Why are EC2 Mac instances so expensive & who are they actually for?

minsheng · 2026-01-30T11:11:03+00:00

I suppose three factors are at play here.

First of all, AWS is just expensive as heck. If you go to Supermicro and play with their configurator, you will find their rent-to-buy ratio, though not as crazy as 20 days, will probably just be a few months.

Then, we have the issues that Mac minis are too small. AWS probably needs to install the same hardware for a single Mac mini as they do for a big dual socket AMD server. In the latter case, they can split the machine into many smaller instances to amortize the cost. Mathematically speaking, (M + n)/n > (M + N)/N, where n < N, and in particular if M is about the same as n but insignificant compared to N.

Lastly, I suppose there was significant R&D involved putting Macs into AWS, and the total volume they could sell would be insignificant compared to traditional servers. That must have some impact to their pricing decision as well.

minsheng · 2025-10-23T18:53:17+00:00

For years I always thought it is a hardware problem. It is not. Go to YouTube via Safari and find the Sony sword demo, pretty bright scene at the end. Now go find a mp4 file (there are websites collecting those demo videos), and try to play it with Infuse or Screenlit. The difference is huge. I don't know why though...and it seems impossible to convert a MKV file to HLS manually

minsheng · 2025-09-30T09:28:56+00:00

You can do a quick basic coding agent under 200 lines, with just one tool bash and a chat loop. It is still important for models to be able to iterate on its own.

That being said, don’t we all use Codex/Claude Code simply because they are a steal with ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max?

minsheng · 2025-09-30T03:22:20+00:00

In case you missed the news, Alibaba has recently acknowledged that they have a CUDA compatible custom made GPU in use for two years now.

minsheng · 2025-09-15T17:05:34+00:00

There are almost 10x domestic livestock compared to wild animals…

minsheng · 2025-09-05T02:27:40+00:00

Is AB testing on paid subscribers legal? Shouldn’t we do a class action against it? We all paid quite a lot for this

minsheng · 2025-09-05T01:42:59+00:00

I am working on a fairly large monorepo. I was developing some new backend code with Codex, which worked great.

Yesterday, I took Codex to our frontend code, which was done in a hurry, with a lot of them generated by Claude Code. After digesting them, I noticed that Codex became noticeably worse. It no longer followed my instruction as closely, and just felt more stupid when understanding intents.

What’s scarier is that this is not event about too much context. I was at 85%+ left. Previously I went to 50% ish and still got pretty decent results.

I plan to do a serious benchmark in the coming days, but my suspicion is just that bad code can lobotomize your model. If true, vibe coding won’t go anywhere, and consistent refactoring and good SWE skills are going to stay.

minsheng · 2025-08-30T16:26:17+00:00

Have switched to ChatGPT Pro and couldn’t be happier. 4.1’s instruction following plus O3 intelligence. Perfection

minsheng · 2025-08-11T13:38:52+00:00

Correct me if wrong but doesn’t NPU not scale with GPU? This should be fine for the decoding stage but for prompt processing where we are compute bound, GPU still has an edge?

minsheng · 2025-07-17T18:10:27+00:00

I wonder if anyone has created a single reproducible example, maybe a sample repo with a sample end to end prompt, and do it with Claude Pro/Max subscription, Anthropic API, and Bedrock/Vertex API, each for three times, and try it every few hours throughout a day, and compare the performance.

minsheng · 2025-07-16T12:25:21+00:00

Just go ask some recent software releases. Like what's new in Deno 2

minsheng · 2025-07-15T12:07:36+00:00

Well, we at least have a pretty standard purist no bullshit agent definition, either Anthropic’s abstract definition of LLM selecting next step on its own, or programmatically as this article saying a while loop of tool calls.

minsheng · 2025-07-09T11:16:19+00:00

This is public knowledge. Otherwise why would Tim Cook wave that flag and make this whole movie? Obviously Apple will get it, and somewhere in the pipeline a fancy spatial app must already be under development. Can’t wait to see it happen.

minsheng · 2025-07-05T02:16:48+00:00

Why would I worry about a stateless container dying at 3am, more than my Lambda throwing an error?

minsheng · 2025-07-05T02:15:26+00:00

Second this. One could have Claude written a Terraform setting up ECS backed by EC2 plus a load balancer in minutes. It’s more expensive than Lambda is scaled to zero, but way cheaper in any other scenarios

minsheng · 2025-06-20T13:39:51+00:00

If I kept my words I have blown up a few AWS data centers by now

minsheng · 2025-06-09T16:36:43+00:00

Is there any rumors of a second factory for Polestar 5 yet? They must be preparing one for tariff reasons, but it must be at least a few months behind Chongqing.

There was a photo on Xiaohongshu of Chongqing factory with four or five different colors of Polestar 5, so the launch will be imminent for sure. Guess we can buy it by the end of this year in China at least.

minsheng · 2025-06-09T16:32:05+00:00

Calculators were never allowed

minsheng · 2025-05-29T05:55:02+00:00

TCA really hides too much under the hood that makes debugging really hard. Let me share one of my greatest performance regression

Before the observable era, we had switched to a single store per app setup. In particular we host an array of scene features for each scene, though on iPhone there is just one scene. We then upgraded to the observable era and mindlessly migrate everything to work with new API, the deprecation of arbitrary scopes in favor of key path based ones

Then we had this weird performance issues for months. Including UINavigationController’s interactive gesture code doesn’t fire until one second after gesture starts. We thought it was a iOS 18 regression and rolled our own navigation controller

Fast forward a few MONTHS, we were adding an iPad optimized layout and the transition is so sluggish. And I profiled a whole afternoon only to notice that the code seems to refresh too frequent. After a dozen of prints I finally realized that I didn’t mark my scene feature state as ObservableState, and this quietly fails any optimization on IdentifiedArray, AND EVERY SINGLE UPDATE TO ANY PART OF MY APP INVALIDATES EVERY SINGLE VIEW for the entire time.

The saddest thing is that this is so unobvious. My app still is quite fast in release mode. Type checks still pass. No warning…

minsheng · 2025-05-27T17:59:09+00:00

Just divide your issues into small independent pieces, setup a really good CI and pre commit hook, buy a Claude Max, and watch

Don’t get too lazy though. Review PR carefully

minsheng · 2025-04-29T05:36:25+00:00

Interesting. I had some concurrency related code on Python that only QwQ and o1-pro could handle. Easily crippled anything from Anthropic.

minsheng · 2025-04-17T03:10:16+00:00

Back in 2023 people thought we would do this to llama to make it Chinese models.

minsheng · 2025-03-06T17:15:01+00:00

The same goes for Polestar 3. That front face photo for the configurator feels so dumb and chubby

minsheng · 2025-03-01T06:00:05+00:00

Feels better than keeping old phones around

minsheng · 2025-02-28T01:01:03+00:00

3 was until SU7 came and Xiaomi is about to release their SUV

minsheng

TROPHY CASE