Hacker News: pmontra

New comment by pmontra in "Leaving Mozilla"

pmontra — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:11:14 +0000

I remember Nokia and their CEO from Microsoft.

New comment by pmontra in "Leaving Mozilla"

pmontra — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:07:58 +0000

Email is OK. The point is that most conversations moved to other media (mainly chats) and so 90% of my mail is notifications, 9% is newsletters, 1% are real messages. They used to be 99%.

New comment by pmontra in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

pmontra — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 05:36:04 +0000

People have to eat food so they will keep doing business no matter what. If AI cost too much, they will do it without AI. Any resource that costs too much is replaced with cheaper alternatives. AI is no exception. At worst most of the IT business will die and we will make money doing something else.

New comment by pmontra in "US Government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

pmontra — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:07:01 +0000

How do they know that you are not buying Fable and let it use by some non US national working for you? They would be in trouble, not you.

New comment by pmontra in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

pmontra — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:59:03 +0000

A US company paying for Fable with a US credit card could have non US nationals working for it, or be made of only non US nationals. How would Anthropic know? So they shut down the product.

New comment by pmontra in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

pmontra — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:47:29 +0000

Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. But yeah, I got the gist of it. Incumbents like moats and happily pay money to build them. Note that the pricing of Anthropic's models usually increases for new models. Chinese models cost 10 or 100 times less. Are they less capable? Maybe, but they are alternatives unless credit card companies start banning payments to them.

New comment by pmontra in "MiMo Code is now released and open-source"

pmontra — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:04:52 +0000

Honest question: what's garbage in that tool? I like that I can pair it with whatever editor I am using even if for 99% of the time I run it from inside emacs. I usually chat in the Claude window and it edits my files. I can also write a comment in the code, press a key and emacs will tell Claude to implement that comment. Simple needs, simple tool.

New comment by pmontra in "Ask HN: Are you still using a Vision Pro?"

pmontra — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:04:52 +0000

A helmet has another downside: a fair number of people care about having their hairs styled and a helmet destroys that work.

New comment by pmontra in "MiMo Code is now released and open-source"

pmontra — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:54:37 +0000

I don't known how Codex works, but we can set environment variables and point Claude CLI to deepseek. I think that before slashing prices they will slash those environment variables. After all they are not working to give a free TUI to deepseek and possibly to other competitors. But eventually yes, prices will go down or there will be an attempt at a regulatory capture.

New comment by pmontra in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

pmontra — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:30:52 +0000

Town names too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montebello_della_Battaglia

Not in the Wikipedia page (but check the Italian version): it started as "Mons Belli" (Mount of the Battle) because of a battle fought by the Romans a few years before the Hannibal campaign. Then the original meaning was lost and it gained another "of battle" in the 1800s. Mount of the Battle of the Battle. Hopefully there won't be another one to add.

New comment by pmontra in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

pmontra — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:21:57 +0000

Giving up is a wise choice: there are so many other sites to interact with. On the other side they have only one refrigerator.

New comment by pmontra in "macOS Container Machines"

pmontra — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:59:13 +0000

It's called a container machine but it's a virtual machine. I quote from https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...

> container runs containers differently. Using the open source Containerization package, it runs a lightweight VM for each container that you create. This approach has the following properties:

> * Security: Each container has the isolation properties of a full VM, using a minimal set of core utilities and dynamic libraries to reduce resource utilization and attack surface.

> * Privacy: When sharing host data using container, you mount only necessary data into each VM. With a shared VM, you need to mount all data that you may ever want to use into the VM, so that it can be mounted selectively into containers.

> * Performance: Containers created using container require less memory than full VMs, with boot times that are comparable to containers running in a shared VM.

So: you build it as a container image and MacOS starts a VM to run it.

Edit: quite unusually for a container it runs systemd. They give an example "systemctl start postgresql".

New comment by pmontra in "macOS Container Machines"

pmontra — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:14:43 +0000

How is this different from Virtualbox or similar products with a shared folder with the host machine? I expected that existing virtualization tech for Macs already did that. Maybe the improvement is having nothing to configure.

By the way, is it headless or can it run a full Linux desktop? Use case: buy a Mac, uninistall whatever can be uninstalled, run the Linux VM as primary desktop forgetting MacOS and without going through Asahi and the incomplete hardware support.

New comment by pmontra in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

pmontra — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:19:34 +0000

I probably had that kind of 10x moment yesterday. I spent 2.5 hours analysing a feature request and I eventually advised my customer to think very carefully about it: it might solve a problem but the implementation time is going to be long, even with an AI, because of actual development and the time we will spend in testing it. Furthermore the new infrastructure will have recurring costs higher than what it saves. My advice is not to proceed. 2.5 hours vs 25 or more. 10x.

New comment by pmontra in "Ask HN: Are you still using a Vision Pro?"

pmontra — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:50:53 +0000

The weight is important but it's only a part of what's wrong with those kind of devices. Wearing something that hides their face is something that people do at Carnival or because they must. It's antisocial. It creates a barrier. It isolates from other people. There is no chance it will become something people will do together with other people not wearing the same device.

New comment by pmontra in "Apple Core AI Framework"

pmontra — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:09:43 +0000

In the 80s we thought that the future of computing was clearly local, home computers, PCs, Macs, the office server (Novell, then Windows NT with disk shares) etc. Add 40 years and we are back to a centralized infrastructure with the modern equivalent of smart terminals.

The AI future will be clearly... what it will be. Probably bouncing back and forth from local to centralized. However, if there are money to be made by selling things that people run locally, it seems that centralizing creates more power and hence more money.

New comment by pmontra in "MiMo-v2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed: 1T model with 1000 tokens per second"

pmontra — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:48:11 +0000

> The things I had to learn and the informed decisions I had to make? All pointless trivia, now. A child could do it.

Probably this is a hyperbole. Did you do the experiment? I expect that the child won't be able to do it. Ask an adult. Same thing. Ask an expert of the domain. Maybe but not as fast or as good as you.

New comment by pmontra in "MiMo-v2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed: 1T model with 1000 tokens per second"

pmontra — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:39:34 +0000

If you split the tasks for the AI in small chucks you keep the architectural control and it's not a slot machine anymore. You still read code and occasionally you write code too. Not much but it's the price to pay for the extra speed.

If you start the AI on something big and come back after one hour then yes, you might discover that you wasted an hour and got nothing.

New comment by pmontra in "Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?"

pmontra — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:16:05 +0000

Which Python tooling? I know that uv is replacing pip but all of my costumers' projects still use pip. One of them installed python with asdf. I can't think about any other tool we are using except Claude, but I don't think that's the kind of tool we are writing about. We deploy with a custom bash script resembling Ruby's Capistrano. Those projects are web apps with server generated HTML.

New comment by pmontra in "Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?"

pmontra — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:02:34 +0000

Any Rails app. A random one: Redmine. You can look at this file and browse the rest of the repository.

https://github.com/redmine/redmine/blob/master/app/controlle...