Hacker News: computomatic

New comment by computomatic in "Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?"

computomatic — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 09:36:20 +0000

You can access Claude models through any number of providers - OpenRouter, AWS Bedrock, etc. and as far as I know, Claude Code can be used with any of them. The only real benefit to going direct through Anthropic is the subscriptions. It’s worth the risk for the discount, but if you get locked out, there’s other (pricy) options to get unblocked.

New comment by computomatic in "No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector"

computomatic — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 21:45:24 +0000

It’s a business-scale cost. When I say materially useful, I mean replacing multiple salaries and improving quality at the same time. Not some variant of “make an existing employee 20% faster.”

The personal hobby version is to get the Claude max plan.

New comment by computomatic in "No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector"

computomatic — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 21:16:27 +0000

“Marginal” improvement isn’t really going to be enough. Products need to be closer to 10x better than the alternative to get traction (which can be divided across several dimensions). AI, I think, is just starting to get there.

New comment by computomatic in "No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector"

computomatic — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 20:34:58 +0000

I don’t know about you, but for me materially useful AI costs around $10,000/mo in tokens. But it is very useful.

Claude subscriptions help, but only if I come in with the expertise to build the entire system around the model and I don’t mind the whole thing grinding to a halt when my session limit is saturated. Anyone selling the system off the shelf is going to be charging API rates. Computers were cheap in comparison.

New comment by computomatic in "Dream-1"

computomatic — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 20:28:58 +0000

I came across this recently and was initially surprised too. It makes sense when you consider that any company trying to build models (or an agent/value-add layer on top of a model) needs benchmarks. The best funded will do the full vertical - build their benchmarks and models together - but many will outsource the benchmark. This is particularly valuable when the dataset is difficult to compile (robotics being a prime example) - it makes more sense to let the benchmark vendor focus on that.

New comment by computomatic in "Dream-1"

computomatic — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 20:23:32 +0000

Wouldn’t it just be easier to ask their team to upvote the post? They probably all have legitimate hacker news accounts already and are happy to upvote their work.

New comment by computomatic in "New Apple TV 4K"

computomatic — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 22:49:53 +0000

It’s more of a fun anecdote, but people forget that there was once a plague of stolen Apple devices. Apple customers were frequently targeted by pickpockets, etc. because of the value of the devices. I have no evidence but I’ve always believed this was the root of the privacy focus - Apple could lock devices to biometrics and eliminate various workarounds, making stolen devices worthless, and the thefts evaporated practically overnight.

Phone theft is a growing problem again, but it’s still less common than it was because they need to get an unlocked device, and I don’t hear them targeting Apple in particular.

New comment by computomatic in "Apple HomeView"

computomatic — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 22:34:48 +0000

> when you want to let them jump in and out of multiple apps (e.g. pick what game they want to play on their own)

The solution to that is Assistive Access.

It’s more painful to use than it should be, but it absolutely solves this problem.

New comment by computomatic in "So, you’d like to sell your print issues of The Onion?"

computomatic — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:01:00 +0000

I’ve had the privilege to work at a company with a highly aligned legal team. It turns out there are quite a few people who get law degrees and are just sensible, chill, fun people. And if you can hire them onto staff, there’s no limit to the awesome things you can do.

New comment by computomatic in "Apple Pass Designer"

computomatic — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:47:36 +0000

Which also seems a bit silly because rural areas have plenty of events and many use e-tickets. Maybe OP just doesn't like events.

New comment by computomatic in "Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1"

computomatic — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:44:27 +0000

GPUs aren’t becoming outdated in practice. An H100 still rents for something like $3/hour. The only reason to take them offline today would be due to limited data centre capacity. In space, that doesn’t apply.

For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.

Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.

Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.

For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.

At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.

New comment by computomatic in "Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]"

computomatic — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 22:34:56 +0000

How do you evaluate that?

New comment by computomatic in "Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test"

computomatic — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:39:35 +0000

Zoom in on the large tree in the background. It looks as if it has ornamental balls hanging off it.

New comment by computomatic in "AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran"

computomatic — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:46:37 +0000

Yes, this, and the article seems pretty clear that only "some data stored exclusively in Bahrain" is affected. Add to that the option to store data with reduced redundancy (in S3, for example), and I don't really see what the drama is about.

Amazon only claims "99.999999999% durability" per year, even for the properly replicated stuff.[0]

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDu...

New comment by computomatic in "Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route"

computomatic — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:30:47 +0000

Suezmax tankers, panamax, etc. Anything bigger needs to go around

New comment by computomatic in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

computomatic — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:15:11 +0000

You can request a ride via Uber. They aren't building the tech. I find it a bit unclear who is operating the fleet (Uber or Wayve), but that seems irrelevant when the question is whether the vehicles' autonomous technology is safe.

New comment by computomatic in "I have a theory that software drives people insane"

computomatic — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:09:34 +0000

This is likely the start to a useful approach. I suspect the crux of the challenge is that engineers who need to write code get very pedantic in their questions and picking the answers apart (because we need to be! code leaves no room for ambiguity or intuition). And you can imagine how that feels from the other side. I imagine a lot of people feel like an engineer asking about the actual problem feels like getting goaded into some sort of pedantic debate. A natural response will be to try to dictate what to build (often micromanaging) and avoid the discussion about why at all costs. Writing offers a bit of a neutralizing buffer, at least.

New comment by computomatic in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

computomatic — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:35:19 +0000

Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?

New comment by computomatic in "Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)"

computomatic — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:50:02 +0000

Interesting idea. Is there a practical way to obtain those permit records at scale?

New comment by computomatic in "A/I shuts down"

computomatic — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 16:09:53 +0000

Most of this has me rolling my eyes (“cadre of radical hackers”? really?), but this part is interesting:

> The A/I Collective… manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.

What is the truth behind that? Such behaviour would undermine A/I’s claim they are akin to Gmail if they explicitly are not a neutral ISP. After that, it becomes a question of degrees: what were their specific criteria for access to the platform?

Asking out of genuine curiosity. I wasn’t familiar with this group before today.