dimmke

100% agree here. The actual practical bottleneck is harness and agentic abilities for most tasks.

It's the biggest thing that stuck out to me using local AI with open source projects vs Claude's client. The model itself is good enough I think - Gemma 4 would be fine if it could be used with something as capable as Claude.

And that's gonna stay locked down unfortunately especially on mobile and cars - it needs access to APIs to do that stuff - and not just regular APIs that were built for traditional invoking.

The same way that websites are getting llm.txts I think APIs will also evolve.

This is still worse than Anthropic's right? Because you get access to their top model even at the $20 price point

I haven't seen anybody else post it in this thread, but this is running on 8GB of RAM. It's not the full Gemma 4 32B model. It's a completely different thing from the full Gemma 4 experience if you were running the flagship model, almost to the point of being misleading.

It's their E2B and E4B variants (so 2B and 4B but also quantized)

https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/core/model_card_4#dense_mod...

Claude Code is a subscription tier explicitly designed for agentic, automated, heavy usage. So the 'subscriptions are for human use, API is for automation' line is already blurry by their own offerings.

If the actual concern is use pattern, enforce that directly. What we have instead is metered usage + behavioral restrictions + product fragmentation across three separate offerings.

That's not a clean billing philosophy, it's layers of control stacked on top of each other with no coherent logic tying them together.

If subscriptions are for humans and API is for automation, fine. But then don't meter the human product arbitrarily and don't sell a subscription tier for automation while also restricting automation. Pick a lane.

Gym costs absolutely scale with usage. Equipment wears faster under heavier use. Cleaning and maintenance staff hours scale with how much the facility is used. Consumables like towels, soap, and chalk go faster. HVAC runs harder. The reason gyms can offer flat-rate pricing is that they bet on under-utilization, not that costs are flat.

Setting that aside, even if we accept your argument that gym costs barely scale with usage, then that makes gyms a bad comparison case for Anthropic, whose costs directly scale with usage. You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike.

I'm arguing that both gyms and Anthropic have usage costs that scale with usage, but gym business model assumes a large margin of under-utilization and there's a hard cap to "power user" - I think both of those extremes don't apply to Anthropic's situation. Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier. There's also a natural ceiling on how much any one person can use a gym. There's no equivalent constraint on API usage.

Because a big part of Anthropic's story is that they build based on how people actually use AI. Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal. Throttling them and calling it done is inconsistent with that.

Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast

The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things.

The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym memberships intending to go, feel good about the intention, and then don't follow through. The business model is built on that gap. That's pretty specific to fitness and a handful of similar industries where aspiration drives purchase.

Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.

Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea.

Then they should figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates this type of usage not just blanket ban it

This is a different case - those all have limitations based on human behavior (it's not necessary or possible to constantly be washing your car the entire month when you pay for unlimited washes) - that doesn't exist here. The types of plans available should reflect that reality. If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things.

Your comparisons are all also "unlimited" situations to Claude's very much limited situation. You can't buy a plan for Claude that is marketed as being unlimited. They're already selling people metered usage. They're just also adding restrictions on top of that.

If people are finding new ways to use AI, they should change how they bill. Banning third party harnesses is bad for a lot of reasons - it looks like they're trying to force people to use their software. Strategically it might make sense - gives them a tiny moat if their models ever slip - but it discourages the breakneck pace of innovation and the long term effect is that their customers (largely highly skilled with computers and building software) will look to decouple themselves. Claude is good but it's not so far better than anything else that they can pull shit like this and people will just deal with it.

They already have the regular subscription plans (Pro, Max) and a separate billing process for direct API usage. They could absolutely introduce another type of plan optimized toward this kind of usage or just accept that it's a dumb pipe that is being paid for and having these random arbitrary limitations is just making things more confusing and a bad plan for the future.

I feel like Anthropic is going down a bad path here with billing things this way. Especially as local LLM continues to develop so fast.

I downgraded from my $200 a month plan to my $20 plan and hit limits constantly. I try to use the API access I purchased separately, and it doesn't work with Claude Code (something about the 1 million context requiring extra usage) so I have to use it Continue. Then I get instantly rate limited when it's trying to read 1-2 files.

It just sucks. This whole landscape is still emerging, but if this is what it's like now, pre enshittification, when these companies have shitloads of money - it's going to be so much worse when they start to tighten the screws.

Right now my own incentive is to stop being dependent on Claude for as much as I can as quickly as I can.

My home charger was like $500 ($300 with the credit I got from electric company) and install was like 250. No upgrade needed.

I've also owned a house before that had old electricity - knob and tube (this was before I had an electric car) and paid less than 10k to get the entire electricity system upgraded to something modern. I dont think your 5k-10k thing is accurate for the vast majority of houses.

I've also found that they have gotten a lot more restrictive with new card offers likely because of the massive influencer industry encouraging churning etc...

I try to keep it simple: I have the $95/year Chase Preferred. I definitely get way more than $95 every year in rewards. It's also helpful for auto converting currency when abroad (the fees add up like crazy if you let individual services do this for you.)

I'm currently in Paris on a flight I booked with points but I use this card basically exclusively for all my expenses (except ones that have to be paid with cash/bank acct)

I recently tried to get one of these higher tier cards like the Reserve just for the lounge access and even though I have near perfect credit and longtime customer they wouldn't give me the joining bonus. It's not worth it overall, especially with these changes.

Idk I switched to Firefox earlier this year and it's honestly been really painless. Not sure why a CAPTCHA would trigger based on browser ID when those are so easily spoofed. Why would someone be running a bot on a less popular browser? I have not noticed any change.

The one thing I do notice is that on some very poorly built websites there will be a bug and it's because they haven't checked in Firefox or because I am blocking things that are no longer blockable on Chrome, but this is rare.

Seriously. When I look at the modern state of front-end development, it's actually fucking bonkers to me. Stuff like Lighthouse has caused people to reach for optimizations that are completely absurd.

This might make an arbitrary number go up in test suites, at the cost of massively increasing build complexity and reducing ease of working on the project all for very minimal if any improvement for the hypothetical end user (who will be subject to much greater forces out of the developer's control like their network speed)

I see so much stuff like this, then regularly see websites that are riddled with what I would consider to be very basic user interface and state management errors. It's absolutely infuriating.

Hello fellow figure skater! This is a fun intersection to find on HN

Thank you for saying this. If you look at Amazon's history, it's basically buying most of their competitors.

Southwest is not "the leader" of anything. They're struggling. If they were doing well there would be no motivation to add these changes. They lost 231 million dollars last quarter.

I personally stopped flying Southwest years ago when someone blatantly cut in line while boarding (like a whole section earlier) and I told the gate agent and he rolled his eyes at me and said "we're all trying to get going" I think their seating and check in system is dumb especially when they set up this elaborate system where you have to rush to check in exactly 24 hours before then get mad when you expect them to enforce it.

Fuck Southwest

That's what I don't quite get. I'm really wary of a "from scratch" web browser at this point. I looked at their project and their main selling point is that they're building both the rendering engine and the JS runtime from scratch "Driven by a web standards first approach" - what exactly does that mean? Firefox has always had that approach and web standards are more complex than they've ever been. I don't understand why not using code from other browsers is supposed to be a selling point when all the major browsers have open source rendering engines and runtimes and there's independent runtimes being built like Bun that they could use.

We're talking decades of features they have to support - unless they're planning on strategically dropping support for older unused/deprecated parts of the standard? Even in 2008 Google made the decision to use Webkit for their browser because they understood what an enormous undertaking it would be to write their own rendering engine. That was 16 years ago.

Yeah, obviously however if you don't have previous experience with a framework in your résumé, they're going to choose the people that do.

I jumped off and started using Svelte but have now found looking at job listings all the non tech companies are still using Angular and all the startups/tech centric companies are using Next.js.

I feel like from an employability perspective I shot myself in the foot, but I also dislike both of those frameworks. So maybe I should just quit being a front-end developer and try to retrain as something else.

Dynalist.io

I think it's funny that we're constantly reckoning with the issues that venture capital causes to various things in tech on a website that's funded and maintained by a venture capital fund.

It can't be all bad, right? More and more, it seems like VC is the only way you can go in tech unless you have a really specific business model.

To attempt to put some metrics to this, NGE is in the mid 40s of the top 50 most popular anime list on MAL: https://myanimelist.net/topanime.php?type=bypopularity

No Gundam series is in the top 50.

It's also the oldest anime in that top 50 list, which I think is really indicative of how popular it is. The only other one that's even from the 90s is Cowboy Bepop.

When I say it could sustain a studio, I just mean revenue from merchandise sales etc... It's such a popular IP there's an entire theme park devoted to it.

I'd say NGE is absolutely more popular than Gundam. I think there's a perfect "target age" to get into NGE, and that age is 13-15 and new generations discover it. Quentin Tarantino once said the same thing about a lot of his old movies.

I had not heard of it until a month or two ago and yeah parts of it were definitely a bit cringe in the classic anime fashion but I liked the story and art style overall.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is such a killer anime, it's honestly one of my top all time favorites even though you can tell it had a small budget.

Even their less popular stuff I dig. I just watched Darling in the Franxx and I'm about to start Kiznaiver.

Yes but Evangelion is so massive and popular it'd be enough to sustain a studio. Gainax does not have the rights to NGE though. They only produced the original series back in the 90s.

Hideaki Anno literally setup a brand new studio specifically to do the rebuild films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khara_(studio)

Additionally, "Ozempic" (semaglutide) has become the blanket word to describe an entire class of drugs (GLP-1 Agonists) that all kind of do the same thing. Some of which have already been proven in clinical trials to be even more effective than Ozempic (ex. Tirzepatide)

It's like when COVID hit and somehow "Zoom" became the shorthand for online video meetings even though there were (and still are) a ton of options for that functionality on the market.

For those without college degrees...