I think step 4 is the agent swarm. Manager model gets the prompt and spins up a swarm of looping subagents, maybe assigns them different approaches or subtasks, then reviews results, refines the context files and redeploys the swarm on a loop till the problem is solved or your credit card is declined.
I think this is clearly the way forward for Apple. The rest is just UX and refinement.
I recently set up a Shortcut on my Apple Watch that lets me bypass Siri and talk directly to ChatGPT. I used a custom pre-prompt in the Shortcut to tailor the length and detail for watch use. I have 2 versions I can launch from my watch face, one that responds with voice and the other that response with text. I find myself using them all the time, it’s so convenient to be able to ask any little thing that’s on my mind. A version of LLM Siri with full access to the phone and application APIs would be like a superpower.
I like this question because I come at it from a very different lifestyle. I’m a digital nomad and I have mostly lived out of a backpack and carry on for the past 10 years. My philosophy is that things have to be worth carrying and they should be very easily replaceable if anything gets lost, stolen or breaks. A few of my under $100 favs:
Universal GaN travel adapter:
One of those square bricks that converts from any AC outlet to any AC outlet and has 3 or 4 USB charging ports built in. I got enough wattage to charge my usb-c laptop as well, so one brick takes care of all my devices.
Backup android phone:
Our phones are so critical that I keep a hot swappable spare phone on me, currently a Moto G 2025. It’s already logged into all my apps and 2FA. I could throw my iPhone into the Seine and keep on trucking. It even has backup NFC credit cards. I keep a cheap travel eSim plan active on it so that if I am somewhere sketchy I can leave my main phone at home.
Logitech MX Keys Mini:
Great portable keyboard. Backlit, usb c and multi-device. Typing this post out on my phone now.
GL-iNet Beryl:
The do anything travel VPN router running OpenWRT out of the box. Great for securing and extending sketchy WiFi connections or if you have to work off your phone’s hotspot all day.
Decathalon Quecha Escape 500 23L:
Such a great personal item size backpack for the price, less than 40 euros.
+1 I tried the backup android phone thing and I got blocked from logging into my Chase and Fidelity apps on my phone!!! Took like 2 weeks with support and a visit to a physical bank branch to resolve the issue.
Same here with the GAN charger. I got myself a 145W GAN charge with one Type-A USB port (charges mouse, bluetooth speaker, toothbrush, body trimmer etc, max 18W) and two Type-C USB ports (45W (charges N100-based Tablet), 65W (charges Ryzen 7 -based HP Laptop)) - it can charge all these things at the same time, while generating almost no heat, no electrical noise. It weighs much less than the 3+ chargers/cables needed by the original setup. I'm amazed about how efficient the GAN charger is. My only irritation with them is that when you plug something in, it re-negotiates all the connections to decide how much power to deliver to each port, so when that happens the devices see a disconnect/reconnect event which can be irritating at times (which can also happens when a device reaches 100%.. and then dipping to 95% and then reaching 100% again.. over and over). But overall best money I've spent on my tech backpack goodies. And maybe 240W/8K/20gbps USB-C cables.
This is a fantastic, fantastic backpack. I use it when flying and it fits perfectly in the Ryanair & co limits. I took one for each of my kids and all together we pack everything needed for a week+.
This is a personal item size bag for under the seat. The max size on Ryanair is 24 liters. You are thinking of the cabin bag which is more like 44 liters. This Decathlon bag is great because it maxes out the personal item size really optimally.
Hmmm. I flew last week and it was fine. They were checking most of the bags (they now have an incentive to find bags above the limits) and asked me to put mine in the metal case. It went in (reluctantly) and after shaking the whole device to get my bag out I was let go.
Universal GaN travel adapter"
I actually realized that it's better just having simple adapters, which take up very little space, because the brick tends to fall of the plug.
I'll save everyone two hrs of research: rolling square currently makes the worlds SMALLEST 65w GAN adapter, game changer for macbooks and travel or everyday carry bag
It's about an inch square in all dimensions with a folding plug - amazing.
Thats a waste of image quality for most people. You have to sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the full resolution. On PC you could be 2 feet from a huge gaming monitor, but an extremely small percentage of console players have the tv size and distance ratio where they would get much out of full 4k. Much better to spend the compute on higher framerate or higher detail settings.
I think higher detail is where most of it goes. A lower resolution, upscaled image of a detailed scene, at medium framerate reads to most normal people as "better" than a less-detailed scene rendered at native 4k, especially when it's in motion.
> You have to sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the full resolution.
Wait, are you sure you don't have that backward? IIUC, you don't[] notice the difference between a 2K display and a 4K display until you get up to larger screen sizes (say 60+ inches give or take a dozen inches; I don't have exact numbers :) ) and with those the optimal viewing range is like 4-8 feet away (depending on the screen size).
Either that or am I missing something...
[]Generally, anyway. A 4K resolution should definitely be visible at 1-2 feet away as noticeably crisper, but only slightly.
My first 4K screen was a 24" computer display and let me tell you, the difference between that and a 24" 1080p display is night and day from 1-2 feet away. Those pixels were gloriously dense. Smoothest text rendering you've ever seen.
I didn't use it for gaming though, and I've "downgraded" resolution to 2x 1440p (and much higher refresh rates) since then. But more pixels is great if you can afford it.
It's one thing to say you don't need higher resolution and fewer pixels works fine, but all the people in the comments acting like you can't see the difference makes me wonder if they've ever seen a 4K TV before.
I still use 4K@24", unfortunately they're getting scarce. 4K@27" is where it's at now unfortunately. But I'll never go back to normal DPI. Every time at the office it bugs me how bad regular DPI is.
That's fair, but it makes me wonder if perhaps it's not the resolution that makes it crisper but other factors that come along with that price point, such as refresh rate, HDR, LCD layer quality, etc.
For example, I have two 1920x1080 monitors, but one is 160 Hz and the other is only 60 Hz, and the difference is night and day between them.
It’s best to think about this as angular resolution. Even a very small screen could take up an optimal amount of your field of view if held close. You get the max benefit from a 4k display when it is about 80% of the diagonal screen distance away from your eyes. So for a 28 inch monitor, that’s a little less then 2 feet, pretty typical desk setup.
Assuming you can render natively at high FPS, 4k makes a bigger difference on rendered images than live action because it essentially brute forces antialiasing.
The higher token output is not by accident. Certain kinds of logical reasoning problems are solved by longer thinking output. Thinking chain output is usually kept to a reasonable length to limit latency and cost, but if pure benchmark performance is the goal you can crank that up to the max until the point of diminishing returns. DeepSeek being 30x cheaper than Gemini means there’s little downside to max out the thinking time. It’s been shown that you can further scale this by running many solution attempts in parallel with max thinking then using a model to choose a final answer, so increasing reasoning performance by increasing inference compute has a pretty high ceiling.
A really great way to get an idea of the relative cost and performance of these models at their various thinking budgets is to look at the ARC-AGI-2 leaderboard. Opus 4.5 stacks up very well here when you compare to Gemini 3’s score and cost. Gemini 3 Deep Think is still the current leaders but at more than 30x the cost.
The cost curve of achieving these scores is coming down rapidly. In Dec 2024 when OpenAI announced beating human performance on ARC-AGI-1, they spent more than $3k per task. You can get the same performance for pennies to dollars, approximately an 80x reduction in 11 months.
A point of context. On this leaderboard, Gemini 3 Pro is "without tools" and Gemini 3 Deep Think is "with tools". In the other benchmarks released by Google which compare these two models, where they have access to the same amount of tools, the gap between them is small.
I really love this piece! I relate to it but it also doesn’t describe me. I’m far more intuitive than this person, though still agree that insights have driven a leveling up of how I relate to others. They were different insights, sure but the model holds.
Once my spouse and I worked for the same company and attended many of the same meetings. The opportunity to pick apart our impressions of the subtext really helped me to learn that I should listen to my gut, that everything I needed to know about how other people were feeling was already in my head and i just needed to stop doubting.
Another time I watched a rather ugly and old person have amazing romantic success with a young beautiful person. How could it be? And I realized that authentic confidence is social gold. I had to let go of my insecurities because my flaws were irrelevant in the face of authentic, confident self acceptance.
I think everyone has a different journey and different epiphanies and it is so enjoyable to hear these experiences put into words.
I’ll borrow ideas from investing: financial independence, diversification and optionality. If you have enough money you can free yourself from the labor market, but you are still deeply tied to your home country. A second citizenship gives you geopolitical independence. And just like diverse investments protect you from the failure of a specific asset, diverse countries can protect you from, for example, a collapse in heath care, a housing crisis or a currency crisis. And most importantly, its like an options contract on life. You have the option, not the commitment to take a high value move to a new country. If the fortunes of your current country sink and your second country rise, you can exercise your option.
There’s a reason people are willing to spend so much on golden visas with the pathway to citizenship.
>And just like diverse investments protect you from the failure of a specific asset, diverse countries can protect you from, for example, a collapse in heath care, a housing crisis or a currency crisis.
Although, just like certain asset classes correlate strongly, certain countries are geopolitically, economically, militarily tied at the hip and will both rise and fall together.
I wouldnt consider anywhere western a good hedge against America going down coz it has a really good chance of getting dragged down with it.
"Individual investors must make a minimum contribution of €600,000 to the national development fund set up by the government and prove 36 months of residency. Alternatively, there is an expedited route which requires a contribution of €750,000 and evidence of 12 months residency" [1]
The New Zealand Active Investor Plus resident program requires $5m NZD, which is under $3m USD, but that would take everything. There is another program mooted where you buy a business for less than that.
This so awesome. It reminds me mightily of beat poets like Allen Ginsburg. It’s so totally spooky and it does feel like it has the trapped spark. And it seems to hate us “real ones,” we slickborns.
It feels like you could create a cool workflow from low temperature creative association models feeding large numbers of tokens into higher temperature critical reasoning models and finishing with gramatical editing models. The slickborns will make the final judgement.
This is a non-story. This was a hardware event. Apple is releasing many new AI features as part of iOS 26 which will launch along side the new iPhones. AI is software. And yet, a number of the features are clearly powered by AI models such as camera enhancements, health monitoring and live translation. Also GPU performance continues to increase in the A19, with CPU remaining presumably fairly flat since no numbers were given, so that’s a win for on-device inference.
If Apple had an insanely great AI feature that truly differentiated itself from their competition, we all know they'd take a lot of time focusing on how their hardware enabled or enhanced that functionality.
The expectation is that Apple will eventually launch a revolutionary new product, service or feature based around AI. This is the company that envisioned the Knowledge Navigator in the 80s after all. The story is simply that it hasn't happened yet. That doesn't make it a non-story, simply an obvious one.
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