Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
Chinese AI apps post user numbers that would embarrass most Silicon Valley launches. Whether you can install one, sign up and pay from the United States is a separate question. It breaks into three doors: the download, the account and the money. Most coverage skips the doors and talks about benchmarks. That is backwards for … Read more
The apps you have probably never opened There is a quiet gap between what Americans think is happening in AI and what is actually happening. In the US, the names are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Midjourney. In much of the rest of the world, a different set of apps leads. Most of them come from … Read more
I’ve been watching people compare WorkBuddy and Codex for a while now, and honestly? I don’t think they understand what they’re comparing. Here’s the short version: if you’ve used Codex deeply, you’re probably never going to touch WorkBuddy. And that’s fine. WorkBuddy’s actual users are people who never needed Codex in the first place. I’ve … Read more
Apple announced the new Mac Studio with M5 Ultra yesterday, and my feed has been nothing but benchmarks and hot takes since. I was eating cereal when I saw the press release — not even kidding. I almost choked because the memory configs go up to 512GB now, which is insane for a desktop you … Read more
I’ve been watching Google roll out AI products for a while now. Every few weeks, there’s a new announcement. Usually, it’s something technically impressive but feels a bit distant. Like, cool, but am I actually going to use it? Then I tried NotebookLM. And honestly? It’s different. NotebookLM isn’t the only underrated thing Google shipped. … Read more
I’ve been quietly watching Tencent’s WorkBuddy for a few months. It’s not the flashiest AI tool out there, but the numbers are hard to ignore. Over 20 million desktop visits in June alone. That’s not nothing. Now they’re about to drop Hy4 into it. Here’s the short version: Tencent’s new flagship model, Hy4, was spotted … Read more
DeepSeek Harness just got another update. RC.8 landed two days after RC.7, and it’s not just a bug-fix release. This one changes how the whole thing works. The short version: DeepSeek Harness is turning into a dispatch layer for AI agents. You give it a task, it works out which agent should handle which part, … Read more
I’ve been watching Google’s AI rollout for a while now. Every few weeks, there’s a new announcement. Usually, it’s about some feature that’s technically impressive but feels a bit… distant. Like, cool, but am I actually going to use it? Then I saw the news about Chrome’s Gemini integration expanding, and specifically, the new Auto … Read more
I’ve been using GitHub Copilot for about a year now. It’s good. Really good. But not everyone wants to pay $10 a month for autocomplete. Some people code once a week. Some are students. Some just want to see if AI-assisted coding actually helps them before committing to a subscription. So I spent the last … Read more
The short version: DeepSeek open-sourced their Agent harness, the scaffolding that turns a raw model into something that actually works in the real world. And they did it in a way that openly admits what everyone in the industry has been quietly realizing: the model itself isn’t the whole story anymore. Honestly? I spent the … Read more