously, there are tasks where using Fable matters but honestly they're rather unusual. And for a lot of tasks I've found downgrading to Sonnet can be valuable because Fable and Opus are a lot more secretive about what they're doing, and it's impossible to "listen to them think" and stop them when they start making off-the-wall inferences/assumptions and going down bad paths.
I think in the long run tokens are probably the wrong thing; it's compute and cache memory that you need to be measuring, and when you look at it that way I suspect in most cases the models have pretty similar performance.
I don't need more powerful models, I need one that responds fast enough that my attention doesn't wander to other tasks. Grok 4.5 is so fast I can just use it in-band without swapping to other tasks.
Slower than Opus 4.8, which was already miserably slow, is indeed a step in the wrong direction.
After actually using for most of a day now, it really seems not just slightly slower than 4.8, but way slower. Even relatively easy code refactoring tasks seem to take a while.
I find that my orchestrating agent still needs to be fast to properly coordinate a fleet of slower models.
During post-training of opus 5, the last few days, opus was a real wreck. I had to swap in gpt 5.6 sol for my orchestrator and enable fast mode (1.5x speed) in order for it to keep up with work and communications from a handful of mostly 5.6 sol agents.
Also because interacting with a slow orchestrator is no fun, even when plenty of work is getting done in parallel in the background.
In my tests, it averages to much cheaper than Opus 4.8 on real tasks on account of being smarter and more token efficient.
I have a benchmark to build a game engine from a set of written instructions. It's a little tricky. Opus 4.8 did it in 470k tokens at a cost of $1.29 vs Opus 5 in 179k tokens for $0.33. (Fable 5 did it in 245k for $0.95)
Though if you really want to cut costs, Tencent's Hy3 model also got it right and did it in 283k tokens for $0.03
The final user-facing responses are usually a tiny fraction of the total tokens used over the course of a given conversation turn. When you're doing any real work, reasoning and tool uses constitute the overwhelming majority of the tokens in / out... not the final user-facing response.
> This still feels like a step in the wrong direction, though, especially with OpenAI making so much progress with the efficiency of their models
Gemini also had modest increase before this - don't be surprised when OpenAI also has a "modest increase" with its next release. Cartel-like behaviour doesn't require direct communication when none of the participants are interested in participating in a margin-destroying price-war. All one needs to do is raise their price and watch how the competition react.
Such a scheme (and resulting high margins) would be imperilled by the existence of frontier open-weight models in the market, which may be why the reaction to Chinese models may be particularly shrill.
>Don't be surprised when OpenAI also has a "modest increase" with its next releases; cartel-like behaviour doesn't require overt coordination when none of the participants are interested in participating in a margin-destroying price-war.
No I will be surprised and I'll bet on the fact that prices will keep going down, just like it went ~50% down in the latest GPT 5.6 release.
If the price keeps going down, how are they ever going to be able to make back all the money they’re spending? If the price stays high, how are they going to undercut the cost of labor?
> especially with OpenAI making so much progress with the efficiency of their models
To be fair though, Sol tends to go off the rails sometimes. It's much less reliable than Fable in its outputs. It tends to be overzealous in its research/changes.
Anecdata: my workflow has been working on the same personal projects for months now with Codex. I cannot anymore finish my daily/weekly code with 4.8 anymore.
I was dividing my work between Codex and DeepSeek. Now I barely use DeepSeek, or never because Codex quota is enough after Sol
It's a step in the wrong direction but also token efficiency has become a focus relatively recently (just the past few weeks it seems like the zeitgeist has turned it's attention to efficiency) while work on this model probably started many many months ago. I would expect to see models released that focus on token efficiency in 6-12 months
Almost completely disagree. Slightly more expensive, but significant better on a per-prompt basis? For non-trivial projects, the former is a small linear increase, the latter is a (somewhat-)exponential(-ish) cost/time/sanity savings.
