Agreed, and then the actual text of the post gets worse. It’s actually unreadable; I literally could not follow what the article was about (without putting in the effort to unravel the Claudisms, a little like unraveling Shakespeare or Finnegan’s Wake) and gave up.

It seems we are all (on HN) thoroughly convinced that the models have all gotten worse at writing as the version numbers have gone up and they are supposedly more powerful models. Sol 5.6 is nowhere near as bad as Opus 5 or even the 4 series but not great.

But looking back there was a time we were enamored with how they wrote. Perhaps it’s related to the newfound prohibitions on “write in this writer’s style”? I wonder if training the models to not be able to do that anymore has steered them towards not being able to write, at all, in any existing human good writing style and they are navigating the small pathway through all existing good human writing to whatever you want to call what they are doing now?

This kind of AI-generated articles are always weird on details. Hyper-focusing on weird details while missing one higher level ones.

E.g., they use Firecracker, they build and deploy backend applications, but they needed to run the stack on macOS. Why? If you're using Firecracker to run backend applications, isn't Linux the obvious choice?

I never understand why people mess with layout/scroll bar in this way. Like, now you have got more things to maintain.

Oh yes. I discovered that there are two scrollbars. By clicking somewhere in the blog text, you activate the inner one and then scrolling with the keyboard works.

Sorry about that - just pushed a fix :)

I thought it was just me. Super weird.

Wow, that's actually an impressive new failure mode; and it happens on Safari too.

see also "smolvm" - the awesome microvms from https://smolmachines.com

I’d like to learn more about doing this myself - do you recommend any good guides or posts?

Note M1 and M2 macs don’t have hardware support for nested virt.

Hacker News is so utterly detached from reality at times, and comments like these really drive that home.

No, they're realists.

Plus show me an off the shelf solution to MDM that exists in the Linux space? (Not too mention an easy to buy consumer devices which supports suspend/resume correctly in 2026, not even Windows can do that any more)

Apple is crap and evil about many things, but at least here they know their paying audience...

Virtualization.framework isn't particularly limited, for what it is... given they're using Firecracker on Linux, it makes sense to use a similarly high level API on macOS.

(One could add a Hypervisor.framework backend to Firecracker, though I'd be surprised if AWS accepted it.)

Agreed. Pacing is off, too dense. It feels like AI wrote it, then they did another round of AI to change the tone and light edits.

This is unbelievably cool. How did you use AI for this? Absolutely not suggesting there's anything wrong with it - quite the contrary. I find AI is most useful for these lower level driver type projects such as yours that one knows are possible but that would be very onerous for a human to implement. For example the guy who re-wrote a driver from scratch for his HP Printer the other day.

Do you think you could have done this without AI? I've been migrating people off of AWS recently and it was absolutely made possible (or at least expedient) by AI.

You mentioned libkrun in the post, but I am not clear on why you chose not to use it for Mac even if you want to stick with Firecracker on Linux. Why not use libkrun?

The project is immensely cool, but please please do not use AI for writing. Very hard to read.

The author of the article is Claude.

It is way more accurate to say you authorized this rather than authored it.

Honestly asking, do you think this post is easy/enjoyable for people to read? Do you intend for people to just paste it into an LLM chat to digest it?

this all closed source?

LOL, I hadn't heard "AI;DR" before. Definitely adding to my acronym toolbox :)

I have both an M1 Max and an M4 Max and out of habit am still on the former. The performance is still substantial enough that is quite usable.

Because prices? Have you seen how much Apple products cost these days?

Also, M1/M2 are perfectly fine and capable hardware. It's hard to justify the upgrade outside some artificial constraints Apple would bring in with a macOS update.

I'm very surprised you feel it's a given that every SWE at every company has the perk of getting a new machine as quickly as every 2 years, I doubt it's justified by the productivity increases of just 2 years of hardware improvements.

I am on an M1 macbook pro. My company will upgrade me anytime I want.

I haven’t asked because my current laptop is more than ok.

it's pretty common to be running a 4 year old computer in most companies I've worked.

I think they plan for 3 years but in reality it becomes closer to 4 (because they don't plan the refresh during the actual hardware refresh cycle, so you'll end up with a computer that was released in September the year before in like August the year after).

I've never worked anywhere that replaced my computer after 2 years.

You’d be surprised. I got an absolute boat anchor of a 2019 MacBook when I started a job in early 2022. I requested a new one in late 2023 because company policy is to refresh laptops every 4 years - whoever was on the other end of my support ticket interpreted the policy as four years from issuance and denied me.

Not everyone is at $CORP. I upgraded from M1 to M4 and probably won't upgrade until the gap is worth it (M7?). Besides the memory increase I barely notice the improved cpu/gpu speed.

Sounds extremely wasteful to me. What's a new machine going to offer than a 2 year old machine doesn't?

Things were painful in the Intel era but I’m on M1 Mac and I’d have a really hard time justifying a request for an upgrade. I absolutely detested my old Intel MacBook (touchbar era) and couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

I run bloated slow electron apps and chrome all day, generally with profligate usage patterns, and things hardly ever slow down even with corporate antimalware. Sometimes I forget about having left Windows VMs running in the background.

Anyway, why would my company spend $2500+ every two years to turn instant into instant?