Thread

1. mark_l_watson · 1791037132 · focus · HN ↗

   It was inevitable that the providers would stop giving away free cookies and milkshakes.

   I pay Google $5/month for Chat and my wife gets to share that: a fantastic deal. I even get a short weekly (one each) opus and gemini vibe coding sessions with agy.

   I pay for inference: I paid $3300 for a Mac mini 64G M5-Pro which runs Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next (3 bit quant) with pi-dev and the results are so very much excellent enough for about 60% of my work and paying Deepseek for deepseek-4.1-flash with Deepseek Harness handles almost everything else.

   I worked at Google in 2013 and I mostly like them as a company. I like their approach to AI in general, but I hate the business models of Anthropic and OpenAI and I fear the US taxpayer is going to pick up the tab on this one.

   1. adrithmetiqa · 1791038804 · focus · HN ↗

      I would be curious to see how Steve Jobs would have delivered AI tools via Apple. The current mess of agents, harnesses is a utter shambles for the average non-techie.

      1. mark_l_watson · 1791039713 · focus · HN ↗

         That would be interesting. I hate to say it, but he might have given us something like Muse by Meta. I made a comment on HN a year or so ago about wanting a strong personal AI agent from a company I more or less trust (e.g., Apple or American Express).

         1. threecheese · 1791051527 · focus · HN ↗

            I agree. I am a little envious of people who are willing to use Meta products; muse is pretty cool.

            1. mark_l_watson · 1791125533 · focus · HN ↗

               I use Muse and only give it access to my Apple Reminders - just to play with it.

               I also have two daily tasks for local events and things to do and also a tech summary of new tech news.

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