I love it. It's not quite as good as Sonnet but it's quick, and Minimax 2.5 is like 1/4 the cost of Haiku. With enough of a harness around it, almost any breed of monkey can be coerced into producing excellent typewriter work. GLM 5 and 5.1 are other really competitive options on the price/performance curve
Side effecting computations that depend on the "real world" go into an IO monad. The game in Haskell is shifting as much of the codebase as possible into pure functions/non-side-effecting code, because it's easier to reason about and prove correct.
I have an extremely similar profile (chess, PBS space time!) and I get non stop Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate in my recommendations. YouTube Shorts are the worst for this, I can't scroll through ten videos without seeing this guy, no matter how many times I click "do not want!"
This was one of my Q4 projects at work last year. We moved CI to 3x hetzner machines, each running four copies of the self-hosted github runner, and drove our build/test times from >20min down to 3-4 min on average. It's ridiculous how big a difference running on a capable bare metal box makes. We run a thousand or so builds daily and pay about 300 euro a month for the setup; our overage fees from github actions were often higher than that. Reliability has been "ok": one of the machines started throwing errors that smell like bad RAM/CPU (bus errors, random reboots, etc), we raised a support ticket, they nuked it and gave us a fresh one.
We provision them with ~200 lines of shell script, which we get away with because they are not running a "prod" workload. Don't forget to run "docker system prune" on a timer! Overall these machines have been mostly unobtrusive and reliable, and the engineers greatly appreciate the order of magnitude reduction in github actions time. I've also noticed that they are writing more automation tooling now since budget anxiety is no longer a factor and the infrastructure is so much faster.
Developer velocity has been my project for the last quarter at work: we just switched from GitHub runners to Hetzner machines, and saw similar improvements to average build times. Between self hosting our runners and switching to bazel which caches aggressively, we've driven down average CI test time from 23 min to 2m40.
Pipewire broke me lots of times during its development and rollout, and that's okay, because new software has bugs and in some of my other use cases "hey it's a lot better than Jack". What I'm not going to do is carry a grudge against the maintainer for decades?
I've been using Linux since Slackware installed from a pile of floppy disks. I'm extremely happy with systemd (desktop and server) and view it as one of the most important UX advancements ever made in the Linux sysadmin space. It replaced a smorgasbord of broken nonsense with a unified and thoughtful system that is objectively superior to what it replaced. I suspect a lot of the extreme reaction to systemd is not just resistance to change, but based on an emotional attachment to the rag-tag heterogeneity it made obsolete.
My partner also works in tech. Between the two of us, and between home and work, we've bought or used probably 25-30 of these over the years. I gave her an M1 air this holiday season! We've had pros, airs, and iMacs in four or five different colors occupying our living spaces for fifteen or twenty years now. We've used them for work and for play, for software development and video editing and graphic design and media consumption.
My verdict is: the hardware is usually GREAT but MacOS isn't. It bothered me when I quit the platform ages ago, and it is still bothering me now: little I care about has changed or improved. New annoyances though!
In aggregate I'd say I've spent ca. 15 hours staring at the beachball. Intrusive admin software has been a problem in the past for sure -- especially at Google -- but I've bought dozens of these for home use as well. Either 90% of their units are defective or we're using our computers very differently.
Terrible keyboards are another thing entirely, Lenovo went through a bout of that with the X1. My gripes about Macs are almost entirely about OSX performance/reliability and command-line habitability: version over version, it almost never improves. For my workflows
