Last week I praised Claude code, especially the cli here on slashdot. I still think it's currently the best but it's also the most expensive. But the competition is getting a lot better (and cheaper). I've been using the opencode cli lately with several models: Kimi K2.5, Kimi K2.5 Thinking, OpenCode's Big Pickle, and Qwen3 Coder Next. Using them through OpenCode's Zen service and also OpenRouter (for Qwen3 Coder Next), they are all about 1/2 the cost of Claude's models, maybe less.

Of those I feel that Kimi K2.5 Thinking is probably the closest to Claude Opus 4.6. The rest are quite good at most things, and Qwen3 Coder Next is very fast. Qwen3 Coder Next also has the potential to run on "reasonable" local hardware.

Apparently drones flown by drug cartels actually are an increasing problem at the border. I'm not clear if they are just surveilling border patrol positions or actually carrying drugs.

Very interesting. So Fedora and Ubuntu install fine then?

Okay but I installed 22.1 for someone a while back (that was the latest). They do the updates when prompted. They are still on 22.1 now, though 22.3 has been out for a quite a while. And further Mint devs apparently intend to enable users to stay on 22.1 until EOL, despite 22.3 or whatever they end up, getting security updates, but not the other upgrades that come with 22.3.

No I'm not referring to that, although that's a good point when it comes to mint developer burnout.

I was referring to 22.1, 22.2, 22.3, which are all maintained individually until EOL as far as I know, even if the primary download is always the latest version. And it requires a manual step to upgrade between 22.2 and 22.3. Google tells me this is by design and that mint's creators want to enable people to stay on 22.1 or whatever until EOL if that's what works for them. Perhaps this idea is part of what leads to their burnout.

Very true. I have plenty of CDs that are highly compressed with very little dynamic range. Wall of loud sound. LPs, despite their crackles tend to have pretty good dynamic range.

Wow in-place updates between point releases used to require a complete reinstall? Yikes.

Sorry I mispoke. "dnf update" not "upgrade." As for "upgrade" I assume that's a full OS replacement. dnf update just updates packages[1] like apt does on debian and ubuntu. Always the latest point version. AlmaLinux 9.7, etc. On Mint though apt sticks within the minor version near as I can tell unless you change the apt.sources.

I guess I just don't see the logic in the way Mint does it. I think they'll have to abandon this practice of supporting older point releases going forward as it just burdens developers who are already maintaining the older LTS versions of Mint anyway (such as 20). While we're on the topic of Mint being trouble.

[1] full system upgrades are possible with dnf... I've used dnf to upgrade continuously from Fedora 37 through 43, usually skipping one or two versions at a time, and using ZFS on root. Yes I like to live dangerously. I do it in single user mode usually, and always ZFS snapshot the root file system.

Well go to mint's website. They have no less than four versions of 22 listed. Why? Why should you need backups to go from 22.1 to 22.2 to 22.3? Why do I need an "in-place upgrade?" Doesn't make any sense to me. As far as I know the last computer I set up for someone with Mint 22 is probably still on 22.1 or whatever it was when I set it up. I don't understand at all the need for a manual step to bump between minor versions. Ubuntu has no such thing. And the RHEL world where I spent my professional career does have minor versions but a simple dnf upgrade always means you've got the latest point version without any scary warnings. Like I said I've never understood why Mint does it this way.

I never did figure out Mint's versions. Like what's the difference between 22.1, 22.2, and 22.3? Seems like all three versions exist at once and most updates are within the minor point version. Last I had Mint it wasn't an automatic one-click upgrade between, for example, 22.2 and 22.3? That kind of gave me pause when installing it for people.

My laptop is in dire need of a refresh (Ubuntu 20.04 believe it or not). I'm thinking of going back to LMDE instead of regular Mint. Although would be nice to have ZFS support, so maybe Mint 22.3?

You were there this last year? Achieving a 95% reduction in air pollution over 2013 is pretty darn good and it's mostly from the government pushing EVs. Downside is the poor rural areas freeze in the winter because they can no longer get coal and the CCP doesn't care.

Not that many years agon air pollution was horrible in Beijing. Not so much anymore. Air quality is quite good I am led to believe. Electric scooters displacing dirty two strokes certainly helped a lot.

Same story in a few other major cities in China.

Sure as soon as a developer at Anthropic uses a couple dozen parallel Claude agents and burns through $50k of compute time. No problem. It's the future.

Sure. A less popular browser like Firefox.I get blocked for no reason by cloudfare at least once a week.

It's all about gate keeping. More and more of the internet is behind cloudfare, so if cloudfare blocks you from accessing a site, there's very little you or the site you're trying to access can do. There's no one at cloudfare that a mere browser user can talk to to find out why they were blocked. So between the big search engines and cloudfare, they essentially control the modern internet. Cloudfare solves one of the problems of internet vandalism by absorbing and blocking DDOS attacks, but it comes a pretty high cost.

Possibly, but it definitely means he hasn't spent any significant time with it. Pay $20 and try it for a month and then post about how awful it is.

My initial experience with Claude wasn't great. In fact it completely failed at the task I gave it. But later on I began to use it in more specific ways---here's my code, can you modify it to do foo, and add a feature bar---and it really began to work for me. Was pretty incredible actually. And I began to use it to teach me and explain parts of the API to me, complete with examples based on the code I already had. And it's pretty good at helping you quickly get up to speed with code you've never seen before. Plan mode is also a key to success. I now use Claude regularly as an assistant.

Claude is also a pretty good debugging tool. Over the past couple of months I've run into problems with my code that I banged my head against for hours, knowing it was probably something simple and obvious but I couldn't see it. Finally I told Claude what was happening and had it analyze the code and more often than not it found the problem with my logic, even pointing out something in another part of the program that I hadn't considered that caused the problem.

I do very little vibe coding, but I have used Claude to add features I needed to an OBS plugin. I also used it to modify a flutter app to add complementary features to communicate with my modified OBS plugin. I have no experience in flutter or dart. But I did review the changes Claude made and they were quite reasonable.

Claude isn't perfect or all that creative, but it still is a game changer. 90% of what programmers do isn't novel or ground breaking, but just putting together existing parts in new ways that fill a need. Claude is very good at assisting in this. The only downside is Claude is fairly expensive. I can only use it for about 1 hour before I hit my 5 hour limit. And if I was to use it heavily the Pro account wouldn't last very long in a week. $100 for the max account is pretty expensive.

I'm looking at other models that are improving all the time. OpenCode cli (not too bad) with Kimi 2.5 Thinking, Qwen3. Not quite as good as Claude but still darn useful. I'm tempted to get hardware to run Qwen3 locally. Probably AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395-based system. Seems a bit ludicrous how expensive they are for what is basically gaming laptop hardware. And I expect the price to jump in the next month, maybe even double by the end of the year.