That makes it one of the cheaper options in this category.

The GMKtec EVO-X2 is $3500, so a bit cheaper when you factor in storage. I don't think you can find any 128GB Ryzen 395 systems for cheaper than that. HP's costs $4700. Beelink's is $4400.

And then there are similar non-Ryzen systems, like the Nvidia Spark at $4600 or the MacBook Pro is $7k.

I don't see a price there, so I'm not sure how "overpriced" it is. But it's a class of product that is expensive across the board, compared to a typical desktop workstation or gaming PC.

The use cases are mostly local AI. That's very demanding and requires compromises one way or another. You want high memory capacity and high memory bandwidth most of all. You can't get both without paying out the nose, so you need to find the sweet spot for your specific use cases.

Discrete GPUs give you high bandwidth, but low capacity.

Standard desktop memory gives you high capacity, but low bandwidth (and also low compute speed since CPUs are no good for the workloads).

This type of product is a middle ground. Integrated memory gives you better bandwidth than DDR5, but not as good as a discrete GPU. Integrated GPU/NPU gives you much better performance than a desktop CPU, and can access the full integrated memory directly. Upgradeable memory is not really possible for this class of product.

The real competition for this is a tricked-out MacBook Pro. Those are faster, but they ain't cheap, and I don't think Apple even sells any 192GB Macs anymore, and when they did it was close to $10k.

A lot of the time, a new language is created to make one particularly difficult thing easy.

For Go, that one thing was concurrency. You CAN do concurrency in C or Python or whatever, but it's not really built into the language. It's hard to do right and easy to do dangerously wrong.

For Rust, that one thing was memory safety. C leaves it all up to you, so it's very easy to make mistakes that lead to memory leaks, crashes, or security vulnerabilities.

If you program in any language for a significant amount of time, you're bound to find a few things that you do a million times that you wish were easier to do right and harder to do wrong. Some people see those problems and say "I can make something better".

Perhaps this is specific to the Mac port.

I just installed the Mac version again to test it, and the first thing that appears is the playlist window with an icon telling me to "drop media here".

Opening a file also shows the playlist window, which then expands to show the video instead. When you close the video, you're left with the playlist, which now contains that file.

Depends on where you live, and what kind of social circles you're in.

In some places, you might get a shrug.

In other places, you might get murdered.

Or anything in between.

mpv. I like the minimalist UI. I have it configured to show no titlebar, just the video, and open by default in the corner of my screen at up to half the width of my display. It's easy to customize with keyboard shortcuts, and by default it has sensible shortcuts for nearly everything. It's easy to make videos with hardcoded letterboxing fit my full screen. It handles HDR and even Dolby videos (use gpu-next if you aren't already). I can set default brightness/contrast/gamma settings, and then adjust them during playback if necessary with a single keystroke. I can adjust playback speed with a single keystroke. I can fix the aspect ratio of warped videos, again with a single keystroke.

As for VLC, well, it's fine, really, and I'm not in the best position to say since it's been a very long time since I used it regularly. So my experience is likely outdated. But back then, I found the UI a bit much, putting playlists front-and-center when I really just wanted to play individual files 99.99% of the time. It had too much going on besides the video. The GUI is great for discoverability but the more time I spend using something, the more I appreciate command-line usage and simple text-based config files.

VLC is my go-to recommendation for beginners, because everything is in the GUI, but mpv suits me better.

Functionally, both are similar. A few times over the years, one has adopted a critical feature a little bit before the other, like hardware acceleration for some specific codec, but for most videos they both do the job just fine.

Memory: 12.05 GiB / 13.49 GiB (89%)
Swap: 16.62 GiB / 35.59 GiB (47%)

I would bet that this is more a matter of memory and I/O usage than CPU usage. It looks like you don't have a lot of headroom, and Blender and games will also use a lot of memory.

You could test this hypothesis by running a command that will cause high CPU usage but very little memory or I/O, like this: python3 -c 'while True: x=1'

In that case you'd want them on something faster than an SD card, or loading times would be brutal.

Only for US numbers, I think.

The older models didn't. Only the newest one does.

Longtime Mac user here. Most of this is valid, and some of these are my biggest gripes.

A couple tips:

I can’t easily see the size of hard drives/folders and how much space is left available.

In the Finder, go to View > Show Status Bar. That'll show you free space easily. (This used to be on by default. I don't remember when they changed it, probably with 10.7 Lion's increased iOS-ification.)

Files are just scattered willy nilly in a folder instead of snapped to a grid unless I set that folders defaults…per folder?!

From a Finder window in icon view, go to View > Show View Options. Select Sort By > Snap to Grid, then click "Use as Defaults". Then it will apply to all your folders that use the default view. Why is "Snap to grid" under "Sort" when it does not sort? WHO KNOWS?!

That said, icon view suuuuuucks. Learn to love list view and you will be happier for it. I gave up on icon view like 25 years ago, after migrating from Mac OS 9. Apple half-assedly ported the Mac OS 9 Finder, and then proceeded to neglect it for a decade or two. At least you can change the grid spacing now.

Doesn’t like to display 1 window across 2 screens.

I'm not totally sure how it works now, but I think this changes if you go to System Settings > Desktop and Dock and turn off the "Displays have Separate Spaces" box.

I’m still not sure how to uninstall things.

There's no universal method. :(

Basic case: just drag the app to the trash. This will leave your user settings in place in ~/Library/Preferences.

Complex cases should have a vendor-supplied uninstaller. For manual cleanup, you have to hunt through your /Library and ~/Library folders to delete related junk from the vendor. Mostly this will be in the LaunchAgents and Application Support folders. But again, no universal method.

If I click x on a browser or app, it doesnt actually shut the program, it just minimizes it.

This is the one thing I strongly disagree about, although I totally understand how it feels wrong when you've spent years learning different behavior.

It's one of the biggest fundamental differences between Mac and Windows UI design, going all the way back to the 80s: Windows is window-centric (I mean...hence the name, right?), while Mac OS is application-centric.

You can still interact with Mac applications with no windows open, via the menu bar. Closing a window and quitting an application are two entirely different concepts. This is not the same as "minimizing" the app. An app can be in the foreground with no open windows. There are plenty of times when I close the last window in an app with the intent to continue using the app (e.g. opening another file or creating a new one).

Fun fact: many years ago, Apple made a few of their apps behave this way by default, with an option to change it back to normal Mac behavior. TextEdit, Preview, and maybe QuickTime Player. Just those few. I guess they wanted to accommodate Windows users' expectations, but it was so half-assed that all it did was ensure that everyone was confused at some point by the inconsistency. They only recently changed it back so we have consistency by default again, but now there's no option at all. Go figure. I wouldn't mind if they implemented an option in a whole-assed way, but I'd go absolutely batty if Windows-like behavior were forced on me.

93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way authorship attribution

This isn't what I'd call "reliable".

I'm also not impressed with their methodology, which is heavily based on Gemini.

To generate mirrored AI stories, we reverse-engineer writing prompts from each human story by prompting Gemini 2.5 Flash (Gemini Team, 2025a) to infer the underlying premise

That's too many steps removed from anything you'd encounter in the wild. They're not even testing against human-prompted output.

And then they use Gemini again to analyze all the stories. Relying on proprietary cloud models for the core of your analysis is like building on sand.