It appears that OpenAI has blessed third party harnesses. I know they officially support OpenCode and they have this on their developer portal:

"Developers should code in the tools they prefer, whether that's Codex, OpenCode, Cline, pi, OpenClaw, or something else, and this program supports that work."

https://developers.openai.com/community/codex-for-oss

Obviously, the context is that OpenAI is telling open source developers who are using free subscriptions/tokens from the Codex for Open Source program that they can use any harness they want. But it would be strange for that to not extend to paying subscribers.

I built a new desktop in 2023 and repurposed my old desktop for my daughter. The old desktop had a couple of smaller SSDs so I swapped them out for a 2TB Samsung SSD. Paid $99 on Amazon.

The exact same SSD is $479 on Amazon today. It's not a fancy super fast NVMe. It's a slow SATA drive. I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.

> I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.

I did recently, specifically targeting lower capacities for the components that have been increasing (RAM and storage).

It didn’t seem like prices would be going down for a while and I didn’t have a desktop pc otherwise, so just went for it. We’ll see how it all plays out but I don’t think it was a terrible decision, as long as prices stay high for a couple years it still makes sense to just suffer through the increases

Mine were SATA too!

What gave you the impression that this was related to AI?

Was it the 100+ Agent Skills?

The Gemini CLI extension?

Or the bundled MCP server?

I don't think they are going to collapse. But it was only a couple of years ago that many people thought OpenAI had a big (some thought insurmountable) lead in a race to dominate a winner take all markee. Some people did correctly state that OpenAI had no moat in those days so credit there where it's due.

Now it's looking like a competitive blood bath where ever increasing levels of investment is needed just to main market position. Their frontier models are SOTA for 4 weeks before a competitor comes and takes the crown. They are standing on much shakier ground than they were 2 years ago.

A competitive bloodbath plus OpenAI has investment valuing it like it will achieve agi rather than (merely) being a huge advancement in computing, but not a fundamental rewriting of how all work is done.

$730b isn't being priced like they will achieve agi

Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, etc have been able to collect large amounts of revenue from a global customer base so I don't think the assumption was that unreasonable.

Obviously, China will protect its homegrown AI industry. Current geopolitics trending towards US decoupling in Europe might slow it. But under the old status quo, US AI would have been rapidly adopted in the EU (and it still might. It depends greatly on how much of the Trump Doctrine outlasts the current administration).

Developing countries eventually adopt new technologies. First they adopted personal computers and became customers of Microsoft, then they adopted the Internet and became customers of Google, they adopted smartphones and became customers of Apple. Eventually they will adopt AI and become customers of someone. The question is whether it will be US tech or Chinese tech.

Apple's core business is trapping users into their walled garden so they can rent seek.

Whichever one you think is worse is really just a reflection of your own personal values. I value computing freedom above all.

> Apple's core business is trapping users into their walled garden so they can rent seek.

Apple’s core business is selling hardware. Their services revenue is not even close to their hardware revenue.

Yes, trapping users into their walled hardware garden so they can rent seek.

You buy a phone, and you're forever forced into buying only their peripherals.

That’s demonstrably untrue.

You could say that there are Apple devices that do not work well or don’t work at all without another Apple device, and off the top of my head I would say the only ones are the Watch and the HomePod, but most alternative devices work fine with Apple ones, e.g Chromecast, Garmin watches, Google Home hubs, etc.

And even so, the same could be said about Android only features and devices, e.g. Samsung Watch doesn’t work without an Android phone, Google Earbuds are feature capped on iPhone, etc.

IMO, if we are looking at rent seeking behaviors, Google shoving Gemini down the throats of Google Home users, with no chance of rolling back if they don’t like it, is way worse.

Demonstrably not true? What did you do with the 200+ Apple-only charging cables?

What are you even talking about? The only Apple exclusive connector in recent memory was Lightning, and it’s been phased out.

Did you get rid of all your micro USB cables and devices once the transition to USB-C began for Android?

> I value computing freedom above all.

So perhaps you should consider switching to GNU/Linux phones.

Yeah, I suspect that a lot of the decline represented in the OP's graph (starting around early 2020) is actually discord and that LLMs weren't much of a factor until ChatGPT 3.5 which launched in 2022.

LLMs have definitely accelerated Stackoverflow's demise though. No question about that. Also makes me wonder if discord has a licensing deal with any of the large LLM players. If they don't then I can't imagine that will last for long. It will eventually just become too lucrative for them to say no if it hasn't already.

Discord isn’t just used for tech support forums and discussions. There are loads of completely private communities on there. Discord opening up API access for LLM vendors to train on people’s private conversations is a gross violation of privacy. That would not go down well.

Wifi 5 for an $80 router in 2026 (I mean we're almost there) is pretty disappointing. I get that its mostly going to be used on crappy hotel networks and the crappy hotel network will often be the bottleneck but $80 looks to be roughly twice the price of the typical travel wifi 5 travel router, about equal to the price of a typical wifi 6 travel router, and only $30-40 cheaper than a typical wifi 7 travel router.

I don't mind a unifi premium for the integration but they should at least have a $50 wifi 5 version and a $100 wifi 6 "pro" version

I'd pay $30 for the software alone that actually works.

I don't think they necessarily compete for the same market as some of these other routers. This seems way more compact than many of the other options on the market. I just briefly looked around on Amazon and even many other wifi 5 routers look to be about 2x or thicker than this one. Compared to the GL.inet Opal for example, it's about 20mm smaller in each dimension: 118 x 85 x 30mm (Opal) vs. 95.95 x 65 x 12.5 mm (Unifi). The Unifi is pretty close to a tiny 5000 mAh portable battery.

Now what I'd be really more interested in a Pro version, more so than wifi 6, would be a built-in modem with SIM/eSIM.

Is there really much difference between Wifi 5, 6, 7, especially when travelling given relatively limited speeds you might find yourself in?

I don't even know what is my Wifi "version" at none of the places I have my routers, things just work for all purposes (work, gaming, streaming).

I didn’t think there was much point in WiFi 6 unless you go 6e and get the 6Ghz frequency?

It’s wifi 5 but the most interesting part is it uses 5w of power max, I thought it’d be more.

That’s a lot of power for a radio you’re right next to. You don’t need 100W to stream Netflix.

Interesting, I was thinking of it more from a travel perspective of running it from a shared power supply or something but you make a valid point.

It was a partnership through a multiplayer service called Engage.

Yes it was!

I just posted a comment about how amazing the warcraft 2 community was on AOL. Couldn't remember if they charged per minute or per hour so you just confirmed it for me. I just remember that some kids were racking up insane bills. I had to play on Zone (and then Battle.net when Battle.net edition came out) but I loved the AOL war2 message boards.