Initial impressions: this is a really strong model and the fact that they reduced prices at the same time makes it an awesome backup model to use when your primary subscription runs out and you need to bridge a few days before it resets.
It also seems to be more willing to just do whatever you ask of it. My favourite benchmark for this is to ask it to download a rom for an old game, that I own. Legal in my juristiction but the US models (except Grok) have a tendency to refuse it.
> My favourite benchmark for this is to ask it to download a rom for an old game
Even easier: just have them review a large codebase of yours that accidentally has a OOB access bug. Even with no consequences and even if the codebase is truly yours you get blocked.
And of course "find vulnerabilities in..." prompts are out of the question, whereas Chinese models happily oblige.
Or if you apply to a company and they want to do an AI HR interview and an AI coding test and an AI challenge - if you throw OpenAI or Claude models at it - they refuse, because it's "wrong" and "immoral".
The biggest challenge with these kind of migrations is training users, especially government employees. Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.
The technical part is probably relatively easy in comparison. Especially because the stakes are low (parallel run with the existing system, good will from everyone involved).
> Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.
True, but that's not accounting for a bunch of typically Swiss cultural factors:
- Swiss people tend to love to death the "one standard solution for one particular problem" approach
- Swiss people tend to be quite change-averse relative to other nearby cultures.
Don't get me wrong I love the Swiss to death, and the above cultural biases actually have their advantages, but re-training government employees is not going to be easy, however well educated they may be.
Fortunately, there is another cultural Swiss bias that's going to help: most large Swiss organizations have been designed using the army as a model, which mean Swiss employees tend to obey orders quite well.
So if the mandate comes from the top, it'll likely succeed. Eventually. Cause in Switzerland, they tend to take their time (yeah, that's another base cultural cliché, but I couldn't resist. And we're already deep into those already, why stop :-) ).
As a Swiss I'm a little surprised about your points:
1. We have a wide, per-canton range of solutions for everything even up to school system or tax software. Almost nothing is the same everywhere in the country (not even mentality...)
2. I am quite surprised about the "chage adverse" comment as well, except maybe in rural/conservative villages, people are on the contrary quite forward looking. Our economy is regularly listed as the most competitive in the world. How can competitive economy exist if nothing ever changes? Where does your impression come from?
3. My wife works in the Swiss government and uses a linux desktop at home...
Amen, I've worked in a few European countries and (outside the big companies and banks) the Swiss love to poke around and experiment.
They do have a tendency to complain (but so do a lot of Europeans) but that complaining does often translate into action (something, seemingly, a lot less common in the south of Europe) so perhaps that gives outsiders the impression that the Swiss are change adverse?
Educated or not, people that have been using the same system for many years will have a tough time IMHO. Looking at my mom and dad interactions with any UI, it seems to me they don't really read what that menu is about, they just use "muscle memory" to navigate it. So I expect a drop in efficiency until that memory is rebuilt.
Not only is it unsecured root access to your computer, it also adds a thousand layers of "security" (which will break on every update) to pretend that it's safe.
It's not only that, all this complexity leads to stuff breaking with every update. For a tool that's supposed to just answer chat messages it's impressive how crappy and unstable this software feels. I have it running since the release and my primary usecase seems to be to use the CLI to fix whatever broke this week.
Would not recommend running this, it's the antithesis of the Linux philosophy.
I have many concerns about the rise of populism in Europe but the (few/very few) good things that might come out of this is that there will finally be (enough?) pressure on the EU to reform.
Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter.
It’s more likely that the rise of the populist right (or left, like Melenchon) will lead to the destruction of the EU. They do not want reform, they want to go back to the fifties.
This is a real risk but from the embers of the (current) systems a better one could still rise.
Despite all the big talk from the likes of Wilders and Meloni, the moment that they're in government they do seem to be very willing to cooperate with their European peers.
EU and EC have been made as a resistant to populism by design, the end result is that we citizens can't change anything, and decisions are arbitrarily made behind closed doors.
The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues.
I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens.
Not that they don't disregard some of my opinions too, but I am quite worried about the opinions of some of the other citizens.
The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy.
Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.
Or maybe it's impossible to satisfy desires of such culturally diverse populace as EU citizens.
Which makes current model, and federated model impossible and/or prone to crumbling.
Problems of Germany are different than one Spain faces, and France, and Poland etc.
Which why originally much more was decided by consensus and if there is no consensus then simply every country can do their own way. I feel like a lot of things actually reached a local optimum in the 90s in our approach to improve things, we left that.
I would agree (not an Icelandic citizen but an EU citizen).
Europe (and Iceland) have many, many challenges and we absolutely need something like the EU to effectively tackle them.
The EU has tremendous potential but a lot of it's current focus seems to be misguided at best, downright evil at its worst.
Let's see if it the EU can tackle the energy and immigration crisis (I'm pro immigration but even I have to admit that the current system is deeply flawed and unsustainable), if it does it would win my respect. Bonus points if we do finally get a (real) single (capital) market.
The EU is definitely better than not having an EU but is absolutely not living up to its full potential as is evident by the low trust in it and the lackluster economic growth of the EU.
Which is highly driven by nationalism, and the fixation of every country to impose their regulations instead of going towards a common set of rules.
Because when it comes to "hey, what if we make the market actually more open, and easier for Spanish companies to sell in Hungary and viceversa?", we get into:
"nope, in Hungary you need to abide to Hungarian laws for shipping. In Hungary you need to abide to Hungarian safety laws. In Hungary you need to register this products with all of this documentation and yada, yada, yada".
You can swap Spain and Hungary with most other countries.
And the same applies at every level. Data and privacy protection? Nope, each country overrides with its own rules.
Sadly, it's very easy for politicians to play the "EU won't tell us how to do X" card, and at the same time "EU don't work!".
Uneducated fools, especially those not involved with scaling across EU, whether with physical goods or services simply don't understand those things.
It's mini-Brexit-like nonsense all of the time.
I see it very vividly as a Polish Italian seeing the same non sense narratives in both countries, while working for a German company that attempts to scale across borders.
By the way:
1. trust in EU is generally higher than distrust.
2. economic growth is lackluster in most of the world. Sadly EU has always been fixated on being an export economy so it now pays especially high both energy prices and better competition. It should've been focused instead of creating a strong internal market instead.
I don’t think that’s the right way to think about LLM ‘knowledge’. They don’t have absolute recall of everything in the training set. They have been trained so that they have weights that can predict what those books might say - that is, if they read them they would find the contents unsurprising. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be helpful to pull relevant passages of text directly into context for a particular task.
Does it really matter? What about including all relevant and up-to-date literature as skills for local models? I have no experience with this but I am pretty sure someone has already thought about it.
Given that it's not possible to buy the USD 100,- or USD 200,- subscription on a team/corporate plan this effectively introduces the 5h limits again for all corporate users.
At this point the 40 USD/120 USD Cursor Team subscription suddenly becomes a lot more attractive. You'll get more generous limits and a single monthly limit.
I'm curious about why you see ads, I didn't think anyone on HN does, nowadays. Given how easy it is to install uBlock, is it a conscious decision to browse adfully?
LinkedIn has a couple of useful features: Getting in touch with former coworkers; seeing who might know the hiring manager for a position you're applying for; uh... that's about it.
The rest is garbage but I guess is how they make their money.
Some of us don’t use an adblocker because we are aware that ads are how most websites get paid for on the internet. I pay for sites I care to support, but for something like LinkedIn, I’d rather have their monetization scheme push me away from any usage than block the ads and make the site slightly more palatable.
Why not? I owe my life to ads. Thank you Google AdSense and Yahoo! Ads for the hundreds of thousands of dollars you paid for 16 year old Rob to slap them on his MySpace layout website in 2006 so Timmy could put a glitter graphic of Stone Cold Steve Austin on his banner.
The rare instance I see them is when needing to use the actual Facebook phone app, and then I see the ads targeted at me. Basically wall to wall ads for Cursor, Anthropic, and Littlebird.
- The provider has a massive amount of (unused) hardware. Google or Cursor seem most likely
- The model is extremely efficient, beyond anything we've seen so far
- Whomever made the model has improved the cache efficiency in such a way that it's very cheap to serve. See e.g Deepseeks or Xiaomi caching (pre-price increase)
It also seems to be more willing to just do whatever you ask of it. My favourite benchmark for this is to ask it to download a rom for an old game, that I own. Legal in my juristiction but the US models (except Grok) have a tendency to refuse it.
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