Maybe so but AMD's AI Max 395 processor can, with 128 GB of combined memory (in a $3000 glorified laptop), do a decent job of running OpenCode with a variant of the Qwen3 coding model. Not quite like Claude Opus, but almost as good as Sonnet, from my testing (accessing it via OpenRouter). A desktop version with 256GB of RAM would make a pretty capable coding agent machine, if it were only affordable to mere mortals, which it won't be.

15% growth overnight is impressive, but a) how much of that is really going to stay long term, and how much is just individuals' curiosity buying a few months worth and b) what percent of their business is suddenly lost to all the DoD contractors and subcontractors? I suspect they've lost far more than they've gained. I commend them for sticking by their principles, if only temporarily, and even if I might disagree with their reasoning.

I take no joy in it. It's amazing to me how quickly constitutional democracy is dying in the US, and how few of my American friends actually care (they honestly believe that the next guy will be a sane Republican and everything will go back to normal). If it was only their own lives they were ruining I might not care so much, but this is extending now far beyond the United States. The same forces that are tearing down the institutions of democracy and making a mockery of everything the founding fathers stood for are also marshaling in other countries including mine.

15% jump in private subscriptions probably doesn't come close to replacing the number of subscriptions that DoD contractors have that they must now cancel.

It's the trump MO for the last year. Do whatever he and his cronies want, using tortured legal reasoning and then when the courts eventually tell him no, the damage is done and it becomes part of the message. "The activist judges won't let me do what you asked me to do."

Crazy to see the US becoming more like Putin's Russia every day. I'm not sure anyone is falling out of balconies yet, but there have definitely been suicides.

Does Claude Pro now work for the Excel plugin? Last I tried it said I needed a Max or Enterprise subscription.

That's a really good question. Why does Trump and MAGA think in those terms?

That's nothing. Just wait until you see the price tag for the 128 GB version. Currently the Mac Pro with M4 and 128 GB RAM is about $11k.

Sure I'm strongly in favor of that. If Alberta had asked in their referendum if people wanted to keep MST year round, it would have passed in a landslide. but I, like most Albertans who voted, am strongly opposed to DST all the time, though. In fact I prefer the time the status quo to being on DST all winter.

China uses one time zone for the entire country. It is of course Beijing time. Interestingly such a policy solves absolutely none of the problems that people have with time zones in general. Because the time zone is so divorced from the actual solar time in far away regions, instead of working 9 to 5 (haha right), you'd be working 7 to to 3. This has all of the same problems as time zones with none of the benefits. I think they do it because it's part of how the CCP maintains this myth of a homogeneous ethnic Chinese society.

No Saskatchewan certainly has not being doing permanent daylight savings time since 1972. Central standard time, yes. Central daylight, no.

I am all for ending the time changing, but I'm strongly opposed to daylight savings time year round. Stick with standard time.

DST has never had anything to do with farmers. I'm not sure where that myth got started. I first originated during WWI as a way to save fuel, although I don't think it ever saved anything.

I'm not sure who these normal people are because the US market is dominated by large, expensive, luxury SUVs and they sell really, really well.

I'm sure there are people who just want to go from A to B in a cheap and efficient way, but the market doesn't believe they matter (nor does the government).

Well it's worked out pretty well up until now if we're honest. The "big three" US automakers pretty much abandoned the affordable car market a decade ago and focus exclusively on luxury vehicles for the upper middle class. And that's served them quite well, making money hand over fist. The government EV mandate forced them to spend money on essentially affordable cars (and EVs) which has really hurt them because they can't and don't want to compete for that market in the first place.

Perhaps you should try racing off the green light with an EV. You'll be surprised. Even the smallest EVs (at least the ones available in north America) will out-accelerate your stick shift v-8 sports car. And recoup 90% of the energy at the next red light. There's no real lag in actuality. It's mostly an illusion from continuous, compounding acceleration. Human perception is interesting. It's obviously completely unnecessary and wasteful to need 1000 hp in a regular car, but people seem to like it (even if their tires don't).