Hacker News: merlindru

New comment by merlindru in "GTA 6 Developers Unionize"

merlindru — Sat, 30 May 2026 09:06:30 +0000

yes but the compensation part is the problem

An 80h week should not be compensated the same as two 40h weeks

New comment by merlindru in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

merlindru — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:36:43 +0000

it's just extrapolation.

it's

    (revenue of this month) * 12

in other words, "if every month was as good as this one, here's how much we'd make in a year"

that means, of course, if you make $1000 in january, your RRR is $12000.

...even if you end up making $0 every other month and thus only $1000 total that year.

thats why RRR is perhaps harmful. especially when it's not growing. it can be much bigger than the actual revenue. in anthropics case it's rapidly climbing, though, so it underestimates revenue if that growth keeps up

New comment by merlindru in "Claude Opus 4.8"

merlindru — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:25:38 +0000

But is there any reason to state something like that publicly if you don't believe it? I certainly think that someone smart enough to be that deceptive would also realize it's not a great look, or at least highly questionable with little benefit

Everyone who reads this seemingly has the same "wtf?" reaction. The "I AM ALIVE" image has been making rounds lately again at least :P

New comment by merlindru in "Claude Opus 4.8"

merlindru — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:21:47 +0000

surely training also gets cheaper so justifying it becomes easier?

i think it'll be more like we get 1-10T models and then distill those down into smaller models, though

It seems like the best small models today are all distilled from bigger models

Moreover, I hypothesize Claude Opus 4.7 and now 4.8 are a distillation of Claude Mythos

New comment by merlindru in "Claude Opus 4.8"

merlindru — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:19:23 +0000

Same. 4.7 felt like a definite regression

New comment by merlindru in "Bun support is now limited and deprecated"

merlindru — Sat, 23 May 2026 09:02:01 +0000

i highly disagree with that framing. the essence of a program is not the fact that people have been running it

you could write a great program and never run it. does that mean the program does now not exist? or that it is not a new, unique thing?

if anything, the essence of a program is made up by all of the things you mentioned!

New comment by merlindru in "Bun support is now limited and deprecated"

merlindru — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:58:02 +0000

the proof is on github; it's true

New comment by merlindru in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

merlindru — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:37:58 +0000

sorry i had missed this! this is extremely interesting. thank you for sharing. i thought about this approach and came to the same conclusions as the reddit thread you shared. then again, it probably works fine for 80% of cases...

New comment by merlindru in "Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc"

merlindru — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:21:59 +0000

how do you square that with the "no LLM translators" rule? i agree i dont think they hate LLMs but that one seems unreasonable and odd, and makes me wonder if its ideological after all

New comment by merlindru in "Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged"

merlindru — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:20:14 +0000

Jarred had tweeted that they're using the rust version internally with Claude Code

New comment by merlindru in "Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision..."

merlindru — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:28:54 +0000

Gotta be a seeding issue. If it's not, and you can prove it, you're about to be a little famous probably :P

New comment by merlindru in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)"

merlindru — Wed, 06 May 2026 11:54:27 +0000

Location: Germany Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes, especially for great fit

Technologies: Great with TypeScript. React, Svelte, Vue, Solid, all things frontend. UI/UX design. Love Rust and Zig. Ethereum/Web3. Some cryptography (wrote provably-fair gaming algorithm). Mac app development, macOS accessibility and HID APIs. Bun and Node.js. Audio engineering.

Résumé: Please shoot me an email:

Email: merlin@merlin.audio (work) merlindruzinec@gmail.com (personal)

New comment by merlindru in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

merlindru — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:03:34 +0000

That's how I got into this thing in the first place, hah. Golden advice. It's incredibly cool to see what some apps offer. More of them have great accessibility support than you think (or at least than I thought!)

New comment by merlindru in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

merlindru — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:53:50 +0000

Not really IMO, webmcp has devs change their apps. invoke just works with existing apps, especially ones that are accessible

invoke rather has overlap with Claude's and Codex' computer-use, except the steps are stored/scripted.

webmcp is bottom-up. computer-use & invoke are top-down

New comment by merlindru in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

merlindru — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:04:59 +0000

i'm not too familiar with browserbase, but invoke works with any macOS app (or at least the accessible ones), i think browserbase is only for browser usage.

in the context of this blog post, the conclusion looks similar though!

"use the whole web like it's an API"

works much better than

"figure out similar or identical tasks from a clean slate every single time you do them"

New comment by merlindru in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

merlindru — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:46:02 +0000

i think this goes both ways too :) agents have been a boon for everyone with disabilities, carpal tunnel, RSI, ADHD, anything

and now the fact that interfaces need to be accessible to agents, not just humans, ironically increases it for humans in return

New comment by merlindru in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

merlindru — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:08:36 +0000

shit, why didn't i think of that

i tend to think of invoke as "an API over macOS apps" tho...

doesn't `invoke finder shareAndCopyLink` read very nicely? :P

New comment by merlindru in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

merlindru — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:06:29 +0000

this is protected against at the OS level, provided the applications declare the input correctly as a SecureTextField.

i so far haven't found any application that doesn't.

all you're able to get out, as far as i can tell, is the length of the entered password.

New comment by merlindru in "Zig → Rust porting guide"

merlindru — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:57:05 +0000

ah, i see what you're saying. fair point! though the argument was that LLMs essentially are a yet higher level programming language (or, rather, let you write in a higher level language).

New comment by merlindru in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

merlindru — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:54:07 +0000

I'm building something that fixes this exact problem[1].

The landing page doesn't advertise it yet, but essentially, I give agents a small set of tools to explore apps' surfaces, and then an API over common macOS functions, especially those related to accessibility.

The agent explores the app, then writes a repeatable workflow for it. Then it can run that workflow through CLI: `invoke chrome pinTab`

Why accessibility? Well, turns out that it's just a good DOM in general. It's structure for apps. Not all apps implement it perfectly, but enough do to make it wildly useful.

[1] https://getinvoke.com - note that the landing page is targeted towards creatives right now and doesn't talk about this use case yet