Hacker News: theturtletalks

New comment by theturtletalks in "Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model"

theturtletalks — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:28:09 +0000

There’s 2 arguments.

1. He’s talking about training new models and at one point, having data was valuable. Now synthetic data is being used to train models

2. Companies like SalesForce who’s moat is having all your customer data so you’ll be locked in. You could extract it but you’d have to clean it and then change it to your new schema. With LLMs, you can do that in minutes and even use SalesForces MCP or API to get all your data and leave.

It’s exactly why companies like Figma are gate keeping their MCP. They know that swapping their MCP with Paper’s or any new one is easy.

The moats are evaporating as we speak. Distribution is one of the smaller ones left, but the personal software trend might eat that too.

New comment by theturtletalks in "Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model"

theturtletalks — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:23:27 +0000

I’ve built a software factory and am using it to build an open-source alternative to every SaaS. What do you mean it’s not possible? A harness like Pi can be turned into a software factory with the right spec, extensions, skills, and a cron.

New comment by theturtletalks in "Tesla takes on $30B in credit as it approaches unprofitability"

theturtletalks — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:21:35 +0000

You can’t even buy a car in Texas unless it’s from a dealership. Dealerships and Car Manufacturers use regulatory capture to make sure their moat stays. I’m sure they will try to block Chinese EVs and buying one is a long ways out.

New comment by theturtletalks in "Tesla takes on $30B in credit as it approaches unprofitability"

theturtletalks — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:08:21 +0000

If they follow what they did with AI and make it open-source, I’m first in line to buy. The Spider-Man ads on BMW is just the beginning and even if you would never buy an open-source car, doesn’t mean it won’t keep the competition honest.

New comment by theturtletalks in "U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels"

theturtletalks — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:11:31 +0000

Yeah USPS definitely reuses tracking numbers, but how were these guys able to overwrite the delivery address? I feel like this shouldn’t be possible unless they are inside the system.

New comment by theturtletalks in "U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels"

theturtletalks — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:42:06 +0000

Yes, I’m deep in e-commerce and fraudulent labels are all over the place. Even Amazon, 3rd party sellers are using these fake labels to sell items for cheaper and win the buy box. Even UPS has this issue.

I get that they have reverse engineered how the numbers are created, but how are they showing up in USPS and UPS databases?

Are shipping platforms like shipengine getting these labels pre-made and this fake label seller has reverse engineered how these tracking numbers are created programmatically and are essentially using the ones allocated to these big shipping platforms?

New comment by theturtletalks in "U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels"

theturtletalks — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:10:39 +0000

I’ve read about this. They basically reverse engineered how USPS creates the unique tracking number.

New comment by theturtletalks in "ChatGPT Pro 500"

theturtletalks — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:09:00 +0000

Yes they used to show an estimate of how many messages you can send in each tier and for each model.

But past few weeks, I don’t think it was accurate since my usage was going down faster. They nerfed the usage and now aren’t even giving estimates.

New comment by theturtletalks in "GPT 6.1 Sol"

theturtletalks — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:32:07 +0000

I think they are hitting compute restrictions. And buying compute right now can be 3-4X. And the costs are increasing. If they train a larger model and demand is high, that’s a lot of compute for Codex subscriptions, which is a loss leader for them. Especially Pro 20X which they just nerfed to 10X.

New comment by theturtletalks in "Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat"

theturtletalks — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:31:02 +0000

IPX was before my day, but interesting to learn IPX was the main protocol before TCP/IP got popular

New comment by theturtletalks in "Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat"

theturtletalks — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:13:50 +0000

In our high school, you could install the Halo: Combat Evolved demo so we would play LAN across the whole school. They eventually caught on and started deleting Halo from all the computers, so we would just have the installation file on a flash drive, install it, and then uninstall it when done.

New comment by theturtletalks in "Sonnet 5.5"

theturtletalks — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 02:34:30 +0000

You’re right, the monetization of software is fading and building actual moats is becoming difficult. If you have distribution, regardless of your app, you still have a long run way.

I was more pointing out that software gets enshittified. A plumber necessarily doesn’t and if the plumber does get worse, you can call a different one next time. Software, especially B2B, has switching costs and lock in. So you just have to put up with it.

Another point is that most software started with a few features and to get more market share and support more use cases, it became worse for the users using the early features. That’s why they try to build their own so it’s not bloated with features you will never use.

New comment by theturtletalks in "Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat"

theturtletalks — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 01:07:57 +0000

I used to put Ubuntu on a flash drive and boot the computer to that. Not sure if it helped bypass website restrictions.

New comment by theturtletalks in "Sonnet 5.5"

theturtletalks — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:19:20 +0000

The plumbing analogy doesn’t match software. You pay for a plumber once and you can always choose a new plumber. With software, it’s a monthly fee that will continue to increase over time. More features behind higher tiers. And probably taking and selling your data. So why wouldn’t a person try to build something custom for their needs? They have the ultimate feedback loop of actually using the product and telling AI the issue and having AI fix it. Most software people create are probably something they never used it their lives. But the best software comes from people building it that also use it. Even Shopify started when Tobi started a snowboarding store online and couldn’t suitable e-commerce software.

You’re right about people not watching plumbing videos and doing it themselves. But the equivalent example would be open-source software in the tech example. But instead of reading open-source code to see how different features were implemented, AI can go and dig into the code and figure it out.

New comment by theturtletalks in "Jev was built for agents, here's how we're using it in computer use instead"

theturtletalks — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 21:59:25 +0000

I’m trying to use Jev as a QA agent for our software factory. But since it’s a classifier, is it even a good QA agent? Or just quick at clicking everywhere?

New comment by theturtletalks in "Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red"

theturtletalks — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:33:09 +0000

Nice. When I saw your connection to Frigade, I knew there was a connection haha

New comment by theturtletalks in "Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red"

theturtletalks — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:26:04 +0000

Is Frigade going to use Jev to do object detection?

New comment by theturtletalks in "Strands Harness"

theturtletalks — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:57:40 +0000

I figured it was lack of MCP support. I would just include a note why it was excluded. Have you checked out FX? It seems to be like Pi but will more things out of the box like MCP.

New comment by theturtletalks in "Strands Harness"

theturtletalks — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:11:31 +0000

This is true, but the team said on Twitter that they were heavily inspired by Pi and this whole team used it extensively:

https://x.com/tianyi/status/2088306143772946499

New comment by theturtletalks in "Strands Harness"

theturtletalks — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:57:55 +0000

That’s fair, but Strands is advertising their harness needing way less tokens which does relate to cost.

In that same vein, Pi is less bloated then Deepseek and Oh My Pi, which are built on top of Pi. Isn’t it dubious to leave it out?