Comment by ChicagoDave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChicagoDave | Hacker News Reader

Here’s my take:

- when I saw Altman driving a multimillion dollar car while OpenAI was still a nonprofit, all of his scientists left to start rival firms, and the details of why they tried to fire him were legit, I dumped ChatGPT and moved to the new company - Anthropic.

- The Pro Max $200/month subscription has uncapped my workflow to where I’ve created several substantial and complex applications in compressed timeframes. (https://devarch.ai if you want to be productive)

- Anthropic has clearly evolved towards being a good corporate citizen and is staging itself to replace the market’s developer-first mentality from its past leaders (Microsoft, Google, Oracle).

- Claude Code in the last three months has finally made it possible to dump Windows and buy a loaded MacBook Pro. It’s been a week since I logged into my Surface Laptop 5.

- if Anthropic does break from its current evolutionary trajectory, I plan to build out my own at-home platform anyway. The open source models are extraordinarily effective.

> when I saw Altman driving a multimillion dollar car while OpenAI was still a nonprofit

If that would be a first time founder that would be much more of a red flag than for someone’s who’s already beyond rich and powerful even before OpenAI became a thing.

Yeah I know he’d already bagged, but the optics were bad. The rest of my statement stands.

I had a similar reaction when I interviewed at Theranos before it was known they were a scam and Elizabeth and Sunny both had insane Lamborginis parked illegally in the handicapped spaces in front of the Theranos building. It was so offputting seeing the CEO and founders of a healthcare company hogging the handicapped spaces that were supposed to be for people who needed them. They seemed super shady for a bunch of other reasons but this was a big red flag! So obnoxious to steal the handicapped spaces with your stupid sports cars.

I also phone-screened for Theranos. Their eagerness to hire anyone and pay for relocation was the red flag that scared me off.

If Altman didn't go round cringe-inducingly saying he doesn't (relatively) have much of nor care about money and how he doesn't have a stake in OpenAI while plotting his power-hungry moves, and publish equally repulsive articles like "missionaries over mercenaries" while acting like the latter, then you might have hade a point. But given all that, sorry no.

Hes had a hair transplant, done a bunch of stuff to his face etc etc. Not a chance he doesnt care about money, self-conceited etc.

And people used to cuss Steve Jobs lmao. Hes looking very normal compared to these folks.

> Claude Code in the last three months has finally made it possible to dump Windows and buy a loaded MacBook Pro

What does this mean?

My entire dev ways of working were Windows-centric. Visual Studio was a core tool. C# was the only platform I was deeply experienced in using. Xcode was/is alien technology to me.

Claude Code erases all of those constraints and the M4/5 chips are blazing fast.

Tangent, but:

> The open source models are extraordinarily effective.

Which models are you referring to? (And in particular, which sizes/versions?)

It’s a fast moving science so I’m still in the middle of defining what my at-home setup will be. I think there will be a tipping point where cheaper hardware plus new models reaches a pro-consumer effectiveness level.

They already have with qwen3.5

I agree with the previous post that there's hope that there's a convergence point in the not too distant future where consumer hardware can run powerful models.

At the moment, the 397Bn Qwen3.5 model (which I assume is what you're referring to) is still out of reach of most consumers to run locally: the only relatively straightforward path (i.e. discounting custom Threadripper builds) to running it would be a 512Gb Mac Studio.

However, in a generation or two (of hardware and models) maybe we'll see convergence with more hardware available with 3-400Gb of memory for more approachable money (a tough sell right now, I accept, with memory prices as they are) and models offering great performance in this size range.

I was referring to the 35B version. It is surprisingly good for its size. You can use it for implementation tasks without it going off the rails

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