I miss the days of playing Halo as a kid, and jumping on internet forums. MSN being the primary chat app that everyone used. Facebook was in its infancy, but everyone who had hobbies or a community was on a purpose made forum. People who knew how to write html/css/php build basic websites and blogs. Gaming clans came together, and xfire/steam was a great way to talk to and play with the same people.
Now days, I don't have Facebook, I don't play games, and the only forum I call home is this one. Times have changed, but so have I. At least I can reminisce on the good times.
My experience so far has been Qwen3.5:32b-a3b-coder via Claude Code on a MBP 64gb M4, and a MBP 32gb M5. Just found about qwen3.6 so downloading that currently.
on 64GB M4 I find it's able to do things fairly well. The few times I run out of tokens, I hop over to that and I'm mostly unimpeded. I compare it to the Haiku models, where you have to go in and be surgical about your changes, or like others have said, guide a junior.
on 32GB M5, I find that it works, but around the 30% ctx threshold it slows down quite substantially, so more need to be surgical in your requests. I'll often just have my IDE open and Claude. But maybe I've been too comfortable talking to Sonnet/Opus and so forget I need to be more deliberate in my requests.
My finding here is that the harness is a big part of the problem. CC seems to be very good with Qwen in my experience. Better than OpenCode.
I also run DeepSeek for some other non-structured data tasks and to generate a to-do out of that. That's not coding, so won't go into that, other than to say it's very competent as a small model left to run in the background and automate small parts of my life and process.
tl;dr it's totally doable on a 32gb mbp using ollama, but be precise in your requests and guidance.
With DigiID, as with this, I never understood why countries give critical infrastructure contracts away from the country it directly impacts, provided they have a mature tech ecosystem. I thought the whole point was that it was critical?
* Spoof GPS - I live in a non-english speaking country. Sometimes Google sets my location to my gps, despite having an english vpn. This is an attempt to correct that.
* Local translate, rather than sending everything to Google.
* (non browser) An SSH selection screen, so I don't need to remember the IPs
My experience (n=1) is that while I'm definitely lazier on certain tasks, AI has opened up some much more complex tasks. There are many tasks which I still carry out which I don't trust AI with. Maybe it's a result of the codebase I work with being fairly complicated and math heavy, but I'd say the overall outcome for me has been: lazier application on the easy tasks, mind opening on the harder tasks.
A big +1 for fastmail, but their official ios app is 0/10 the last time I used it. Not a big problem if you use mail.app or their website on desktop.
Something I've done and which has been a big quality of life improvement is to set up a folder with 30 day retention, then an email rule to move any emails with `+` or apple relay there. Those are legitimate emails I want to read such as online order status, but I don't need them in my every day email.
As a consumer, there are many non PE owned restaurants and pubs you can frequent. While you might not be able to change the game, you can absolutely vote with your wallet. The small guys will thank you.
Same for Amazon vs going direct to the manufacturers, which is more often than not, China.
I can very clearly imagine it always going for branded products where brand is not required, unless specifically prompted not to, which the average person won't do.
> I need dishwasher tablets
Could mean buy a 30 pack for £25 which have all the marketing buzz surrounding them, or buy the own brand 45 pack for £5 which does the job just as well.
This is where critical thinking needs to be a skill taught and learned. Too many people take information at face value. An AI that's 80/90% right is a great way to get duped - like the author at the end.