Go local, or go loco.
Kent, UK
Joined February 2009
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So I get an email from @RoyalMail which says “We've now returned your parcel to Your Seller, please contact them for any further information.”
Which would be fine except: Who is “Your Seller”? What’s the parcel? Why is it being returned? Why didn’t you deliver it? How do I contact “Your Seller” about a parcel I’ve no idea what it is. Oh, and the tracking number doesn’t show anything.
What an absurd system. They return a parcel I don’t know to a company I don’t know and tell me I have to contact whoever it is that I don’t know about a parcel I don’t know.
Oh, and Royal Mail’s email address is “no-reply@…” so I can’t even reply to them to find out more.
Royal Mail is a joke.
Whatever the parcel was, I’ll just have to presume I won’t get it because there’s naff all I can do about it.
Apparently I got a DM from @RoyalMail giving me a link to their track and trace website, which I’ve already said didn’t work. Pointless, useless, worthless time wasters.
Is @YouTube on advert overdose tonight? Watching short 12 minute videos, and there’s a minute-long ad every 2-3 minutes. Eventually the thing just froze up on me and I quit.
I guess YouTube are going out of their way to chase viewers away these days.
£30,000+ for the Mac Studio.
I‘m not sure what I’m most gobsmacked by - that Apple expect people to pay that kind of money, or that some people will pay that kind of money.
Still, it’ll be good for another round of blocking YouTube influencers who are more intent on inflating their egos than creating engaging content. Every cloud …
Installed Splash today to see what all the fuss is about.
Uninstalled Splash today when I couldn't see what all the fuss is about.
End of story.
So I order something from @AmazonUK which says it’ll be delivered today (15th), so I check the app. Now it says this: come back in 5 days.
If you couldn’t deliver on the same day, you shouldn’t say you can. No wonder people are starting to go off Amazon.
Fortunately for me this is definitely not an important item. I don’t buy anything worth anything from Amazon these days. But if they offer same day, then they should deliver same day. Otherwise it’s just yet another scam to get your money and stop you going elsewhere.
Two days later, and it’s pushed back by another day.
I’m not going to receive this am I?
Any other company would realise this and send a replacement, given they’re going to miss the delivery date by about a week, or forever.
Not @AmazonUK, oh no. All they want is to trap you in a “contact us and we’ll do nothing” loop.
The most laughable thing is that their website said “spend another £10 for free same day delivery”, so I added some non-essentials on there. The non-essentials arrived same day, but not the item I actually wanted.
You couldn’t make it up if you were writing a comedy sketch show.
Funny how, when you order a replacement, the original one suddenly turns up. You couldn’t make it up.
I don’t know what @AmazonUK are up to, but I’m sure they have a plan.
It's sometimes difficult to remember just how powerful today's Macs are. I'm running an LLM comparison test between my modern Macs and my old late-2014 Mac mini.
It's quite humbling and makes you believe we are living in a space age future.
If someone told you then what we're capable of doing now, they wouldn't believe you.
Still not understanding why @Apple wants me to pay more to add my new device to my existing AppleCare One than to just have separate AppleCare.
What’s the point of AppleCare One if it costs more to add additional devices to it?
Well, that wasn't on my bingo card today.
Testing out image gen models loaded from a @UGREENOfficial TB5 enclosure, but getting poor performance. Spent the morning diagnosing it with Claude Code. Was it a dodgy NVMe? Dodgy enclosure?
I compared it with my @PoweredbyOWC TB4 drive which worked fine (at TB4 speeds, of course), and couldn't pin it down. Claude supplied loads of tests, but nothing really helped. I feared a dodgy NVMe (Kingston). It couldn't be the enclosure (UGreen are a quality brand, right?). I tried everything.
Until …
Swapped out the UGreen TB5 cable with the OWC TB4 cable and … perfect performance.
It seems that while OWC supply their TB4 enclosure with a high quality TB5 cable (even if it does say only 40Gb/s on the plugs), UGreen supply their TB5 enclosure with what I can only describe as a poor TB4 cable (even though it has the lightning symbol and "5" on the plugs) that's incapable of maintaining TB5 speed throughput.
I really did not need to spend the entire morning of my one day off figuring this out. I guess I know where I *won't* be buying cables and enclosures from in the future. I'm grateful to OWC for supplying their drive with a TB5 capable cable. My next enclosure will be from you guys.
Why on Earth does it cost more to add a device to my Apple Care One plan than to keep it separate? @Apple is barmy.
Loving the way @gmktecdotcom list a £5,299 machine as the top of their “best sellers”. Given how few they’ve probably sold at that price, to make it a “best seller” they must have sold even less, or none at all, of their more affordable products.
Is the phrase “best seller” no more than a marketing clickbait phrase in 2026?
When you see 128GB+ unified memory machines priced out of the market, people defend the prices by saying “it’s not for you, it’s for developers”.
Yet, then you feel swamped by “developers” claiming that AI came direct from hell, produces slop, unclean code, and no one who’s a real developer would ever use AI.
So what are these machines for? Apparently not for AI enthusiasts like myself and not for the devs that claim it’s for developers.
Could it be that devs want these devices priced out of the hands of enthusiasts to protect their elitism and their income stream?
Who is actually using these devices for real purposes?
So I can add it to AppleCare One for £4.99, or keep it off AppleCare One for £3.99. So the incentive for AppleCare One is what, @Apple? To pay more?
The new M6 Mac mini has arrived! 🎉
What to do first? Let me check what Apple said it was built for...
Apple: "Mac mini is a powerhouse for all things AI."
Me: downloads 1.56TB Kimi-K3 locally, staring directly at the shiny new box
Mac Mini (sweating profusely): "Look, you know you have a Mac Studio sitting over there for this kind of stuff, right? Go ask him!"
Mac Studio: "Listen, kid, I was handling local models before you were a glint in Steve Jobs' eye. Now, let me see… wait. How many parameters?"
Mac Studio (automated voice): "The subscriber you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone." 📞
Urm, okay... methinks the little Mac mini's ambition has outstretched its reach.
Thankfully, someone put out a 4-bit version of Qwen3.8-27b! 😅
Loving the ads that OpenAI are showing on the ChatGPT UI these days.
You spend awhile working with ChatGPT on a subject and the advert is - "Kimi K3 on Digital Ocean". OpenAI is so confident in their own chatbot that they're encouraging you to go elsewhere.
Another one, in which I've been talking with ChatGPT about the latest Mac products, and the advert is: "For the Mac performance and storage differences, here are some computer options." with the options being ... an ad for HP Windows computers.
So, chasing their customers to other AIs and hallucinating products for your use case. Yep, OpenAI are on to another winner here.
It's almost amusing how lots of reviewers, influencers, and YouTubers are decrying the rise in price for something like the new M6 Mac mini, but what with the increase in Max Studio pricing, the DGX Spark continuing its price climb to Everest-height proportions, cloud services cutting usage and pushing people towards $500/mo plan, maybe spending £1300 on a 32GB Mac mini isn't the crazy pricing that these "influencers" would have us believe.
The 32GB M6 Mac mini could be the "Local AI machine for the new age" and, if the local AI community focusses more on sub-32GB models and less on "look, I get 4tps running 500B parameter models on my cluster of 16x $15,000 Ultra Mac Studios", we could see some good come out of this in the end.
Let's stop decrying what we can't afford and start pushing what we can.
Now we know the price. Is anyone leaping on this instead of the Mac Studio? I don’t have a spare £5K lying around, and I certainly won’t have whatever the price goes up to in a few weeks, so it’s clearly not for the likes of me.
I’m sure social media, X, and YouTube will soon be full of influencers pushing it though.
