Impressive systems write-up. A question: if Composer is an RL finetune on an open model, why keep weights closed? The edge from a slightly better checkpoint erodes quickly in this market, it's not a durable advantage. Composer protects Cursor's margins from being squeezed by the big AI labs, but that is true whether the weights are open or closed, and I think Cursor would have more lasting benefit by generating developer goodwill than from a narrow, short-lived advantage. But, that's just my opinion. I personally find it hard to get excited about yet-another proprietary model. GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5 are around when I need one of those, but I think the future is open.
One problem from Apple’s perspective is that it continues to cost them money to maintain both the translation layer and the x86_64 frameworks on an ongoing basis.
I mean, is it really an excessive burden to keep a "too popular" feature alive for users? Features users pay for cost money to build and maintain. These aren't unique situations.
It would be different if the feature wasn't popular at all but that doesn't seem to be the case.
It doesn't seem especially popular to me, so... citation needed? It's not being discontinued for being too popular, that's for sure.
Apple doesn't want to maintain it forever, and a handful of legacy apps will never be bothered to update to native Apple Silicon support unless it means losing access to their user base. Apple has given them plenty of time to do it naturally, and now Apple is giving them a stronger reason and a couple more years to get it done. Apple is not randomly discontinuing it with no notice; two years is plenty of time for maintained software to get over the finish line.
At the end of the day, Apple doesn't want to pay to maintain this compatibility layer for forever, and Apple's customers will have a better experience in the long run if the software they are using is not running through an extra translation layer.
There will always be some niche users who want this feature to remain forever, but it's clearly not a significant enough percentage of users for Apple to be worried about that, or else Apple would maintain it forever.
Alright, so now the easy thing is done, now how do you actually manage them, keep them running and do introspection without resorting to SSH or even remote desktop?
How do you manage any EC2 instance “without resorting to SSH”? Even for Linux EC2 instances, the right answer is often tools like Ansible, which do still use SSH under the hood.
You usually provision them via images, that they then either install from or boot from directly. Not to mention there are countless of infrastructure software to run that works for at least Linux, sometimes Windows and seldom even macOS.
I specifically mentioned the imaging capability of EBS for Mac, which you dismissed as the easy part. Now you’re claiming that is the main thing? Well, good news!
And yes, Ansible (among other tools) can be used to manage macOS.
This discussion doesn’t seem productive. You have a preconceived view point, and you’re not actually considering the problem or even doing 5 seconds of googling.
Managing a Mac fleet on AWS isn’t a real problem. If Apple’s OCR framework were significantly above the competition, it could easily be used. I would like to see benchmarks of it, as the other person was also asking for.
I keep hoping Postgres will one day have the ability to mark a timestamp column as an expiry column. It would be useful for all kinds of things beyond caching, including session tokens, feature flags, background jobs, rate limiting, delayed deletion (as a variant of soft deletion), etc.
It seems like the autovacuum could take care of these expired rows during its periodic vacuum. The query planner could automatically add a condition that excludes any expired rows, preventing expired rows from being visible before autovacuum cleans them up.
One could use a trigger for this. All we need is to setup a trigger that would delete all expired records looking at some timestamp column on update. That would eat up some latency but as was said, most projects would find it good enough anyway.
I mean, I can kinda roll through a lot of iterations with this model without worrying about any AI limits.
Y'know with all these latest models, the lines are kinda blurry actually. The definition of "good" is being foggy.
So it might as well be free as the definition of money is clear as crystal.
I also used it for some time to test on something really really niche like building telegram bot in cloudflare workers and grok-4-fast was kinda decent on that for the most part actually. So that's nice.
There are enough vendors that it's difficult for any one vendor to charge too much per token. There are also a lot of really good open-weight models that your business could self-host if the hosted vendors all conspire to charge too much per token. (I believe it's only economical to self-host big models if you're using a lot of tokens, so there is a breakeven point.)
Outside air isn’t a panacea. There is often plenty of pollution right outside your window unless you live on an idyllic beachfront property. The humidity level outside is also rarely what you want in your home, whether it is too high or too low.
Much better than cracking a window is the use of ERVs (energy recovery ventilators) and air filters on the incoming air.
An ERV is a fairly simple device that exchanges air with the outside while mitigating the loss of energy and humidity.
Any modern home build likely has an ERV as part of the design, but it’s not like they can’t be retrofitted, and I’ve even seen some DIY-friendly window unit ERVs (but I’ve never heard if those are any good).
> Any modern home build likely has an ERV as part of the design
Sounds very country dependent. I really doubt it's true here in the UK. But then, UK housing is just garbage all around unless you build something custom and put a lot of money and attention into it.
Yes, I meant in the US. Apologies for not making that clearer. I don't think ERVs are uncommon in new construction outside the US, but I don't know as much about that.
I installed an ERV system in my very small and very old home. It was quite a bit of work, but nothing terribly difficult. Finding a suitable spot for the ERV unit was the biggest challenge: it is quite bulky and not silent, and you need to be able to route ducting to it from all over the house.
It's easily the favourite thing in my home. It filters the outdoor air, reducing pollen and mosquitoes. It keeps out excess moisture in summer. I don't have to open a window when it's cold. It automatically goes into overdrive after a particularly steamy shower. It's great.
Could you share which one you installed and under which circumstances? I'm running two mobile HEPA air filters; not very efficient nor very effective I'd assume.
I have a Zehnder ComfoAir Q350. Overall I'm very happy with it. My only regret is not having installed the optional additional filter box. Due to the limited space and the place I've installde it, it's not feasible to retrofit it.
I live in an apartment in Washington DC. Opening a window reduces CO2 and VOCs. An ERV is great if you can afford it, but cracking the window is still quite reasonable.
CO2 and VOCs, but what about PM2.5 and PM10? What about pollen? What about humidity control?
Cracking a window is also costly, since it directly raises your heating and cooling bills. It's just an "invisible" cost that's easy for some people to ignore since it's hard to directly measure. An ERV pays for itself over time, so it's more a question of whether you can afford to just crack a window?
Living in an apartment makes this difficult because your landlord may not let you improve this situation, but just ignoring the cost of opening a window doesn't make the cost go away.
I live in the DC area and whenever I hear people say "just crack a window" I think, that brings in all of the pollen I'm allergic to in all seasons except winter, plus humidity and 95 f degree heat if it's the summer... I' be been looking into getting an ERV for a while.
The humidity and temperature are rough. Some months I can't open the window at all. This month has been pretty good though, huh? At least for the temperature and humidity.
I feel you about the pollen. I use a Blueair filter, and that keeps PM 2.5 and PM 10 in check.
Don't leave your windows open all the time. Open them for 5-10 minutes at least once a day. Heating air is cheap, it's heating all the other mass in your home that's hard, so don't let it cool down.
If you live somewhere uninhabitable like Texas, change heating for cooling.
The GP comment is technically correct, if somewhat incomplete. A 40 m3 room (about 14’x14’x8’) has about 50kg of air in it; that’s only ~300 Wh to heat every molecule of it by an entire 20C. The thermal mass of the other things is orders of magnitude larger.
The reason that I consider that explanation somewhat incomplete is the behavior of the air and the embodied energy. Imagine it’s winter, the exterior air is quite dry, and you open a window. You will easily lose a large amount of moisture, making the air uncomfortably dry. So you turn on a humidifier, but that will cool the room further with the evaporation of water. You also have to consider convective heat transfer. The fast-moving air is quite good at transferring heat to the outdoors. So, even if you don’t care about humidity, you will lose a lot of heat through convection.
But yes, strictly speaking, the thermal mass of the air is very low in most structures and situations.
I've got one laptop case where it is quite spongy with panels like neoprene and some stretch fabric. When I ride about half an hour with a driver who is not smoking but had smoked in the vehicle (supposed to be always with the windows open out of courtesy to the other drivers), the next morning when I pick up the laptop it smells like tobacco and it takes a few days to go away. This doesn't happen with the backpack which is not built like that.
You can also take the domestic calculations further.
If you have 50 kilos of dead weight for instance, whether it's a set of workout weights or a piece of furniture, and it's all a stable 10 degrees C through and through, it's going to take 50 kilos of 30 C warm air constantly coming into intimate contact with the dead weight however long it takes before your dead weight gets to 20 C and the air does too.
That can be a whole lot longer without forced air. But it still takes 50 kilos of air no matter what.
>the thermal mass of the air is very low
This is exactly it, along with heat exchange capacity.
If you pull out the water hose you could spray it down with 50 kilos of water in no time, but not everybody's living room can withstand that :)
Now if you had 500 kilos of 20 C furniture along with everything else, and you opened your windows and let out the full 50 kilos of air which was fully replaced by 0 C air, then shut the window to achieve a closed system once again, you'd still be sitting on 20C furniture for some time and only breathing 0C air for a short period before the overwhelming mass of the furniture itself warmed the much lesser mass of air right back up a few degrees, and to about 18 C eventually. Which none of the other heated mass will drop below.
With no additional heat added, assuming insulation was perfect, but that's the number of degrees lost from one single full air exchange alone under those conditions.
While the windows are open is the time to vacuum the carpets, drapes and furniture so you can get some forced air through them and let absorbed irritants out instead of just stir it up and move it around. The high-surface-area porous materials can soak up more than you think.
Air exchange matters again because some of the irritants are not the kind that evaporate or "dissolve in air" very fast, and they might have had all kinds of continuous time to accumulate.
You've got to figure that curtains can hold grams of unwanted stuff in their pores from previous bad air days, furniture ounces & carpets pounds plus a lot of the latter is solids which may give off odors or stir up allergens for quite some time once it has gotten into the pores and other tortuous passages. That's a lot of air exchange when you do the math.
Change your air filter after stirring things up and breathe easier after that :)
Can you link an example of a window unit ERV? I tried searching briefly, and came across some folks hacking together units to make them work with windows or adding their own ducting, but nothing analogous to a simple window air conditioning unit. As a renter of an apartment in a very much not modern home, I don't really see anything that seems like it would work.
A couple examples I see on Google. I'm not advocating for any of these, because I have no idea if they are any good, but I see no technical reason an ERV couldn't work as a window unit. Maybe it's an underserved market and someone should make a business out of that.
Yes, consider spores from harmful microorganisms that are released during building work or harmful airborne particles from transport vehicles. Its not as simple as: open the window!
If you have ERVs and filters then amazing. That's still outdoor air.
Yes you have to take into account running an air filter for PM2.5, closing the window while a truck is idling outside, running your humidifier or dehumidifier if you want.
But you need fresh air coming in somehow, at a certain rate. There's no way around it. Pollution in terms of VOC's, and CO2, is always higher indoors than outdoors, because things indoor generate it and don't remove it.
> Most people don't, and cracking a window is the only option.
It's not usually the only option. Installing an ERV is an option for the more than half of the population that owns their own property in the US, and an ERV will save money and pay for itself compared to opening your windows, in addition to the other benefits.
For renters, that's where the window units I mentioned come in, but there aren't as many options there as I would hope yet. If people don't ask for ERVs en masse, then apartments won't offer ERVs as a benefit to attract tenants unless they are legally required. Helping people understand that options exist seems like the first step to changing things. Ideally, even window-unit ERVs wouldn't be the only option for renters. Nearly 90% of households in the US have air conditioning now (which I believe includes rentals), because people asked for air conditioning and were willing to pay for it. ERVs have the added benefit that they don't just make things better, but they should pay for themselves in energy savings too. Maybe I'm too optimistic. I believe the 2024 IECC building codes make ERVs mandatory in new construction in climate zones 6 through 8, as one example of a change that is coming.
A lot of GPUs are allocated for training and research, so dividing the total number by the number of users isn’t particularly useful. Doubly so if you’re trying to account for concurrency.
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