Looks like maybe things haven't changed much?

What is the practical latency difference you see between on-device and, say, whisper, in streaming mode, over the internet? Comparable? Seems that internet latency would be mostly negligible (assuming reasonable internet/cell coverage), or at least compensated for by the higher end hardware on the other side?

I've never ever seen anyone claim that hybrid is the end goal.

I've only ever seen people say that hybrid is the practical stopgap until faster charging rate/infrastructure and better range is available, probably the result of next-gen batteries.

The concept of financing an expensive thing is overwhelmingly mundane and widespread. The word "obvious" means "self evident". Unless that logic also applies to all the other companies through time that provided financing, it is not self evident, since they're all contradictory evidence to your view of Apple's strategy (since it was not those other companies goal)! You're claiming that the motivations of financing applies differently to Apple than all other companies that use it, but not giving evidence why you think that, making it all an opinion/guess, not something obvious to anyone else.

Sears had it in 1953. Amazon has had financing for everything since 2015 [2]. Dell [1] had direct-to-consumer financing since 2020.

[1] https://investors.delltechnologies.com/news-releases/news-re...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

I assume that China will be the first to do these sorts of things, since the west will be too hogtied in regulations, lawsuits, and bureaucracy.

[1] https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2026/02/17/ocean-iron-fertilizat...

For Anthropic, as a business bleeding money, it's probably nice to have value-based pricing, for the tokens, so innovation (like computation efficiency improvements) can result in some extra margin. If they exposed the more direct computation cost, they could never financially benefit from any improved efficiency, including faster hardware!

The population is as big as it has ever been, and growing. Hunger index is steady [1], with low scores concentrated in the usual failed African states. We are sustaining ourselves just fine, by all metrics.

There are future problems, but there are also future solutions. A surprise meteor from the blackness of space has no solution. Both are bad. Multiple efforts for multiple problems can take place at once. One does not negate or even influence the other. Corruption in our government it's a much bigger money sink, and risk to our future, than a moon mission.

[1] https://public.flourish.studio/published_thumbnails/visualis...

And, that's silly, because API pricing is more expensive for output than input tokens, 5x so for Anthropic [1], and 6x so for OpenAI!

[1] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

[2] https://openai.com/api/pricing

Determinism isn't required unless it's required.

If it's not required, then you must plan for it NOT being deterministic, with any accidental determinism being ignored (to be safe, forcefully so with an intentional randomization/delays within the library). If it is required, then my random input should always (from the tests perspective) come out the same as I put it in.

If possible, force the corner case if the corner case is a concern. That's the purpose of testing. If there's a concern with timing, force bad timing with random delays. The alternative is relying on luck. I try to make my code as unlucky as possible, during development/testing.

For an alternate perspective, the development for this (which includes future launches) was only 80% the cost of ~500 miles of railway in California! [1]

[1] https://www.kabc.com/2026/04/06/high-speed-rail-cost-now-at-...

Back in high school, this is how the state exams were performed. We had an external proctor come in.

Related, see the insane success and excitement from the early GUI based operating systems.

1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

The popular way to get around video chat proctoring is to physically attach notes to your screen, so when you sweep the room with the built in camera, it doesn't see anything.