Some pretty audacious hypocrisy from Anthropic this week.

I made a project for a band to use on-stage where it would switch between videos by tapping a bluetooth foot pedal. The stompbox-style foot pedal buttons were just wired into an ESP32 acting like a bluetooth keyboard sending 1, 2, or 3. The key bindings for mpv were setup to instantly switch to specific videos for each number. It worked perfectly.

I have also used it to real-time 1080p stream my gaming PC from another room using Moonlight so that I could play in more than one location in my home. That was also running directly from the command-line.

But trying to use something like X/Wayland and proper GUI apps usually performs poorly. 512MB of RAM and the 1GHz CPU clock struggle with that.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w/

I wish a Pi 5 (and RAM in general) was cheaper, but Raspberry Pi can't control that.

> We will require 30-day retention for all traffic on Mythos-class models, on both first- and third-party surfaces. We won’t use this data to train new Claude models, or for any non-safety-related purpose, and we’ve instituted new privacy protections including logging all human access to the data and ensuring its deletion after 30 days in almost all cases (see this post for further details). The data will help us defend against complex and novel attacks (including new jailbreaks and attacks that operate across many requests) as well as help us identify and reduce false positives.

Clearly, xAI thinks this is the best way for them to extract value out of their assets.

Also, it is clear that Google and Anthropic both think they can extract more value out of those assets than they will pay in rent to SpaceX.

> Musk’s detractors have been correct about Tesla’s terrible fundamentals, its Full Self-Driving lies, its robotaxi fantasies, its shaky accounting. But when they have imagined these things might affect the stock price, they have been wrong.

> Someday, someone, somewhere will make a lot of money shorting Tesla or SpaceX. But it’s unlikely to be you.

> For now, Tesla remains better understood as a religion than a financial investment, and we can now add SpaceX to that category.

If you can't tell the difference between Google Sheets and Excel, you probably won't notice the difference between Mac and Windows Excel. But if you are in some role like finance where you spend a ton of time in Excel, the gaps become obnoxiously noticeable. Especially because VBA is completely non-existent on Mac.

Up until this point, I've found the cost/value to unequivocally favor using a cloud subscription, but I would be lying if I didn't worry that one day OpenAI is going to increase the price for my subscription by 5-10x. I rely on these tools enough that if there is a real viable local option, I'm going to take it.

I'm betting more on the successors to this initial group of AI companies. The ones that have to build actual profitable businesses.

Geekbench Single Thread Score:

- DGX Spark (same CPU as RTX Spark): 3125

- Snapdragon X1 Elite: 2950

- Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme: 4050

- AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX: 3225

- Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus: 3175

- Apple M5 Max: 4350

I'm happy to be wrong about Qualcomm's latest X2 chip performance, even if it is shipping in only a single product so far. Their previous best was the lowest in this list.