A 486 in 2003? Pentiums were shipping by the mid-90s, did you just have super old hardware lying around?

I retired my 486 in ‘95 or thereabouts…

In the mid-90s, I retired my 486 hardware and brought it over to a local ISP that we were friends with.

It had a second life doing stuff like delivering mail, handling IRC, serving web pages, and whatever else a few of us wanted from it. The performance was fine.

(The Pentium-ish machines stayed on desktop duty where GUIs devoured resources.)

Huh? Your conclusion does not follow. A large fraction of the interchange fee is kicked back to customers.

The size of the pie being so much bigger means the issuer’s tolerance for fraud is much larger, but it’s orthogonal to whether there’s actually more fraud. In practice credit cards fraud actually impacting customers is vanishingly rare at this point.

A large fraction, yes, but I believe in absolute numbers, US issuers still retain much more interchange than European ones.

The numbers are even public: https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis...

If you take a look at some of the more "expensive" cards, interchange is often higher than 2%, yet issuers often pay as much only on certain categories, and flat cashback cards usually pay 1.5% (2% is relatively rare).

Compare that difference to a total interchange of 0.3% in the EU.

Because adding friction will deter many impulse purchases. Americans use credit cards constantly. The equilibrium would be perturbed in a way very much not advantageous for the credit card issuers if consumers became more cautious about using credit cards.

It’s the same reason credit card issuers are willing to pay Apple a few basis points to participate in Apple Pay: reducing friction has a non-linear impact on propensity to pay.

oMLX makes prefill effectively instantaneous on a Mac.

Storing an LRU KV Cache of all your conversations both in memory, and on (plenty fast enough) SSD, especially including the fixed agent context every conversation starts with, means we go from "painfully slow" to "faster than using Claude" most of the time. It's kind of shocking this much perf was lying on the ground waiting to be picked up.

Open models are still dumber than leading closed models, especially for editing existing code. But I use it as essentially free "analyze this code, look for problem <x|y|z>" which Claude is happy to do for an enormous amount of consumed tokens.

But speed is no longer a problem. It's pretty awesome over here in unified memory Mac land :)

“Scared” to “take risks”?

This is a bizarre way of saying “if they ship it and it has reliability problems, they know they’re skating on thin ice”.

Apple’s brand has taken a beating (I’m as aghast with the latest macOS as the next nerd), but people love that when Apple ships a product, it generally works and the hardware doesn’t break.

Butterfly keyboards are a terrible stain on the hardware team’s reputation. “Scared” is the wrong word for how these things work.

I agree, Apple gets hit from all directions.

It's expensive (though largely comparable to business machines) so people dunk on it being low value for money,

People dunk on them for not taking risks, but when there's a reliability problem that would be sort-of acceptable for another product it becomes international news.

When they do take "risks" (like USB-C only) people dunk on them for taking away choice.

Now, I'll be the first to admit, I'm one of the people dunking on them a lot, I was not a fan of the headphone jack removal, butterfly keyboards, discoverability of 3D touch, change of UI paradigm away from Skeumorphism etc;etc;etc -- but I feel like a lot of the other manufacturers seem to get a comparative free pass, which feels unfair.

I was working at Apple and wondering the same thing ;)

Turns out people like them. Not so much the HN crowd, but c’est la vie.

I wonder if the reason that most people don’t agree with me about Antigravity is because you were used to VS Code?

For me, Antigravity is possibly the worst GUI experience I’ve had since Clippy.

It’s completely filled with arcane buttons, prompts that are effectively modal appear in at least 3 different places, it’s constantly… doing stuff, without any reference to where I should focus my attention.

I appreciate Google giving away absurdly generous quantities of tokens for FREE just to get me to use the thing, but I can’t bring myself to, because when I get into the flow of a feature with an LLM, I’m suddenly stuck and can’t figure it out.

It’s like peak Google UI for me.

I used to feel this way, then a week or two ago, after an automatic update, it started hanging. All. The. Time for me. Launching the app now frequently takes 30 seconds before it shows me the “load a git repo” screen.

Speed was its main advantage, before. It has become nearly unusable.

The price of extraordinarily rapid iteration, I suppose.

FWIW I think I was experiencing the same hangs as you, and they seem to have resolved on their own now. Worth checking again just in case

I'm surprised that there were downvotes. This is an excellent answer, and better interfaces between linguistic definitions of color and physicists' than saying "Rayleigh scattering impacts blue more than red"!

It hadn’t occurred to me this was a billing bug.

That would be heartening, if I wasn’t consuming tokens 10x as fast as expected, and they just had attribution bugs.

Do you have references to this being documented as the actual issue, or is this just speculation?

I want to support Anthropic, but with the Codex desktop app *so much better* than Anthropic’s combined with the old “5 back and forths with Opus and your quota is gone”, it’s hard to see going back

Yeah I think it's either a billing bug, or some sort of inbuilt background sub-agent loop gone wild inside Claude Code, if you have a look at recent issues on the Github relating to 'limits', 'usage', 'tokens' you'll see a lot of discussion about it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues?q=sort%3Aup...