Cost-Optimization

It is widely known that the Claude Max 20x plan doesn’t buy you just $200 worth of API (Application Programming Interface) credits in a slightly more convenient format. It’s closer to … well, an order of magnitude is what I have heard, but I’ve heard other people say it goes up to $5,000–6,000 worth of API credits.1 In any case, it’s a lot. What’s the catch? Enterprises — not startups, usually — shy away from Claude Max 20x because it has certain data retention properties that they consider too commercially valuable to waive away.2 So instead they either work through the API directly or use something else like GitHub Copilot for Business. ...

Scan the Quick Response (QR) code above with your favorite Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) app. You should get a six digit number, rotating every 30 seconds, that looks something like 1 2 237601 # as of Wed May 20 09:44:53 AM EEST 2026 If you then take the secret key that QR code maps to, say ...

Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he hacked together for a tiny, static, specialized data structure that does exactly what he needs it to and no more.” ...

I am an ardent capitalist. I am also an ardent Unix philosopher. I have long percieved there to be some interesting tensions between these two wolves inside me. The Unix philosopher in me wants my code to be as simple and flexible as possible, and - not always, but often - to minimize the number of lines of code I need to sling to solve a given problem.1 The capitalist in me wants to cover as many edge cases as possible, make every transition as smooth as possible, and apply as much napalm to the fire of user acquisition and douse its twin flame user churn in liquid death of another kind. What to do? ...

I have been aware of tarsnap for a long time, but only recently did I actually get around to using it for anything, as a result of my big personal digital resiliency audit for 2025. For those of you not in the know, tarsnap is “online backups for the truly paranoid”, and tarsnap the command-line program is the client-side tool you invoke to actually zip up and push your archives into the vault. Its creator, Dr. Colin Percival, is a really smart and interesting dude for a whole bunch of reasons. I’m led to believe the whole business is basically a two-man show between him and his brother these days. ...

Spaced repetition has been around for a long time. If you’ve never heard the term before, it’s best described as flashcards on timers. an algorithm such as SM-2 or the more recent FSRS keeps track of how you did on the flashcard, makes a guess as to how long it could possibly wait to show you the flashcard again before you below, say, a 90% chance of getting it right the next time, and then schedules the flashcard for a new day. ...

Given my interest in extending the life of my SD cards and hard drives as much as possible, I’m surprised I haven’t come across /dev/shm before. In a word it’s a world-accessible RAM scratchpad, which seems baked right into POSIX, so that virtually every Unix EDIT: Linux system already has it mounted as a tmpfs by default: 1 2 ❯ mount | grep '/dev/shm' tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,inode64) Today’s lucky 10,000, indeed. It gets mentioned often in Hacker News comments, but surprisingly I couldn’t find any actual articles talking about it. The existence of /dev/shm is a boon for me mostly because it means I never have to worry about whether /tmp is really RAM-based again. ...

Earlier today on Hacker News Scrappy made the rounds, with the explicit tagline “make little apps for you and your friends”. I always like to see new projects in this vein. That’s why I’d like to outline my alternative approach, which Works cross-platform and on mobile devices by default, Doesn’t require any app store tomfoolery, Has great uptime built in, Gives you just enough data persistence to not get in your way, and Is owned by you, forever. This is the stack I used to build my diet checklist, which I keep as a little icon on my phone’s home page. Here it is: ...

As a nerdy, working-class kid who grew up in the 1990s, knowing what time it actually was was a luxury I rarely had access to before I was 12 or so and my parents finally got an Internet connection with its attendant link to the Network Time Protocol. If you had told me I could have not just a watch but an entire machine that Never lost the time, Did what I wanted, how I wanted it, and Could be programmed to do what I want, how I want it on a schedule, I would have had to substantially revise my Christmas wishlist. ...

Below is a GIF of tsk, my pocket Finnish-to-English dictionary, running in my terminal emulator of choice under Linux. It’s what the kids call a TUI, a graphical program that just happens to drive its graphics using terminal graphics instead of graphics-graphics. Insert GIF here. You can probably tell that this program fits neatly into the “home-cooked meal” clade of programs. There is a very straightforward problem I want solved - fast, single-executable-portable dictionary lookup, with a few conveniences for the busy language learner layered on top. I am quite happy with tsk in its current iteration and don’t plan to add much more to it anytime soon. It would still save me a lot of time and hassle if I were the only person who could use it. ...