Hacker News: saratogacx

New comment by saratogacx in "Claude Opus 5"

saratogacx — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:20:17 +0000

My understanding is that you get $20 in api credits each month and a one time $100 until mid September. So you can still use the model with a subscription but you aren't getting any kind of discount.

I burned through $45 in 3 prompts to fix some bugs in my code (Some kind of tricky to isolate). That thing burns through cash so fast I don't see myself using it outside of maybe building execution plans for other systems

New comment by saratogacx in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

saratogacx — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:05:17 +0000

I think it depends on how you use it. All things in moderation and all. I've had one for years but when I set it up it only allowed it a few notifications. When meetings start during my work day, getting e-mail to my personal account, and when I get messages from my wife, that's it.

So when I'm not working the watch is... just a watch.

New comment by saratogacx in "Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers"

saratogacx — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:56:04 +0000

You don't need to put in a lot of effort to convince people that creepy, deceitful, generally unlikable, rich folks are doing things you won't like and are lying to get away with it.

New comment by saratogacx in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

saratogacx — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:19:21 +0000

> That's the most annoying thing about password managers, and a major reason I still don't use them: there exists no password manager that is cross-platform (desktop/mobile in particular), local-first, and isn't sketchy or enshittified or otherwise on HN's current "don't use it, use instead" list.

I had the same frustration, I ended up with Keepass, the store is a open spec db[0] that has several clients, I use it across windows, android, and Linux without any issue and just sync with your favorite file sync tool.

0 - https://keepass.info/help/kb/kdbx.html

New comment by saratogacx in "Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them"

saratogacx — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:30:59 +0000

The thing about PC though is that there is no exclusivity. Steam built an extremely well respected brand but if that were to turn, the moat is shallow, install a competing client and buy games from there instead. The only internal competition for consoles is digital or physical retail (Or I guess buying game codes could be pseudo-digital).

New comment by saratogacx in "Grok Build is open source"

saratogacx — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:34:46 +0000

It has had one for months. The desktop app has a "code" mode which is Claude Code in GUI form

New comment by saratogacx in "Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip"

saratogacx — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 22:41:33 +0000

128MB ram... Your hard disk could be upgraded to 12.8GB of total space for an extra $50.

Also, you get this _sweet_ 8MB nVidia 3d graphics card!

New comment by saratogacx in "GPT‑Live"

saratogacx — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 05:11:42 +0000

Funny enough I have only encountered two voice modes that were okay to use tools and they are so far out there that you wouldn't even think to try. Bixby and Perplexity (in android phone digital assistant mode) both seem happy to use whatever the account is connected to. I mainly use it for managing my local phone's calendar. Claude chat can interact with it but voice can't which is frustrating.

New comment by saratogacx in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

saratogacx — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 02:00:35 +0000

Government Regulations[1]

> According to the Costco U.K. website, memberships to those stores are only available to certain groups of people. Since the store is classified as a wholesaler, this complies with the U.K.'s wholesale store laws. These dictate that wholesale stores are only accessible to those working for select business sectors.

[1] https://www.thedailymeal.com/1483679/costco-uk-membership-re...

New comment by saratogacx in "Please stop the AI confidence theater"

saratogacx — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:26:54 +0000

Probably not, it just re-baselines. Now the scams aren't for bread money but are for entertainment money. If the time resource isn't changing and the effort isn't changing but the needs fulfilled become wants fulfilled you're getting more joy from each dollar scammed instead of just substance.

It may make pity scams less effective though so I'd expect the implementation to change to focus more on creating urgency and less on altruism.

New comment by saratogacx in "A retrospective of my time on the internet"

saratogacx — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:02:07 +0000

At the time it was happening I recall thinking "This should be a typical flair up that'll die down to smolders in a couple of weeks and life will continue" as so many dicey internet things had done in the past but that time there was something that kept that fire burning, it wasn't organic feeling, it was as if it was hooked up to life support just to stoke more engagement and stronger, more subtlety incompatible opinions.

It worked, we collectively fell for it hook, line, and sinker. It keeps working. It will likely keep working for a long time as people continue to feel empowered by self-entrenchment and the want for affirmation that they're on the right side of history.

New comment by saratogacx in "Updated Xbox Console Prices"

saratogacx — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 19:17:47 +0000

You need to format it as code. (Blank line followed by code lines, indented by 2+ spaces)

  Console          Price -> Old       New
  ------------------------------------------------
  Xbox Series S 512GB       $399.99   $499.99
  Xbox Series S 1TB         $449.99   $599.99
  Xbox Series X 1TB Digital $599.99   $749.99
  Xbox Series X 1TB         $649.99   $799.99

New comment by saratogacx in "Why Does Everyone Hate AI?"

saratogacx — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:08:05 +0000

Asus's AI Suite has been around a lot longer than that. My 2014 Motherboard has the same software, it came on a CD with the board. it was sold as a utility for continual performance, power, and noise/airflow tuning, nothing really like AI is sold as a feature today.

New comment by saratogacx in "Why Does Everyone Hate AI?"

saratogacx — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:58:44 +0000

English really doesn't have a good way of broadly saying "lack of a trait" that isn't "adverse to a trait". In coding we have to have specific terms for lack thereof that is distinct from "vale of zero of".

Discourse, especially around things like AI could benefit from having a term like nullhonest to enforce it is a lack of honesty as an associated concept instead of having zero honesty.

New comment by saratogacx in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

saratogacx — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:13:56 +0000

I'd much rather know that something I think should work won't and where it happens. Bad advice can't become good advice in a vacuum.

New comment by saratogacx in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

saratogacx — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:15:25 +0000

> Mixed metaphors, style over substance, and the idea that "flat" is anything but a way to turn your display into a sludge of rectangles of slightly different shades of grey with little or no differentiation between them, and few or no visual cues as to what elements of windows are clickable.

It isn't even that any more. Now you have "pills" and "Islands" of random rounded shapes completely disconnected from the context they are supposed to be impacting. things float above or next to things with no connection between them. Content suffers for fobs and exclusive sets (old timers call these radio buttons) or tabs are now just things that happen to be close enough that you should just know they're associated with each other.

New comment by saratogacx in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

saratogacx — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:24:43 +0000

If it is mostly your own tooling you may want to look at setting up a dev drive. It is supposed to be more optimized around workloads that would normally spin stuff like defender off the rails.

    System -> Advanced -> 
      -> For developers -> Developer Mode [on] 
      -> Dev Drive -> Create Dev Drive

New comment by saratogacx in "Fox to buy Roku"

saratogacx — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:27:58 +0000

Every one of those sections can be trivially turned off in the settings. Mine just have the list of apps I installed on my device.

New comment by saratogacx in "Every Frame Perfect"

saratogacx — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 06:25:00 +0000

Animations on software are infuriatingly slow these days. I turn on dev mode on my android phone for 2 settings. DPI and double animation speed. Simply to compensate for software design taking up too much space and time. On windows I turn animations off for the same reason. Just let me use the thing.

New comment by saratogacx in "Software Architecture Guide (2019)"

saratogacx — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 06:18:43 +0000

I like to ask this question: "Can I make this system do what I need it to do while being able to stay with the existing architecture or do I need to become a special case?"

There is a lot buried in this question but it can help sus out if the rules in place allow the challenges the system faces today or if it is antiquated in how it views the world it operates in. Good and bad can be related to time and context but like many things in software, it needs to be able to change and sometimes that change requires the willingness to start from scratch with new assumptions.

Attributes like mix of languages, system/task ownership, specialization are symptoms that an architecture may want to enable or discourage but are symptoms, not measures of quality. Automated testing and how much that influences your software design is more aligned with the culture of the organization and how it treats code than it is the arrangement of subsystems it is built on.