> Also M2 batteries are about maybe halfway done already unless the refurb replaced the battery.

My mom still uses a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. The battery requires servicing, but she's unaware and still using it just fine. I asked her to go to the Apple Store and get the battery replaced along with her iPhone 12 Pro Max battery, and she'll easily get 10 years out of each device.

> why Apple has nearly wiped it off their site all together, seriously go check out apple.com, not a single mention of Apple Intelligence.

TBF, the reason Apple removed "Apple Intelligence" is that they failed to deliver on its promises.

So much so that they just settled their false advertising in a class action lawsuit for $250M:

https://archive.is/efWkb

Also, P.S: Not to say that clothing/shopping is the primary use case, but I know plenty of women who use AI for clothes/fashion/interior decoration etc related tasks.

What feels already like old history is that Apple made a generous deal to OpenAI based on the premise that their AI could do the claims.

Apple engineers spend months trying to prompt engineer their way, thinking the prompter is at fault if the soon to be AGI system diverged. Some of these instructions were trending out there, as reveals of how naive Apple was at the time. They could be traced from the device's logs so not so much of a leak: Don't hallucinate, strictly follow instructions, followed by all sort of refined predicates, appended as if an LLM had reason

Then Apple released a paper to warn everyone (well, a few, and to save face) that we are getting fooled.

https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinkin...

In case Apple is a biased anti AI propagandist, here is a similar, more recent research paper from MIT and co:

https://arxiv.org/html/2603.24755v1

its really hard to read that first apple paper in context when it doesnt have a date on it. I know research papers are meant to be timeless artifacts, but when it says things like "Recent generations of frontier language models... " "frontier LRMs" etc i'd like to know what they were testing on and what the zeitgiest was around that time.

Please put a date on your research papers! I could figure it out roughly by looking at the "last accessed" date on their citations - 2025-05-15.

The specific models are specified. E.g gpt version's, deepseek R1 etc. but I agree that's terrible practice not to timestamp a paper aside the authors.

I've been running qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q4_K_M (22.3GB) via Ollama.

Is the 20.9GB GGUF version better or negligible in comparison?

> Which open weights model?

Yes, I'm also wondering!

Currently I'm testing out gemma4:26b and qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q4_K_M locally on my M2 Max Macbook Pro.

Not the fastest, but reasonable.

However, I am also interested in getting as close as possible in performance to Opus 4.6 while minimizing my costs.

> I am also interested in getting as close as possible in performance to Opus 4.6 while minimizing my costs.

Aren’t we all? ;)

Remember, Open Weight doesn't necc. mean local. They are probably running on a larger version online, closer to Claude specs. (lol and probably distilled from Claude)

Gemma4 on an m2? That sounds promising. I have an m3 max, going to try that today

Who remembers BlackICE Defender tho?

https://archive.org/details/BlackICE_Defender

I was there for SoftICE and BlackICE.

Simpler times.

I remember switching from Win95 to NT4.0 just to be able to use SoftICE properly under Windows without all the stability problems, it was an incredible time! SoftICE felt like absolute wizardry at the time.

I'm on regular Android but thinking about switching to GrapheneOS for my next phone.

This is what I do... I use Mullvad VPN with NextDNS.io for DNS.

> https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

I get "Our tests indicate that you have some protection against Web tracking, but it has some gaps." but nothing of too much importance I think.

I use a VPN and NextDNS.io.

The real test is whether the site believes you to be unique, which is listed separately. It reports me as "Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking.", but I'm still uniquely identifiable.

> I know it's a cliché, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

"Kindly let me help you, or you will drown, said the monkey as it put the fish safely up a tree"

—Alan Watts

Wrong parent?

> Beginning to wonder if convenience is the root of all evil, and not money.

Self-deception is actually the root of all evil, not money nor convenience.