jwr

That is a modern BBS! I love the idea. Though I guess most people these days don't know what a BBS is, if you don't, look it up.

Yes, please do. Your support of Russia is the only reason why I stopped using Kagi and paying for Kagi. I really want to like you and use your product.

Well it's a good thing they killed Aperture, then. Makes perfect sense.

(I was badly affected by that and decided not to trust them to maintain anything over the long term anymore)

Update: I now re-read the job posting and also realized that none of the responsibilities listed there are good for the users. This is bad news.

How is it better than, say, LM Studio? And does it run MTP models (which from what I understand are GGUF)?

The word "frontier" is like "load-bearing" at this point (Claude Code users will know what I mean). I wish we could stop using it. Especially as this does not, in fact, run the leading/top models locally on your Mac.

If you are developing something significant, you don't want your competitors to be able to later say "build me something like THAT over there".

I haven't measured the percentage of users, so I wouldn't venture an opinion with a number, but these concerns do exist.

Well, there is the small issue of privacy policy: Kimi will train their models on your interactions if you use their subscriptions, and only with direct API usage (billed at API prices) they say they won't. Whether you trust that is another matter.

Those things do make a difference to some of us, even though nothing is black and white. In my case, I'll probably want to wait until other providers appear through OpenRouter and then I'll try to judge how much I trust them. But even if I don't trust them much, they don't train models anyway, so the likelihood of my data being used that way is smaller.

As someone who has used both kinds over many, many years: it really doesn't matter.

I try to avoid "smart" appliances and if the manufacturer forces the "smart" stuff, I never enable it. Even my induction hob would like to connect to wifi (no idea what that would be useful for), but that's just not happening.

The problem with many cheap USB-C devices is that they lack a required resistor on the USB-C pins, which means they won't charge from a compliant USB-C PD charger, only through a USB-A to USB-C cable.

It's idiotic that companies don't even test this properly and never read the specs, but here we are. Many cheap Chinese devices like toothbrushes will have this problem.

Incidentally, companies developing technologies for reusing EV batteries in grid storage applications (where even <80% capacity EV batteries are just fine for many years), have trouble getting enough EV batteries, because they last much longer than we were made to believe.

Interesting. The major factor seems to be the latency of change-compile-test cycle.

I wonder if one of the reasons I've been getting such excellent results from LLMs with Clojure could be that they can immediately try things out in the running REPL. Rebuilding my entire application from scratch takes minutes, while connecting to a running system through nREPL and compiling single functions or namespaces takes less than a second.

I believe we are talking about the same thing.

You can't give up the right to sign your work with your name. But you can definitely share rights to reproduce your work etc — although perhaps not in a clickable EULA.

This looks very similar to what I do in Emacs, using ghostel, which also has the advantage of using libghostty for excellent quality terminal rendering.

Mostly because I have to do way too much clicking to see things in the column view. Columns are usually too narrow. Then you have to scroll horizontally to get to see your files. Search is slow. Open windows are kinda-remembered, but not always, it seems. And I'd like some folders to be sorted by date modified (downloads, anyone?) and most others by name. Then there is no quick "fuzzy find in a subtree" fzf-like functionality. I mean, compared to the Windows garbage this is better, but it has seen little love over the last 20 years or so and it shows.

I really, really need a better Finder. I've been using Path Finder for many years, but it was always a so-so replacement and the company wasn't very interested in moving it forward (even fixing bugs took many years). I eventually gave up and stopped paying for it.

I now use the Finder (column view) and it sucks.

At a first glance, I like this app. The problem I have is that I tend to think about the long term: will this app be around in 5 years? There is a plethora of AI-coded apps (this in itself doesn't bother me) where the author loses interest after just a couple of weeks.

And (here come the HN downvotes, because this is really unpopular on HN) the one-time pricing model doesn't lend itself to long-term sustainability, unfortunately. I know people hate to hear that, but ask anyone who tried to run a small or solo-founder business whether it's possible to make ends meet with one-time purchases.

HN has such a knee-jerk reaction to subscriptions that it will definitely not enjoy it. See how my comment above was downvoted into oblivion just for mentioning them. Problem is, those HN commenters have not tried to run a sustainable business.

The perspective is very different once you actually try to make ends meet.

My arguably rather informative comment based on 10 years of running a sustainable B2B SaaS got downvoted to 0. I realize subscriptions are unpopular (nobody likes paying regularly), but downvoting what you disagree with means that eventually it will become invisible and you will only see what you agree with.

I think I need to take a break from posting on HN.

But that's a gamble! That's exactly my point. Someone is betting on something. How long the customer will stay, how long the software will be maintained and available, etc.

you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you

There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions. You can't go to a local bakery and pay $24 for life to get fresh rolls every day.

Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.

Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems (all too often).

The difference is that my customers are mostly engineers in small to medium sized businesses. They understand that 1) ongoing development costs money, hence subscriptions, 2) there are no magic wands and things are indeed more complex than they seem.

This is one of the reasons why I don't want to get into B2C. At a first approximation, people just don't want to spend money, hate subscriptions, have zero appreciation for how much ongoing development costs, do not understand that the money has to come from somewhere and that $5 purchase 6 years ago really doesn't cover the costs, and do not understand the complexity of software and product development.

Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.

Incidentally, I thought personal support would be a competitive differentiator, but I don't think it really works that way. Yes, customers do appreciate it a lot, but so what? Business customers don't talk to each other much, you won't get "viral" recommendations. And new potential customers have no idea how your support works, they think it's the same AI chatbot and knowledge base search as anywhere else.

As a reminder "EU cookie banners" are not required if you use cookies for site functionality. They are only required if your site uses these to track users.

This needs repeating, it's a common misconception (deliberately spread by many, too) that the EU requires cookie banners for all cookies.

The black PR has been very effective. I own an EV and the first question I always get from non-EV people when they find out is "…but what about the range, isn't that a problem?", while the second one is invariably "but what about the battery, I heard it only lasts a year or two and it's so expensive to replace!".

The myths are now strong and it will indeed take a long time to dispel them.

Also, spel (https://github.com/Blockether/spel) for persistent browser sessions (through a daemon) and Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit engines.

Exactly! I can't stop wondering: are these executives just not thinking, or are they blindly repeating what they were told to? If I get into a rental car, do they seriously think I want to spend the next 30 minutes logging into Spotify, mapping apps, Overcast and anything else that I want to use but that needs to know me? And then worry about logging out of all that stuff once I return the rental?

I am so tired of people repeating this. Usually, this results from conflating two uses of MCP: local, which can indeed be replaced by CLI (and you can argue which one is better), and remote, which is entirely different, and there is no way to replace it with a CLI (note that you are making an implicit assumption that a CLI tool can be used at all, which is not always the case).

Please don't repeat this. It's like saying that apples are dead and oranges are the future.

I also wish we brought back interesting discussions in a medium that is not corporate-controlled, but I do not long for those crappy forums. I always thought they were a major regression. We had Usenet, and it had easily filterable threaded conversations with a plethora of good readers. The only thing it lacked was good inline image support, but that could have been bolted on. Instead, we started implementing those terrible forums. The necessity to bookmark multiple forums if you wanted to participate in multiple discussions. Bugs, captchas... There were a ton of difficulties with accessing those. And, of course, you had to register for each one with a username and a password.

The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will.

Well, I can tell you how my thinking goes: 1) I don't buy my computer just to run LLMs and there are many scenarios where I benefit from both a decent GPU and from a large amount of RAM, 2) I run a solo-founder business which owns exactly one computer in the entire company so it might as well be a good one, and 3) I don't need a new car, so comparing pricing this way is irrelevant.

In other words, yes, buying this kind of machine only to run an LLM locally doesn't make sense, because local LLMs generally still suck for serious programming work (they work great for spam filtering though!). But more generally this machine makes sense for a lot of people.

If these kinds of breaches were actually costly, then people would indeed treat PII as toxic. But they aren't. The media brouhaha blows over within a week or so, and things are fine again.

Leaking PII should be very, very expensive, and then this idiocy would stop.