The time difference between today and Hackers is the same as when the film was released and the year 1964. That's the year films like Dr. Strangelove, Goldfinger and A Fistful of Dollars was released.
Oh wow. I did the same thing a couple of weeks ago. The server hadn't been updated since ~2015, running a blog on Ghost from that time with node 0.10 installed.
I was a bit rougher though: I just took a backup, then let my Hermes agent (Gemini 3.1 Pro) loose on it. It upgraded everything that needed to be upgraded, patched what needed to be patched, then proceeded to migrate everything to it's most recent equivalents. After that, a fair bit of server hardening was carried out followed by debloating of unused services. Likely would have continued to procrastinate doing this if it wasn't for AI support.
"Foreigners like me care more about global stability" yes so continue to rain bombs on the middle east, accept their poorest as refugees, and continue to support Israeli expansion. All of this leads to global stability. It's definitely not the reason behind global instability.
European takes are usually the funniest. It's literal racism (as in, one race is better than the other) but it's packaged in such a ridiculous way that you somehow suggest that it's doing others a favor.
I was out on the streets protesting the 2003 GWB Iraq invasion war. It was mostly obvious before the invasion that the cause was bogus. It was later proven to be bogus.
And you seem to have this way of boiling literally everything down to some sort of unspecified racism.
> I was out on the streets protesting the 2003 GWB Iraq invasion war
You mean the war that all the European countries participated in? How about Libya? Syria? or the various conflicts in Israel? Surely you also opposed what's happening in Yemen right?
> And you seem to have this way of boiling literally everything down to some sort of unspecified racism
Suggesting 'we are trustworthy to have nuclear capabilities, but those other people are not' is racist, yeah. Considering the most crackpot nations responsible for most of the global instability and suffering over the last few centuries are also the ones who seem to think they can decide who can and can't utilize energy sources. Let me know when you show similar concern about Israel.
The only ones that didn’t are France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Greece. The rest all did. This cohort changed its mind with Libya and Syria not too long after though.
> The US famously renamed French fries in protest.
The same French who very famously made Israel the nuclear-capable pariah state that it is today.
Oh come on, only Poland and the UK joined in the original invasion. The later post invasion involvement by some NATO members was also minimal, not to mention all the non NATO countries that had no involvement. Why make such absurdly fallacious and easily disproven statements?
Italy, Spain, Denmark, The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Norway, Portugal. Which have I missed?
Even Germany is a dumb one, really. The only reason why they didn't participate is because they legally weren't allowed to. What they did do, however, is deploy huge numbers to various US bases around the world so that the US can have a larger deployment.
The only absurdity here is the idea that the European retconning is believable.
Yes it is I who am doing the retconning not the person claiming that tiny contingents of mostly non combat troops sent to Iraq after Bush declared "mission accomplished" in an effort to help clean up Americas mess and with a UN mandate constitutes involvement in the war by all European countries.
Competition is bad? Who cares - let the big players subsidize and compete between each other. That's what we want. We want strong models at a low price, and we'll hype up whoever is doing it.
Simultaneously, we also hype up the open models that are catching up. That are significantly more discounted, that also put pressure on the big players and keep them in check.
People aren't falling for PR; people are encouraging the PR to put pressure on the competition. It's not that hard.
Interesting to see your observation where I have observed the opposite: posts that share big news about open-weight local models have many upvoted comments arguing local models shouldn’t be taken seriously and promoting the SOTA commercial models as the only viable options for serious developers.
Here and on AI tech subreddits (ones that aren’t specifically about local or FOSS) seem to have this dynamic, to the degree I’ve suspected astroturfing.
So it’s refreshing to see maybe that’s just a coincidence or confirmation bias on my end.
Both can be true at the same time. I currently wouldn't waste my time with open models for almost all use cases, but they're crucial from a data privacy and competitive perspective, and I can't wait for them to catch up enough to be as useful as the current frontier models.
I've found qwen3 to be very usable on my local machine (a Framework Desktop with 128gb RAM). I doubt it could handle the complex tasks I throw at Claude Opus at work, but it's more than capable of doing a surprising number of tasks, with good performance.
I have an Asus GX10 that I run Qwen3.5 122B A10B on, and I use it for coding through the Pi coding agent (and my own); I have to put more work in to ensure that the model verifies what it does, but if you do so its quite capable.
It makes using my Claude Pro sub actually feasible: write a plan with it, pick it up with my local model and implement it, now I'm not running out of tokens haha.
Is it worth it from a unit economics POV? Probably not, but I bought this thing to learn how to deploy and serve models with vLLM and SGLang, and to learn how to fine tune and train models with the 128GB of memory it gets to work with. Adding up two 40GB vectors in CUDA was quite fun :)
I also use Z.ai's Lite plan for the moment for GLM-5.1 which is very capable in my experience.
I was using Alibaba's Lite Coding Plan... but they killed it entirely after two months haha, too cheap obviously. Or all the *claw users killed it.
GLM 5.1 is extremely good, and ridiculously cheap on their coding plan. Its far better than Sonnet, and a fifth of the cost at API rates. I don't know if the American providers can compete long-term; what good is it to be more innovative it only buys them a six month lead andthey can't build the data center capacity fast enough for demand? Chinese providers have a huge advantage in electrical grid capacity.
True but Z.ai also just silently raised the price, and the entire Chinese frontier set is having to make profit now... hence Alibaba killing the Lite plan and not letting people sign up to their Pro one either; and why MiniMax has their non-commercial license, etc. etc.
So I agree with you, its better than Sonnet but way cheaper. I do wonder how long that will last though
The Framework Desktop has a Ryzen 395 chip that is able to allocate memory to either the CPU or GPU. I've been able to allocate 100+gb to the GPU, so even big models can run there.
Most recently I used it to develop a script to help me manage email. The implementation included interacting with my provider over JMAP, taking various actions, and implementing an automated unsubscribe flow. It was greenfield, and quite trivial compared to the codebases I normally interact with, but it was definitely useful.
That's great. Ostensibly my system could also allocate some of the 32 GB of system memory to argument the 12 GB VRAM, but I've not been able to get it to load models over 20B. I should spend some more time on it.
Local isn't viable yet on an economic basis, API costs are so low that you're better off taking advantage of the bonanza. As local models become more performant, so too will the ability of providers via Openrouter be able to offer them cheaper than your likely payoff period for a $4K Mac Studio 128GB. e.g Gemma 4 31B is impressive, but it costs practically nothing via Openrouter. Given that there are a ton of providers for open models, I doubt there's any subsidy going on because the providers are faceless and interchangeable.
At least, that's my theory.
The big advantages of local on a business level are:
- Freezing your model's exact settings once you've locked in some kind of workflow that works just fine.
- Guarding against insane token usage from LLMs who have been told to never stop until they figure out the solution OR setting up an LLM run incorrectly. (The last one happened to me with Gemini 3.1 Pro)
- PII or some need for on-premise only LLMs.
> Interesting to see your observation where I have observed the opposite: posts that share big news about open-weight local models have many upvoted comments arguing local models shouldn’t be taken seriously and promoting the SOTA commercial models as the only viable options for serious developers.
When I argue this, my point is that FOSS shouldn't target the desktop with open weights - it should target H200s. Really big parameter models with big VRAM requirements.
Those can always be distilled down, but you can't really go the other way.
I've invested significant time into getting open models to work, and investigating what works well.
The TL;DR is that unless you are doing it as a hobby or working in an environment where none of the data privacy options supported by Anthropic/OpenAI (including running on Azure/Bedrock with ZDR) work for you then it's not worth it.
The best open models are around the Sonnet 4.6 level. That's excellent, but the level of tasks you can give to GPT 5.4 or Opus 4.6 is just so much higher it doesn't compare (and Opus 4.7 seems noticeably better in my few hours of testing too).
It shows for every task they test closed models do the best. The closest and open model gets is Minmax 2.7 on issue resolution where it's ~1% worse than the leaders.
That matches my experience - fine for small problems, but well behind has the task gets bigger.
> Competition is bad? Who cares - let the big players subsidize and compete between each other.
Subsidizing is the opposite of competing. It's literally the practice of underpricing your product to box out competition. If everyone was competing on a level playing field they would all price their products above cost.
All these tech oligarch asshat companies need to be regulated to hell and back.
The moat was already too large for smaller players. Let them subsidize. Take from investors and give to us buying me time to beef up my local stack to run local models.
For many things now you need to go local and in the future if you want any privacy you'll need to go local.
No, the medium and small players are the Mistals, DeepSeek and H Company of the world, with their own models using quirky optimisation techniques to be able to compete.
Yes, and also pushed for by the Israeli and US governments. Tech investment is part of the Abraham Accords - i.e this is part of the prerequisites for normalization of ties with Israel.
> Renewables, particularly wind and solar, are the path forward
You missed the asterisk where endless dependence on coal, gas or oil is a non-optional requirement.
Who the hell cares if nuclear is expensive to get going? Plenty of things cost a lot - healthcare, social spending, roads, all of it. Those war machines that exist to prop up the fossil fuel industry cost a pretty penny as well. It's only when we get to nuclear that the talking point becomes cost. If governments don't even want to provide energy independence then perhaps they should end the slavery they call income tax.
> The only things that ever comes up in elections about energy is the price.
Yeah, because solar and wind are both expensive and unreliable, and fossil fuels are both expensive and destructive. The point is that the price isn't worth it.
> There is still no long time storage for the nuclear waste.
This is a non-argument, just like it was last year.
> And even if we ignore that. People are worried about drones flying over airports. Wait when drones fly over nuclear power plants.
2026, new argument dropped. Almost as much of a non-argument as the one above.
> Talking about energy independence, what do you think where the nuclear fuel comes from?
> BTW if you don’t want to pay the membership fee of a country aka taxes, you’re free to leave
The membership fee isn't giving up your money, the membership fee is participating in improving the country. It's this backwards ethos that has most European countries in the toilet.
Ah yes, the sun shines at night and wind comes from trees. If you can name a country using solar and wind that isn't dependent on fossil fuels I'd love to hear about it.
I see. You make a claim, and your argument is "you haven't proved me wrong". Classic crank behavior.
You then back it up with the transparently nonsensical argument that "the sun doesn't shine at night." Batteries exist, you know.
You made the claim renewables require indefinite use of fossil fuels, you show your reasoning. An argument that ignores the existence of storage is not an argument, it's insulting verbal vomit.
No, batteries do not exist. Just like solar technology wasn't developed to a point where it was barely useful until relatively recently, battery technology is no where near what is required for any national grid. That's why there is a fundamental dependence on fossil fuels, and why there isn't a single country who can depend on wind or solar. Because there is no way to store that energy.
The only countries with a successful secondary fallback are those who use geothermal or hydro, with the latter being opposed by the same environmentalists who oppose nuclear. Not every country has geothermal energy, nor do most countries have hydro, and most of the countries with either of those don't have enough to power their grid. The only ones that do have no real manufacturing. The issue is front and center: the ones that need it the most are the ones who are unable to utilize it.
In the interim, until meaningful storage exists, it's the 'environmentalist' anti-nuclear crowd who have plunged the world into chaos and contributed to endless destruction of the planet. The world is still using fossil fuels because the world has no alternative other than nuclear.
There needs to be a stepping stone - and that stepping stone is nuclear. Until then, the stepping stone is oil, coal and gas. Which means Middle Eastern wars, environmental destruction and fracking. Dealing with whatever fallout that comes from nuclear, with room for those who can't support nuclear to use fossil fuels, while the rest of the world figures out a real way forward on how to collect and store solar and wind is the only path forward.
The icons in the menu bars are rough, the spacing isn’t great and the inconsistent window borders aren’t great.
I’m not that opinionated though - I don’t really care that much. But the part that sucked was installing it on a 2020 intel MacBook Pro. It basically made it unusable to the point of being ready to throw it out. Going back from Tahoe breathed so much life into it that it was fairly upsetting to see Apple release it. It reminded me of early iPhone updates that would basically brick older devices due to the performance impact.
To be fair MacOS (and all apple software) is so heavily optimized for their current hardware. It is unfortunate that Intel macs are left behind, but my 2019 intel mac was capital-S Struggling with macos already in 2022. The M-series was such a leap forward. It’s a server under my desk now.
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