Existence of the imminent Oblivion remake was leaked months ago, and maybe I just missed this tidbit, but today Andy Robinson reported for Video Games Chronicle:

The Oblivion remake is reportedly “fully remade” with Unreal Engine 5, with six reworked gameplay systems: stamina, sneaking, blocking, archery, hit reaction and HUD.

If this is the case and because Elder Scrolls VI is still being developed on the Gamebryo/Creation Engine, I can't wait to see a side-by-side analysis of image quality, performance, and overall "Bethesda jank" between the two. I've been saying Bethesda needs to ditch its in-house engine since two-thousand-fucking-eight when Fallout 3 shipped broken and required years of patches to even feel playable. If this Oblivion remake is a lights-out technical success and I'm Phil Spencer, I'd be kicking shins left and right to convince Bethesda to take the time to replatform Elder Scrolls VI now before it ends up becoming another dud like Starfield.

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:

Apple says turning on Low Power Mode reduces the Mac Studio's fan noise, which is useful for tasks that require a quieter environment, and it also allows for reduced power consumption if the computer is left running continuously.

The reduced fan noise aspect of Low Power Mode requires macOS Sequoia 15.1 or later. The new Mac Studio ships with macOS Sequoia 15.3.

A few Reddit users said macOS Sequoia 15.3 enabled Low Power Mode on the previous-generation Mac Studio with the M2 Max chip, and presumably on M2 Ultra configurations too. This is not reflected in Apple's support document.

I can confirm, a "Low Power Mode" toggle appears in the Energy settings of my M2 Ultra Mac Studio.

I really put this thing through the ringer with video and AI workloads and I have never been able to hear the fan (even with my ear right to the back of the thing), so I guess I was lucky to get one whose fan holes don't whistle. I'm always glad to receive new features through software, but am comfortable promising you that I will never turn this on.

On March 9, 2015, Apple announced a redesigned MacBook, notable for a few incredible things:

• 2 pounds (the lightest computer Apple currently sells is 35% heavier at 2.7 pounds)
• 13.1mm thin
• A 12-inch retina screen (something the MacBook Air wouldn't receive until late 2018)
• The Force Touch trackpad (which came to the MacBook Pro line the same day)

It also became infamous for a few less-than-incredible things:

• A single port for charging and data transfer, heralding the dawn of the Dongle Era
• That port was USB-C, which most people hadn't even heard of, and which approximately zero devices supported
• A woefully-underpowered 5-watt TDP Intel chip
• The inadvisably-thin butterfly keyboard, which would go on to hobble Apple's entire notebook line for 5 years (though my MacBooks never experienced any of the issues I had with later MacBooks Pro)

Still, the 2015 MacBook (and the 2016 and 2017 revisions Apple would go on to release) was, without-a-doubt, my favorite computer ever. When I needed power, I had uncompromised power on my desktop. When I needed portability, I had uncompromised portability in my bag.

It was maybe Phil Schiller's best pitch for a new Mac, too. Here's the keynote video, scrubbed to the MacBook part:

Literally the worst thing about traveling with the 12" MacBook was that I'd frequently panic—oh shit, did I forget my computer back there?—when in fact I had just failed to detect its svelte 2-pound presence in my bag. I lost track of how many times I stopped in traffic and rushed to search for it, only to calm down once I confirmed it was still in my possession.

I started carrying it in this ridiculous-looking 12-liter Osprey pack, because it was the only bag I owned that was itself light enough for me to feel the weight of the computer:

This strategy backfired when I carelessly left the bag (and computer) on the trunk of our car, only for Becky to drive away without noticing it (probably because it was barely taller than the car's spoiler), making the 12" MacBook the first computer I ever lost. Restoring my backup to its one-port replacement was a hilarious misadventure in retrying repeatedly until the process completed before the battery gave out.

I have many fond memories programming in the backyard using the MacBook as a remote client to my much more powerful desktop over SSH, even though bright sunlight on a cool day was all it took to discover Apple had invented a new modal overheating screen just for the device.

Anyway, ever since the line was discontinued in 2019, I've been waiting for Apple to release another ultraportable, and… six years later, I'm still waiting. The 11-inch MacBook Air was discontinued in late 2016, meaning that if your priority is portability, the 13" MacBook Air is the best they can offer you. Apple doesn't even sell an iPad and keyboard accessory that, in combination, weigh less than 2.3 pounds. Their current lineup of portable computers are just nowhere near light enough.

More than the raw numbers numbers, none of Apple's recent Macs have sparked the same joy in me that the 11" Air and 12" MacBook did. Throwing either of those in a bag had functionally zero cost. No thicker than a magazine. Lighter than a liter of water. Today, when I put a MacBook Air in my bag, it's because I am affirmatively choosing to take a computer with me. In 2015, I would regularly leave my MacBook in my bag even when I didn't expect to need it, and often because I was too lazy to take it out between trips. That is the benchmark for portable computing, and Apple simply doesn't deliver it anymore. Hopefully that will change someday.

Last night, Aaron shared the week-old Claude Code demo, and I was pretty blown away by it:

I've tried the "agentic" features of some editors (like Cursor's "YOLO" mode) and have been woefully disappointed by how shitty the UX always is. They often break on basic focus changes, hang at random, and frequently require fussy user intervention with a GUI. Claude Code, however, is a simple REPL, which is all I've ever really wanted from a coding assistant. Specifically, I want to be able to write a test in my editor and then tell a CLI to go implement code to pass the test and let it churn as long as it needs.

Of course, I didn't want to actually try Claude Code, because it would have required a massive amount of expensive API tokens to accomplish anything, and I'm a cheapskate who doesn't want to have to pay someone to perform mundane coding tasks. Fortunately, it took five minutes to find an LLM-agnostic fork of Claude Code called Anon Kode and another five minutes to contribute a patch to make it work with a locally-hosted LLM server.

Thirty minutes later and I have a totally-free, locally-hosted version of the Claude Code experience demonstrated in the video above working on my machine (an MacBook Pro with M4 Pro and 48GB of RAM). I figured other people would like to try this too, so here are step-by-step instructions. All you need is an app called LM Studio and Anon Kode's kode CLI.

Running a locally-hosted server with LM Studio

Because Anon Kode needs to make API calls to a server that conforms to the Open AI API, I'm using LM Studio to install models and run that server for me.

1. Download LM Studio
2. When the onboarding UI appears, I recommend unchecking the option to automatically start the server at login
3. After onboarding, click the search icon (or hit Command-Shift-M) and install an appropriate model (I started with "Qwen2.5 Coder 14B", as it can fit comfortably in 48GB)
4. Once downloaded, click the "My Models" icon in the sidebar (Command-3), then click the settings gear button and set the context length to 8192 (this is Anon Kode's default token limit and it currently doesn't seem to respect other values, so increasing the token limit in LM Studio to match is the easiest workaround)
5. Click the "Developer" icon in the sidebar (Command-2), then in the top center of the window, click "Select a model to load" (Command-L) and choose whatever model you just installed
6. Run the server (Command-R) by toggling the control in the upper left of the Developer view
7. In the right sidebar, you should see an "API Usage" pane with a local server URL. Mine is (and I presume yours will be) http://127.0.0.1:1234

Configuring Anon Kode

Since Claude Code is a command-line tool, getting this running will require basic competency with your terminal:

1. First up, you'll need Node.js (or an equivalent runtime) installed. I use homebrew and nodenv to manage my Node installation(s)
2. Install Anon Kode (npm i -g anon-kode)
3. In your terminal, change into your project directory (e.g. cd ~/code/searls/posse_party/)
4. Run kode
5. Use your keyboard to go through its initial setup. Once prompted to choose between "Large Model" and "Small Model" selections, hit escape to exit the wizard, since it doesn't support specifying custom server URLs
6. When asked if you trust the files in this folder (assuming you're in the right project directory), select "Yes, proceed"
7. You should see a prompt. Type /config and hit enter to open the configuration panel, using the arrow keys to navigate and enter to confirm
   1. AI Provider: toggle to "custom" by hitting enter
   2. Small model name:" to "LM Studio" or similar
   3. Small model base URL: http://127.0.0.1:1234/v1 (or whatever URL LM Studio reported when you started your server)
   4. API key for small model: provide any string you like, it just needs to be set (e.g. "NA")
   5. Large model name: to "LM Studio" or similar
   6. API key for large model: again, enter whatever you want
   7. Large model base URL: http://127.0.0.1:1234/v1
   8. Press escape to exit
8. Setting a custom base URL resulted in Anon Kode failing to append v1 to the path of its requests to LM Studio until I restarted it (If this happens to you, press Ctrl-C twice and run kode again)
9. Try asking it to do stuff and see what happens!

That's it! Now what?

Is running a bootleg version of Claude Code useful? Is Claude Code itself useful? I don't know!

I am hardly a master of running LLM locally, but the steps above at least got things working end-to-end so I can start trying different models and tweaking their configuration. If you try this out and have landed on a configuration that works really well for you, let me know!

Gurman with the scoop, summarized by MacRumors:

An updated version of the Mac Studio could launch as soon as this week, reports Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The new machine is expected to be equipped with the M4 Max chip that we first saw in the 2024 MacBook Pro models, but Apple apparently does not have an M4 Ultra chip ready to go. Instead, there could be a version of the ‌Mac Studio‌ that uses an M3 Ultra chip. Apple didn't release an M3 Ultra chip alongside the M3 chip lineup, so it would be a new chip even though it's not part of the current M4 family. The current ‌Mac Studio‌ has an M2 Ultra chip, as does the Mac Pro.

Releasing a previous-generation, higher-end chip is utterly routine from every other manufacturer, but Apple doesn't sell chips, it sells computers.

Offering a Mac Studio in M4 Max and M3 Ultra configurations would give Apple’s marketing team a really fucking narrow needle to thread. One imagines the Ultra will be better for massive video exports and the Max will be better for literally every other workflow. Woof.