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toddmorey

6,901 karma · joined November 25, 2009

Building for the web for 20+ years. Currently with amazing folks at OnMachina.
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toddmorey··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
Well, I think from the technology side, the performance and capacity you can get in a personal computer (especially a laptop) is absolutely incredible.

It's just component suppl and that supply is being eaten up and re-diverted to data centers. Prices and availability will be in poor shape. Though I am wondering if GPU compute and memory start to diverge enough that AI companies begin using such specialized chips they stop threatening consumer devices. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.

toddmorey··on Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV
counterpoint: I have an EV that I never drive more than 77 miles a day and I paid over $70k for it. Top speed would definitely be a limiting factor, but I do think there's a huge gap in the mobility market between e-bike and a traditional (and expensive!) car.
toddmorey··on GLM 5.2 vs. Opus
I’m actually amazed at the output since GLM doesn’t have eyes. If GLM 5.2 costs 1/5 as much, seems like it could be set up to reach out to a multimodal model for vision tasks when required. Closer to parity but probably still significantly cheaper.
toddmorey··on Running local models is good now
For the curious, it looks like a PC with a RTX 5090 32GB graphics card will run you about $6,000.
toddmorey··on "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
I always imagine the model rolling its silicon eyes when it’s assigned a personality (“you are an expert growth hacker”) at the start of the prompt. Was that ever actually shown to be effective? Is it still?
toddmorey··on Waymo Premier
I'm SO tired of subscription services that only offer the opportunity to buy more stuff.

  - Doordash wants you to subscribe
  - AMC movies want you to subscribe
  - Now Waymo wants you to subscribe
You can't buy anything now without being hassled for a subscription. I don't see any value here except for when they degrade the service for non-subscribers to make the priority pickups seem worth it.
toddmorey··on Apache Burr: Build reliable AI agents and applications
Anthropic seems to agree with you as more recent Claude updates have it just building task specific harnesses as needed.
toddmorey··on Claude Fable 5
I fear it's a smokescreen to manage cost and capacity.
toddmorey··on Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models
I'm interested in how it feels to use: whether there is any context leaking, as you mentioned, if it introduces latency, and whether there are any pricing implications? I know they weighed a variety of factors, including the smaller models, but cost had to be a big concern, too... I feel like Google is the only provider giving away so much AI inference for free.

This will further blur the picture about when and how consumers / employees are supposed to pay for AI services. For example, they showed consumer rather than coding tasks, but could you select five files and ask Siri to write a Python script or a small app? Will enterprises just disable Siri AI functionality, or will they be able to route it through their own AI auditing and providers?

toddmorey··on Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute
I don’t know. Give me a 94x multiple and I can make any financial deal look brilliant. I think a better word is just opportunistic.
toddmorey··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
Ok, not my favorite narrative, but assume asymmetric application of intellectual property rights was a big factor. Wouldn't the US exploiting asymmetric labor wages, rights, and conditions be the even bigger story? It still feels like a short-sighted own goal. The US abandoned its ability to manufacture. Maybe dark factories and robotics can bring it back, but manufacturing supply chains are just so much more advanced in Asia than in the US.
toddmorey··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
It feels like the US for years has operated under the assumption that homeostasis for the global economy would always be “designed in California, assembled in China.”

Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here.

But China it seems doesn’t need the US to produce great cars, devices, robotics, or AI. We absolutely need China to help us build all of the above.

toddmorey··on Launch HN: Superset (YC P26) – IDE for the agents era
I agree with the hard part being managing state, especially environments and ports. I've never used lsof so much in my life.

Question on Remote Workspace: Can the remote machine port forward so I can use a browser to see / test current state of the app on the remote machine?

toddmorey··on Vivaldi 8.0
It’s my daily browser. Small glitches occasionally and can lag chrome releases, but the best absolute non-adware browser with powerful features.

I have it configured to be ultra minimal with the look of Arc that I loved.

toddmorey··on Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels
Have always said community solar programs are the way to do residential solar. In those programs, you pay for and own off-site solar panels, then the energy they produce is credited to your electric bill.

They end up installed at commercial locations ideal for solar: often on covered parking, in fields, or on industrial roofs. Easier to repair, they can do larger panels, no issues with your roof line or roof condition.

toddmorey··on Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)
Yes! My son who has autism would eat anything we put in front of him until age 3, when his weight, appetite and health suddenly and alarmingly crashed. Ever since that episode, he's had a much more restrictive diet and food preferences. Night and day.

They never successfully identified what happened. Just diagnosed it generally as failure to thrive.

toddmorey··on Claude for Small Business
Also reads like the paid placement of some sort of mobile phone or streaming bundle.
toddmorey··on Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine
Look I'm speaking here as a career designer:

I think design as a "signaling function" for determining the quality of a thing was already broken. It was already possible to put up an impressive-looking site for anything; already possible to to dupe people with cheap product wrapped in fancy packaging.

Movies with insane budgets that spend forever in production are often still terrible. One of my favorite songs was written by the artist in a hotel room on a Sunday afternoon.

One thing to consider: if it's cheap and immediate to wrap any content in design, it can now also be cheap and immediate to customize the design of content. Maybe we can finally return to a user-focused internet like the one that was promised to us by browser custom style sheets.

Finally, I can see democratizing design in this way will make more content more pleasant to look a (which is a win). And we'll also make better decisions with design out of the decision matrixes it doesn't belong in (another win).

toddmorey··on Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results
I know for most people that the big surprise here is sustained search ad revenue in the face of AI. But I’m super curious on margins because I thought for sure offering so much free AI inference would be so insanely expensive it harmed margins.
toddmorey··on Vercel April 2026 security incident
Conjecture, but the wording "limited subset" rarely turns out to be good news. Usually a provider will say "less than 1% of our users" or some specific number when they can to ease concerns. My guess is they don't have the visibility or they don't like the number.

I feel for the team; security incidents suck. I know they are working hard, I hope they start to communicate more openly and transparently.

toddmorey··on Vercel April 2026 security incident
I've been part of a response team on a security incident and I really feel for them. However, this initial communication is terrible.

Something happened, we won't say what, but it was severe enough to notify law enforcement. What floors me is the only actionable advice is to "review environment variables". What should a customer even do with that advice? Make sure the variable are still there? How would you know if any of them were exposed or leaked?

The advice should be to IMMEDIATELY rotate all passwords, access tokens, and any sensitive information shared with Vercel. And then begin to audit access logs, customer data, etc, for unusual activity.

The only reason to dramatically overpay for the hosting resources they provide is because you expect them to expertly manage security and stability.

I know there is a huge fog of uncertainly in the early stages of an incident, but it spooks me how intentionally vague they seem to be here about what happened and who has been impacted.

toddmorey··on Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage
Given the same inputs but not provided the results (output) from our accountant, did it come to the same conclusions or have good analysis as to why it differed?

Obviously, accounting is "spreadsheet math" intensive, so Claude wrote some python scripts for that which kept the math very stable. But there were some complex nuances that had taken the accountant and I quite a bit of work to track down and clarify. Claude quickly had a very accurate read on the situation and knew all the right clarifying questions.

I'm not yet ready to ever sign a return that's been entirely AI prepared, but I left the exercise pretty impressed.

toddmorey··on Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage
On the subject of metrics, better user-facing metrics to understand and debug usage patterns would be a great addition. I'd love an easier way to understand the ave cost incurred by a specific skill, for example. (If I'm missing something obvious, let me know.)

Baking deeper analytics into CC would be helpful... similar to ccusage perhaps: https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage

toddmorey··on Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage
My taxes are rather complex, so I ran the same exercise to see if Claude agreed with my accountant. An automated second opinion, so to speak. Spent about 6 minutes analyzing all the PDFs and basically nailed it perfectly in one shot.

My only point here is it sure seems the same activity / use case can have wildly different results across sessions or users. Customer support and product development in the age of non-deterministic software is a strange, strange beast.

toddmorey··on Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
> it works by simulating a trackpad swipe with a large amount of velocity

Damn, that's rather clever.

toddmorey··on Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead
Also with this approach, you actually have a real collection and it's fun to collect things.

My son has autism and viewed his Netflix homepage as his personal curated collection. But then, of course, Netflix renegotiates licensing deals and entire seasons or shows just go away. And it really crushes him because it's like they were stolen from his personal collection.

So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.

toddmorey··on We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2
There are some easy optimizations wins for this page but none of the top ones are framework related. Maybe with the faster build times they can easily optimize images and 3rd party dependencies. As someone else pointed out, nearly half that data is unoptimized images.

For the curious, google's current homepage is a 200kb payload all in, or about 50 times smaller.

toddmorey··on Muse Spark: Scaling towards personal superintelligence
Question: since they've rebooted their approach to AI... have they given up on open models? There's no mention of open source or open weights or access to the models beyond their hosted services.
toddmorey··on Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message
You joke but as a parent, I’m so sick of the gem packs, etc. they try to push on the kids to obfuscate your actual spend on games in real world money.

And now it feels like the are gamifying the compute we use for work for all the same reasons.

toddmorey··on Embarrassingly simple self-distillation improves code generation
wow that's fascinating
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