I’ve always felt they weren’t really worth it for performance per dollar spent. For C++ work I just use a non-Mac workstation. For lighter workloads the Mac Mini is very capable already.
The Studio (Stud IO™) is the new Mac Pro - it's not "worth it" unless you need the most performance period - or you have money to spare.
Or you really, really need to drive eight displays from a single machine.
For "home user" stuff a Mac mini or MacBook is going to do everything you ever need (in fact, they have the problem where the M1 systems are still perfectly capable, six years later).
You think they will skip M4 ultra? May be they slowly plan to launch ultra chips alternate years since the development costs are high and demand is niche.
If they do a 1TB m5 ultra, I too would be configuring one for sure.
I hope so! I already have the M4 mini pro - would like to bump up the prompt processing time and the memory bandwidth at the same time with the new M5 matmul changes.
Senior Backend Engineer with 5+ years building scalable systems across FinTech, EdTech, and AI. Currently at British Council architecting exam platforms for millions of concurrent users. Solo-built a Go-based scraping engine that extracts structured data from 200M+ company records, and an AI interview prep platform with 100K+ users (ProTechStack.com). No over-engineered stacks — Go, PostgreSQL, Playwright, and headless Chrome. Looking for early-stage roles.
I agree that reading every dependency isn’t realistic. But “not reading the code” as a principle feels risky.
In my experience, abstractions hold until they don’t. The first time you hit a production incident and the docs stop helping, reading the source stops being academic and starts being survival.
We once had a performance issue caused by a library making assumptions about concurrency that weren’t obvious from the API. The fix only became clear after stepping through the source.
I think the real skill isn’t avoiding reading code, it’s knowing when to escalate from trust to understanding.
For glue code or low stakes utilities, sure. For auth, billing, or core infra, I’d argue reading at least the critical paths pays dividends.
So last week I tried Gemini pro 3, Opus 4.6, GLM 5, Kimi2.5 so far using Kimi2.5 yeilded the best results (in terms of cost/performance) for me in a mid size Go project. Curious to know what others think ?
I predict Gemini Flash will dominate when you try it.
If you're going for cost performance balance choosing Gemini Pro is bewildering. Gemini Flash _outperforms_ Pro in some coding benchmarks and is the clear parento frontier leader for intelligence/cost. It's even cheaper than Kimi 2.5.
Insights on this cat-and-mouse game are spot on. As AI evolves, watermarking might be a viable countermeasure. what detection methods/tools have you found most reliable in practice? I want to be able to detect and automatically block AI generated comments under my posts.
At this point, GitHub outages feel closer to cloud provider outages than a SaaS blip. Curious how many people here still run self-hosted Git (GitLab / Gitea) vs fully outsourcing version control.
My previous two startups used GitLab successfully. The smaller startup used paid-tier hosted by gitlab.com. The bigger startup (with strategic cutting-edge IP, and multinational security sensitivity) used the expensive on-prem enterprise GitLab.
(The latter startup, I spent some principal engineer political capital to move us to GitLab, after our software team was crippled by the Microsoft Azure-branded thing that non-software people had purchased by default. It helped that GitLab had a testimonial from Nvidia, since we were also in the AI hardware space.)
If you prefer to use fully open source, or have $0 budget, there's also Forgejo (forked from Gitea). I'm using it for my current one-person side-startup, and it's mostly as good as GitLab for Git, issues, boards, and wiki. The "scoped" issue labels, which I use heavily, are standard in Foregejo, but paid-tier in GitLab. I haven't yet exercised the CI features.
I just checked out Forgejo. I think i start with it, looks clean and lightweight. For my homelab I don’t have very large requirements. Might be a good starting point for me.
I was just looking into this today but it seems pricey. $29/user/month for basic features like codeowners and defining pr approval requirements. Going with Forgejo.
Wait, what? So you're on the hook for backups, upgrades, etc. and you have to pay them for the privilege? I thought GitLab was free as in speech and beer.
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