I think 8GB with Tahoe will lead to a lot of griping in a month or two, but I've bought one for family use. We have some old iMacs with various issues issues and this ticks all the boxes for basic family use. Plus, the sickly color will hopefully mean no-one will hog the machine or take it outdoors.
Not using, but I still have it. I get it running every couple of years and it's striking how dim it is compared to modern monitors. Yet I just can't bring myself to dispose of it or the 2007 Mac Pro it's attached to, despite them having absolutely zero utility.
So prompt goes in 4x as fast but generates tokens slower.
I'd take that tradeoff. On my M3 Ultra, the inference is surprisingly fast, but the prompt processing speed makes it painful except as a fallback or experimentation, especially with agentic coding tools.
It's not the whole answer, but SO came from the .NET world and focused on it first so it had a disproportionately MS heavy audience for some time. GitHub had the same issue the other way around. Ruby was one of GitHub's top five languages for its first decade for similar reasons.
It may also depend on where you're from. I'm British, have travelled around the US, and never had problem engaging in chit chat with all sorts of people, big cities or not. But there's a strong disarming undercurrent of "oh wow, you're from England" through the whole experience that I expect most Americans never experience, at least within their own country.
Nano Banana 2 has an image search tool that looks up pictures of things and uses them in the context (and arguably, an agent could eventually figure out who jacquesm is and hunt for a photo).
However, I tried "a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon" for a laugh, and I have to hand it to Google as the person was in a spacesuit, as they should be, and totally unidentifiable! :-D
"Instead, employers will likely increase their reliance on temporary workers with fixed-term contracts"
It's no quick fix. The new six month (previously two year) unfair dismissal rules from January 2027 already impact annual fixed term contracts. As the end of a fixed term contract is legally a "dismissal", it'll be necessary to go through the full process.
I suspect some low-level service industry employers will sense the weakness of the jobs market and increase employee turnover by giving people contracts of under six months then rinse and repeat from the queue of applicants, which would suck for someone who wants a temporary job for a year or two like students.
"large pothole" .. Oh sweet summer child, I can think of at least ten bigger than that in my small British town. It seems they're doing something in LA, even if asphalting over half the width of a road isn't ideal. Over here, we packing the potholes with loose material, only for it to all come out again within a few weeks. We've gone through several tyres (including one total blowout, cords and all) in the past couple of years, and pothole related callouts are up 18% in the past year apparently: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cddn0n3p2ppo
“I don’t find their actual search engine very useful at all.” (me in 2009)
I'm quoted on here so I thought I should give an update! :-)
I still don't think DDG was very useful in 2009. A noble idea, but the quality wasn't there for the searches I did. In the past several years, I've found it to give Google a good run for its money, both through DDG's index getting better and Google's getting worse. I'm delighted they've made a real go of it.
I've tried so many times to make DDG work. In fact I'm currently commenting via Android DDG browser and still I find myself switching to Chrome/Google more than half of the time because the DDG search is just not working for me. I suspect the problem is I do a lot of geospatial type searches.
I understand why the results are worse but that doesn't really matter to the general populace.
I wish them the best though. We need search market fragmentation.
Same, I tried DDG a bunch of times over the years, maybe once every 2 years or so, but never got to the point where it felt it could replace Google.
Tried Kagi when it launched, and I'm not sure if it was because Google had deteriorated so much at that point, or Kagi was simply better, but I got way better results in Kagi, and still do. Kagi ended up being what I thought DDG was aiming for, but was never able to reach.
I tried kagi started years ago. It had some really interesting and deep results when I was planning my wedding but failed elsewhere. I should try it again.
I think Kagi is neat/fantastic but I also feel like unless you want extreme customizability, DDG is absolutely amazing and I really love DDG.
I also think that though its name might've hold it back a little bit but its absolutely great right now the way it is. I mean I am trying to remember the google proxy of sorts thing and I remembered it in way longer time than DDG (Mentioning https://www.startpage.com/)
So to me I remember duckduckgo a 1000x times more than startpage. Honestly not that big of a deal when you think about it as well but for what its worth, it was valid concern at the time.
Imagine if I create frogfrogjump as say idk an openrouter alternative and uploaded it as show HN. People would reasonably question its name don't you think.
Though to be fair frogfrogjump is sounding a lil cool when I am thinking about it...
Also an interesting story that I found trying to find the name origin behind DDG which I want to share which I found on wiki page of DDG
"We didn't invest in it because we thought it would beat Google. We invested in it because there is a need for a private search engine. We did it for the Internet anarchists, people that hang out on Reddit and Hacker News." - Fred Wilson, 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in New York[34] (Wikipedia)
This is pretty cool when one thinks about it and actually made me want to use DDG even more just seeing a mention of someone investing in DDG because they wanted people of hackernews wanting/seeing they might use it.
Although I think that people of HN love both DDG/kagi and I think both are acceptable decisions imho.
The blacklisting feature of Kagi is a killer feature to me. I also like to pin Wikipedia to the top. It baffles my mind this ain't possible in Google. And while I pay for using Kagi, I still have to say the most interesting (and most expensive) part of alternative search engines is when they have their own search index instead of being a glorified proxy with UI and branding slapped on top of it.
