Coding agents are the most profitable application of AI at the moment, and Anthropic has the most widely used one

But it's relatively easy to switch from one to the other.

And in terms of capabilities and pricing they are not *that* different.

So I can't imagine one company being vastly more valuable than the other one (unless their spending or long term strategy is vastly different).

s/most/only/, cross fingers, make test

I don't know about selling, but Apple permits up to 2 virtualized Macs to run on a Mac. If they are circumventing this limit that would be an issue, but it doesn't sound like they are.

Yes but if you read the EULA the two VM limit it does sound like you can't really sell access to VMs:

> except as otherwise provided in writing, signed, or issued by an authorized representative of Apple, to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software, or any prior macOS or OS X operating system software or subsequent release of the Apple Software, within virtual operating system environments on each Apple-branded computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using macOS Server; or (d) personal, non-commercial use.

In section 3 they also say that if you're renting access to a Mac you can only run one VM, which sounds kinda like that

> Except as expressly permitted in Section 3, the grant set forth in Section 2B(iii) above does not permit you to use the virtualized copies or instances of the Apple Software in connection with service bureau, time-sharing, terminal sharing, relay service or other similar types of services.

Ah okay - and the 24 hour minimum rental time doesn't apply to VMs? Im just curious how they are getting around the limits that Mac Stadium and AWS have.

They aren't getting around any limitations. How you decide to bill for meeting the limitations is a business decision, and you can do it via either higher average rates and allow more granular rentals to be financially covered that way or by requiring a 24 hour minimum.

I.e. just because Apple requires you to do things in 24 hour increments does not mean your billing has to expose it in exactly the same way.

I dont think thats an correct interpretation of the EULA, they are just choosing to ignore it - https://wiki.licenseware.io/catalog/rules/apple-macos-lease-...

If a business reserves a Mac for 24 hours (and allows no other users for that window), it complies with the EULA, no?

That doesn't mean the business has to charge the user for 24 hours. You could charge for 6 hours and then just let the Mac sit idle and unused the remaining 18.

You're eatting the cost of that unused time, but if its a differentiator that leads to more business than it might still be worth it.

EDIT: To be clear, imagine a case where the user has 24 hour sole access to the Mac. They could use up 24 hours if they wanted. But usage is tracked per hour, and they're only billed after the fact based on how much time they actually were running something during that 24 hour window.

From the wording of the parent comment my understanding is that 24 hour period applies to the MacOS VM, not the hardware itself. Since they split each physical host into at least 2 different VMs the 24 hour period is for that VM. Even stronger case if they also lock the core affinity to the physical layout like Max editions having multiple Pro chips/dies within...

For Amazon EC2 the case is different since it doesn't allow VMs but only possible to get dedicated bare-metal hosts. Obviously Amazon could offer VMs but they would not because the current way allows them to charge 24 hours even if user uses the host only 1 hour. And obviously no body big enough challenging the status quo and impacting AWS' revenue hard enough.

I don’t think they are doing this.

The hack for the 24 hour thing is, of course, as a data center, to form an s-corp and hire employees to work 1 hour per week racking servers and give them a W-2 for a princely sum of just $16.90/week which works out to $878.80/year. Then as a perk of the job, those employees get to access the cluster as a perk of their employment. You can't charge an application fee since it's California, so then you sell interview prep courses for $1,000, and encourage graduates to apply.

I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.

Nice apology, though weird flex about their expensive bikes in there

I don’t know, the expensive bikes explained the need for the tool.

The average person doesn't think about bikes of the ring ring variety costing 15k dollars.

How is mentioning their valuable bikes a flex?

I think that was the initial concept of what "Full Disk Access" was supposed to be, but I've run into needing to give some of my own apps full disk access for very innocuous reasons. Recently, I wanted to build a little app to give me a Time Machine on/off switch by calling "tmutil enable/disable". A single on/off command with no need to access any of my data, but its use was gated behind needing Full Disk Access. Hopefully if Apple is rethinking Full Disk Access permissions they will rethink better ways to provide these sort of permissions.

I don't think Linus Torvalds has any sway on what Apple does. Or do you mean John Ternus, the new CEO?

My phone autocorrected Ternus to Torvalds, what a catch!

> My phone autocorrected Termus to Torvalds, what a catch!

Kinda funny and definitely a word suggestion that will be locked in future code.

Also it's "Ternus" with an "n"

Fixed. Thanks!

If it's advertised as a case and it works, why is it a scam? I don't own a 3D printer, nor do I know anyone who does. If someone is designing, printing, and selling a useful product, why is that a scam?

I think they are saying people mislead customers into thinking they are getting a "$60 gaming pc" when they are actually just getting a 3d printed case with nothing inside.

If you are selling a product for way more than it should cost (like a $60 3D printed case), when that cost is the exact price that a popular blog says the computer costs, you are intentionally hoping to prey on people mistaking your listing for the actual computer.

You can make all sorts of arguments about possible reasons for charging that exact price for that exact product, but no reasonable person is going to buy that.

Automatically no 3d printed case is worth $300 because it's not possible to make it good enough quality.

A metal and wood case could be worth $300.

A good design is worth something, and a good printing job is worth something, and the convenience of a service is worth something, but no amount of good design and quality printing job and service convenience can make a 3d printed case worth more than about $50 before shipping, and it would need to be somehow pretty special design to overcome some basic material and process weaknesses and still be functional and look good to be worth that much.

$300 is too high, but $50 is too low. 3D print sellers aren't doing injection molded parts at scale, nor offshoring the labor. For GP's linked case file; between the filament, the compatible linked switch and fan hardware not purchased by the thousands, and someone paying themself at least minimum wage to print all 46 individual parts and then to partially assemble and package it up nicely (and not counting printer hardware depreciation or electricity), $50 for it is not a viable product to sell or to run as a business. That's the price I would budget for making it myself with the 3D printer I already own and not counting my time as a cost, not something I would waste my time with selling.

Fair

The cases are $60, the "original" price, not $300. Search ebay for BC-250, they're everywhere.

Agreed a $60 case, even if 3d printed as long as it's good, is no scam.

Because the sellers are categorizing them as computers on ebay and filling in all of the appropriate specifications as if it was the computer, and only putting in the description "CASE ONLY, DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY COMPUTER PARTS".

This post resonates. I recently built a little web service to scratch an itch I've been having and after discussing the options with Claude we settled on Go, and honestly it's been fantastic. Highly performant, native threading, dead simple to deploy with containers. And I don't even know how to read or write Go.

Go is fun, you should actually learn it

Oh man... I like go because it is compiled, performant, strong and statically typed. But "fun" is not something I would say about it. The ergonomics of error handling, lack of ternary operator and other stuff that compiled 30yo languages already had ...

Idk, I'm having fun with it. The good outweighs the bad for me, and idk why people get so bristly about handling errors, it's more straightforward to debug than nested try/catches

That sort of syntactic sugar goes against the Go philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I share your frustration, but I also see the value of consistency in their philosophy.

I'm starting to think all these languages having their own pet "philosophies" that is "totally better than X" is a shitshow and just personal preference masquerading as standards.

Go is less a language than a philosophy. It was an angry reaction to 10,000 ways to do things, and overly clever (ahem, expressive) syntactic sugar.

It is quite boring to write, but very easy to read.

Not a Go fanatic. I use Go and various other languages, and was a decade and a half late to the Go party anyway. Just trying to explain the outlook.

I did go through the Go tutorial many many years ago, but it's been so long I don't remember anything. I do remember it was an enjoyable process though, and I'd love to pick it up again.