Hacker News: tomComb

New comment by tomComb in "Stop the Apple Music app from launching"

tomComb — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:11:02 +0000

I guess you mean it runs automatically at Mac user login, so that it is running all the time.

New comment by tomComb in "Stop the Apple Music app from launching"

tomComb — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:54:44 +0000

It seems I need to leave this running for it to work? So it's not just a configuration changes.

New comment by tomComb in "Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas""

tomComb — Mon, 25 May 2026 20:07:24 +0000

I think you’re referring to the short term impacts of AI and he’s thinking more long-term.

Also, AI, even short term, is going to make some people and some countries extremely wealthy, so maybe this isn’t such a bad time to be thinking about those who are still extremely poor and who won’t benefit.

New comment by tomComb in "Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?"

tomComb — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:30:05 +0000

I can't believe that readers of HN actually think that that is how it does or should work.

Google/GCP can only make very general statements and in this case we want more than that.

They need to tell Railway and Railway needs to tell us, or Railway can tell us that Google is refusing to tell them.

Either way, we need to hear about this from Railway.

New comment by tomComb in "Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension"

tomComb — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:23:52 +0000

They can't - that would violate the privacy rights of their customer.

They need to tell Railway and Railway needs to tell us, or Railway can tell us that Google is refusing to tell them.

Either way, we need to hear about this from Railway.

New comment by tomComb in "White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released"

tomComb — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:18:51 +0000

I think we know how this goes ...

Administration officials will insist that this will be bipartisan and just for national security.

Trump will then just come out and say it: that they won't authorize models that provide "fake news" such as him not winning the election by the most votes ever.

There will be a big fuss as people and media point to this as the smoking gun, but then it will turn out that American voters just don't care.

I guess we could learn to appreciate Mistral sooner than expected.

New comment by tomComb in "Our principles"

tomComb — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:44:36 +0000

Having it in the hands of public companies or foundations seems preferable to me to having it in the hands of private companies or individuals.

New comment by tomComb in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

tomComb — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:09:02 +0000

This sounds great, except for one thing: you can scale your compute (CPU & RAM) as needed but your storage appears to scale with it.

So, if I use a "16 vCPUs, 32GB RAM, 400GB SSD" machine for a period of intense compute, and then want to scale that down to "2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM", most of my storage disappears?

That rather ruins the potential of the advertised scalability.

New comment by tomComb in "Introduction to Obsidian"

tomComb — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:40:56 +0000

Joplin looks great, and is open source, but it appears to have one problem: the primary data store is SQLite, not files, and in this AI infected era having plain text files on the local filesystem is really important.

So if I am correct the "cloud drive as the storage" option is syncing with a the local SQLite db and to get local files one would need to be syncing the local db with both the cloud drive and the local filesystem.

With Obsidian I sync from local files direct to a cloud drive.

New comment by tomComb in "Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read"

tomComb — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:39:31 +0000

That would be great! Please do.

New comment by tomComb in "Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents"

tomComb — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:52:42 +0000

But it wouldn’t be non paying customers. That was from the on demand section. I just want to pay for what I use without getting into a subscription.

New comment by tomComb in "Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents"

tomComb — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:49:03 +0000

? You say 'yes' but you seem to be answering a different question. Docker desktop only makes me choose a max ram - it dynamically scales RAM usage. I don't need fully automatic like that, but the ability to vertically scale RAM for an existing instance is really important, particularly given the cost of RAM these days.

New comment by tomComb in "Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents"

tomComb — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:47:04 +0000

But your pricing page suggests that that is not available without a subscription: in the on-demand pricing section "persistent Snapshots" and "Persistent VM's" have an 'x'.

New comment by tomComb in "Launch HN: Freestyle: Sandboxes for AI Coding Agents"

tomComb — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:04:34 +0000

Can your service scale ram? like the way docker desktop does. Manual is fine.

New comment by tomComb in "Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents"

tomComb — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:20:39 +0000

And fly.io sprites

New comment by tomComb in "We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant"

tomComb — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:17:59 +0000

And Turso has built a Virtual Filesystem on top of their SQLite.

AgentFS https://agentfs.ai/ https://github.com/tursodatabase/agentfs

Which sounds like a great idea, except that is uses NFS instead of FUSE (note that macFUSE now has a FSKit backend so FUSE seems like the best solution for both Mac and Linux).

New comment by tomComb in "Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew"

tomComb — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:30:38 +0000

And zerobrew, like the original Homebrew, is compatible with Linux.

It appears that Nanobrew is not.

I care about the light-weight efficiency of these new native code variants much more when I want to use brew on some little Linux container or VM or CI, than I do for my macOS development machine.

New comment by tomComb in "My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)"

tomComb — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:16:01 +0000

The pebble index seems like the optimal form for this.

https://repebble.com/index

Could be pressed even if your hands were busy.

New comment by tomComb in "Your phone is an entire computer"

tomComb — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:42:27 +0000

The pixels all ship with unlocked bootloaders.

New comment by tomComb in "Google Workspace CLI"

tomComb — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:29:27 +0000

Yikes, I wrote that? I hate it when people write cryptic replies like that.

What I meant was 'yes', Google Workspace CLI appears to quite similar to 'gogcli', the CLI written for OpenClaw. Both provide CLI access to a broad range of Google services for both workspace and regular gmail accounts.

GAM, on the other hand, is an admin tool, and strictly for Google Workspace accounts.