A world screwed by a mouth breathing MAGA cult. I guess democracies should have programmatic indicators when the idiocy levels start increasing. Countries that cross a bunch of "idiocy indicators" will need intervention.

There is something seriously wrong with american system where a felon can become president and steal openly.

Who's going to intervene on the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world?

It is very easy if they stop:

1. Using the USD as a reserve.

2. Buying its treasuries.

3. Using the USD for trade with other countries.

Under ordinary circumstances, no.

But these are not ordinary circumstances. This is the collapse of the country that is the center of the tech universe. More than a few on HN are supporters of the administration. The frustration of HN users appalled at the situation is on topic.

Nearly the entire political class here has wanted this war for decades, but held back because they knew how risky and unpopular it would be. They were very happy when Trump came along and was dumb enough to do it and take the blame on himself. Chuck Schumer put out a video last year egging him on! https://x.com/SenSchumer/status/1929676991789203528 Trump is not the actual problem, just a useful idiot

I think we need to counter surveil those in power and their relatives.

I use a raspberry pi for all my experiments

Yup, for openclaw and APIs you dont need a big PC. I run something lightweight on the RPI4 8gb. Many people run local LLMs which is where a mac is useful. Frankly I dont think you can beat the value of an openrouter subscription and API calls.

> Many people run local LLMs which is where a mac is useful

Unless you go for the very expensive options, most of the Mac Minis really aren't suitable for running local LLMs, they're painfully slow with prefill/processing input, and the models you are able to run don't handle long context very well, which these sort of long-running agents perform very differently with when you can.

I'll agree with your latter point, hard to beat the value of using something like OpenRouter or similar remote inference.

Even with local models, you can run the agent software and the inference workload on different hosts, which is what I'm doing at home. Beefy server responsible for inference, tiny VM on other server is running the actual agent software + RPC + bridges and what not.

If you or anyone else don’t mind, I have a have a question or 2.

I use Claude Pro ($20/m) as a glorified search engine (no ads/SEO) plus simple hobbyist dev things (shell scripts, managing my Mac, apps etc.

I also use it for tasks like - “search the web for top ten selling EVs, put them in a table” and then iterate - pivot tables, charts, additional research”. It could be cars, it could be broccoli. Code Work has facilities to streamline this type of work, but I usually drop into the CLI.

How much if any functionality would I need to recreate if I switch to OpenRouter and would be match my costs with the API approach. I don’t want any cost overruns. With Codex or Claude, if I run of tokens, no big deal, I can wait.

Thanks!

You should try Google Edge Gallery and Gemma4 on your local pc

Thanks, on it!

You're not getting it on OpenRouter for anywhere near that cheap.

Why not go direct to the source instead of paying an extra 5.5%? Seems like it'd be trivial to have AI wire up connections to your preferred inference providers and save yourself some money over time.

If you're referring to the markup charged by OpenRouter, you can use harnesses like OpenClaw/Hermes without it and go direct like you're saying. If you're talking about actually "routing", then you don't get that out of the box. However, the popular use of those harnesses doesn't often use the smart routing approach with a single agent. Instead, the approach is to create multiple agents, each with a role and a model tailored to that role by cost and functionality.

There was a time I used to listen to the All In Podcast. Then Trump became president and these guys started gloating with glee about all the breakage that Musk and Trump were causing. Was quite the shock to me to see the all out happiness. That's when I stopped listening to Sacks and his crowd.

They asked for a global AI moratorium and got one. Funny how things work out. Best of luck with the IPO.

This is the kind of supply risk everyone should plan for. Depending exclusively on one country, one provider, or one model is not going to cut it anymore. I'd double down on improving opensource local models even more and getting harnesses, routers, and testing right.

The Trump administration should focus on things like the UFC fight etc.

This also looks like the perfect China shaped gap in the market if there ever was one.

Windows 11 is what happens when no one speaks up at product team meetings. People nod their heads, get on with the build and the marketing team decides they want another 40 hooks into customer data for monetization.

Windows 11 today is a spectacular example of customer disrespect and disregard. MS believes it can manage with enterprise customer revenue alone. Well, best of luck with that, even enterprises are getting fed up.

Windows is what happens when there are too many cooks in the kitchen, without a single authority figure, ultimately responsible for maintaining the OS (and only the OS), guarding against and saying no to all attempts to leech the user base.

Yes and an LLM checks it as well. I am yet to find a sysadmin task that an LLM couldn't solve neatly.

A nice bonus is that sysadmin tasks tend to be light in terms of token usage, that’s very convenient given the increasingly strict usage limits these days.

During the Covid lockdowns in India, I saw birds I had not seen in decades. It was amazing; the skies had cleared up, and nature truly was recovering.

And humanity as-a-whole learnt nothing.

Let's hope there's some more movement in the right direction as a result of _this_ crisis.

There will almost certainly be more pandemics and they'll probably be worse. The world is getting smaller, and what takes a super high end lab these days (in terms of virus creation) will be done by college students in 20 years.

I firmly believe that William Gibson nailed it with the Jackpot in his recent books:

nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.