Hacker News Reader

Comment by MaxLeiter | Hacker News Reader

FTA:

> In 2022, we built Tart, which became the most popular virtualization solution for Apple Silicon, along with several other tools along the way.

from Tart's github:

> [Tart is for] macOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon to use in CI and other automations

My (naive?) hypothesis is this kind of expertise is why OpenAI chose to acquihire.

View on HN

Same; the reason everyone ran out to buy Mac Minis last month is it gave their Claw access to iMessage, their browser cookies, and a residential IP. Cirrus provides a way to provision and orchestrate MacOS VMs, which is exactly what I did for running Openclaw (for a minute …).

Not to sell Tart short (it is quite good), but it's "just" a wrapper around Virtualization.framework with a few extra pieces. This is the kind of thing that Codex driven by experts _should_ be able to build very easily.

Agreed. The benefit from not having anyone else or any partial (container) solutions in the computing chain is huge for secure isolation. Getting rid of the intermediary solves a universe of possible problems.

That said, I've been free-riding on tart because they've often surfaced issues I needed to address. Free riders like me are possibly the reason these companies can't make their own way.

Yes, but it’s also currently the best one. They have OCI compatible Mac VM images that are prebuilt. It’s quite good.

interesting that was what i thought this was, it keeps boggling my mind the sums being paid for what really could be built by experienced devs on their own teams

You don't want a 40-men strong team that needs to be managed, you want 2 guys that already did it and are hungry for the next 10 problems all on their own.

"Hey guys, make our agents verify tool use before responding to the user. See you in 2 months. Here's 2$b"

Short term: they don’t need devs to build it, it’s already built

Long term: they now have experienced dev(s?) to build their next products and features

I agree that is the reality of why this has happened, but it is completely at odds with the story that that AI maximalists are telling the world, which is that software development is over because LLMs can do anything with a couple of specs and a Ralph Wiggum loop.

Eh, we’re approaching that world (I am "an AI maximalist", I guess)

But someone with the knowledge to guide an AI will have more success than someone without, at least today. I don’t think that will necessarily be true in a year or two.

Note that apples terms do not allow someone to sell something like an agent running on macOS. They have explicit cut outs for 24-hour minimum leases of full hardware, but they prohibit this with vms

Reply on news.ycombinator.com