seviu

Thanks for SimpleX it looks like a great solution for a longstanding problem.

Why would you not trust Jolla? It was born from Nokia employees. GrapheneOS is a great alternative. Still Android though.

One of my best friend has a Jolla phone.

He never had WhatsApp. He refuses to use google. Only till recently he started using signal. He has been using an old Nokia phone till he was forced to upgrade by his operator. He is European and here in Europe WhatsApp dominates. Despite all that and having a very social life, driven by work, he manages.

I recently ordered a Jolla phone. I don’t want to know about android. I might tolerate iOS. But shelling thousands of $ for a phone that is controlled by an external company…

I am looking out for messaging alternatives. I am at a point where I think linking your identity to a phone number is not right either.

Let’s say we should all wake the fuck up. This is not right. Having a phone with such spyware is a potential attack vector I don’t want to have on the most important device I own.

The tokenizer is 30% more expensive (it generates 30% more tokens) just they are giving an offer now which will end by end of August. On max effort its way more expensive than Opus and slightly less than fable.

It has also strong guardrails and deliberate reduced training data around cybersecurity. On purpose. If you develop a system and then try to harden it, it will miserably fail.

It’s a neutered model. Pretty sure not what they had in mind, but they have to, since they invested so much VC money in developing it.

This. I have been using anthropic and codex subs, on max. All this changed in June. We are clearly entering an era where we cannot rely on American models. As a solo developer I value reliability over performance. I cannot pay hundred of $, plus a lot of my private time figuring out how to properly use this technology, for it to be taken away within hours.

On top of that, the intelligence is being dialed down. Sonet 5 is a living proof of this. Fable has strong guardrails, but new Sonet is a dumbed down expensive model, which already falls behind GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7. I might go back to Claude since I know Fable is just a limited offer, and I am not going to pay for API usage. But what they are signaling with Sonet will also come to Opus. A lobotomized more expensive model.

I am honestly baffled how the current administration is giving the whole world, on a golden plate, to China. And they don't seem too bothered about it. They are living in their own bubble and reality distortion field I guess.

I could go on endless rant about Dario, but I feel I am so strongly biased now that my judgement might be clouded.

Time to move on

I would say 3.5 flash is great if you use a good open harness. I use omp for that. The thing with Google is that they announce they have a great model, and that they have been testing it internally for half a year. I guess they don't care too much about who or how he uses it.

I am still struggling how to deal with sub agents and different roles for each model. I still think Claude or Codex are overall better models, but everything around them transpires such weird vibes, including, and this one kills me, that at certain times they feel like dumbed down.

I keep changing these things often, but I have basic subscription to codex (20$ plan) which I use with GLM 5.2 to do some high level planning of what I intend to do, and then leave Deepseek do the coding. Or something along those lines.

Point is, GLM 5.2 is now at a point where I cannot tell you if it's better or worse. I can tell you however one thing: no matter when I use it, it's consistent in what it does and how it works.

Then there is the Fable thing, but as with many things, I think the past has distorted the reality. It lasted two days, but Anthropic said it clearly for plan users it would only be there for two weeks. It was great for doing what you can already do with other tools: doing all the planning, and reviews, and launching a million subagents talking to each other. I sometimes wonder if it was really a new model, or just Opus 4.9 wrapped with some fancy model driven harness.

Dont worry, chinese models will distill frontier ones, quite fast.

The excuse they give is borderline childish. I get the thing about slow rollout, make sure partners get to fix the bugs, etc...

But bad actors are hard working motivated entities with tens of thousand of fake ids, and american citizens working for them, for pennies.

All while the ones like or you sit at a crossfire which is borderline useless.

I cant wait to see what Qwen did with the massive distillation they made out of Opus 4.8 and Fable aka Mythos aka pretty sure they jailbroke it.

I am on the opposite camp. Open models are starting to perform better. GPT 5.5 keeps on messing things up.

On the contrary, pi + glm + DeepSeek… bliss.

Fable was a different kind of beast though. Rip.

I ordered two in the September batch, which was way less expensive.

Jolla phones are fine. I have friends who use it every day. Happy to support them all the best I can.

—— Sent from my iPhone 17 Pro

New qwen soon

Same here. Buy now ask questions later. Pretty sure the shop where I bought it will happily cancel the order if I give the cancel order.

Oled laptop will have to wait a few years now.

Impulse bought a Pro with 48Gb ram on a retailer with old prices

Was waiting for the next generation but I think I will sit it out

To be fair with Codex, you can use any harness you want with it. Access is not gatekeeper by a crappy full of slop electron app.

So just move to PI, or whatever.

Claude on the contrary, forces all plan users to use their horrible app, which, if you ever dared to use cowork, only once, will run a 2GB VM on app start, no f's given. at all.

Not justifying it. But if you use the official Codex app, thats on you. If you use the official Claude app, it's because you are forced to.

Sidenote unrelated to the post: since the Fable thing, and after serious thinking, I moved to open source models. I still have the basic OpenAI sub, but then easy lifting is now done elsewhere.

I am member of the SP in Switzerland and I am pro nuclear.

I don’t know why we put people in political buckets. It’s good to disagree. I am probably the weird guy but so be it.

Right now I rely on whoever that is opensourcing the models.

I wholeheartedly agree with what you said about China.

But I can’t shrug off the fact that fable was taken down within minutes for reasons that are childish and petty.

I am sorry but I can’t use any US AI if I don’t have the guarantee that I will be able to use it tomorrow.

And Trump showed us he is willing to take it out whenever he wants.

An opensource model on the contrary, I can host myself, or use a miriad of providers, mostly non chinese.

Anthropic employees are right, but maybe this is for good. It certainly has opened my eyes.

I can’t rely on using a technology that the US administration can ban at will.

IMO without getting into personal thoughts about how capable the current US administration is, last Friday move sent a very powerful signal to the industry.

Also I don’t think China releasing so many good models, capable to compete with Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, all at once, is a coincidence.

I usually hit the limit when I am frustrated and I don’t want to understand what the problem is.

I am an engineer, and when I understand what’s going on, I never hit any limit.

They have no choice because unlike OpenAI who backordered most of the Ram in the world, Dario decided they wouldn’t spend a dime on infrastructure.

A critical mistake if you ask me

Anthropic has been trying to be a trust me bro and an I know better than you steward. All while Dario has been crying wolf since 2017. Not that I like the current administration. They are horrible human beings. But this effective altruism first from SBF and now from Amodei kills me too.

There is nothing worse than very highly intellectual people thinking they are entitled to make decisions for the rest of us.

They fully own this. They have built a narrative so powerful that now the government is going to shut them down.

Meanwhile OpenAI, who own their own data centers, infrastructure government officials, and are being smart about all this, will reap some of the benefits. They are loosing too.

Anthropic did indeed dig their own grave, and it saddens me. Fable was an amazing model. First of its kind. I will miss it.

Still let’s not forget: this was a two week trial. After that it would have been over, except for the enterprise customers.

Apologies for the tone of my post. It’s not easy to be neutral and unbiased. I am just so angry at all this nonsense. At home I got kids, and they are more mature than many of these people who are just ruling over the world.

So much for that Effective Altruism Amodei and SBF are part of

Not sure if related but this is my story. I am Spanish. When leaving SF back to Europe from a Google IO, after control, waiting to scan my luggage, an officer stood besides me and started speaking in Spanish besides me.

The first minute my brain didn’t register because though Spanish is my mother tongue, I guess it was not ready for that. The police officer started to get irritated. Eventually my brain switched, I had a chat with him and he left.

I was totally freaked out the rest of the time, till the moment I boarded.

Only then I realized how frail our rights are when you are abroad.

The small thing that annoys me is that I am 100% sure somebody at Apple has a directive: never allow Kagi search integration.

I am truly baffled (and annoyed) about this fact.

For a while already

Cheap power at what cost for our planet?

Not long ago we were crying death to bitcoin, it’s going to destroy the planet.

Come AI, with unlimited power demand. Everybody screaming we need more power.

We need infrastructure, clean energy, even nuclear. We are doing all in the wrong order.

Not crazy, I always resort to yandex when I know google is not showing me the results I am looking for

DDG doesn’t click for me sadly, and I cannot point my finger to where or why

In those rare occasion when I want to use Gemini I just type gemini on my terminal.

Gemini was on life support on my side. I barely get to use it due to its subpar performance in coding, which is to be honest the only use I have of it.

And now I read that they spent 4 to 5 months testing 3.5 internally. Let that sink in. By the time they release the world has moved on. I don’t know who makes decisions at Google regarding AI but it saddens me to see this happening. Google should be up there leading but they are lagging against everybody.

How can I justify dropping 100$ per month, for a coding agent that is half a year behind, knowing that Codex or Kimi is going to do much better?

Stock might be ripping but that’s about it.

That time my Mac display broke and I had to log in taught me much about how important learning accessibility is even for non blind people.

Previous cycles were fueled by retail, with an industry trying to legitimize itself.

This cycle is about max extraction and fraud - Legitimized by the presidential family cashing out billions in meme coins, insider trading and forks of existing protocols.

Hacks have also been hitting hard. North Korea has stolen 500m this year alone and 2b last year.

So… no thriving. On the opposite. Dying is a more appropriate word at this time. Some would call this an opportunity. I see more pain ahead.

No wonder Coinbase is laying off people with the excuse of AI. The reality is that volume is zero. At this stage only me and a bunch of other retail weirdos keep on buying bitcoin paycheck by paycheck…

I used to have the 20$ plan, upgraded to max, they were going to charge me 86$ for max minus pro plan.

Credit card didn’t get through, pro plan got insta cancelled, had to pay for full max plan. Clearly a billing bug on their side. If the credit card when upgrading a plan doesn’t come through, don’t destroy the existing plan.

I talked to the chat bot; i got a ticket number, a human will come back to me. That was three months ago. Never got refunded. Nobody emailed me.

I ended cancelling the max plan, it expired yesterday. This plus the constant degradation of the service despite having 30B revenue first quarter this year.

A company that has so much money, and cannot care less about their users…

They will have to do much better if they want to get me back.

Technically not but the devil is in the details. Having to reinstall the app every 7 days and a limit of one app doesn’t even pass the bare minimum.

Jolla has a prelaunch campaign, decent phones for 200€. I might just as well grab one. Sick of having a phone which is more expensive than my laptop but I can barely use.

Codex limits are weird, I can’t barely use up all the limits of the basic subscription.

Switched to Claude max just because I can combine both. I can say since the weekend, I only have had problems. When it works it’s great. But I am seriously thinking to just cancelling this experiment.