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by TeMPOraL10 hours ago |
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upvoteby hirako200010 hours ago|
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There is nothing to solve. It's already there, a VPS, a container platform, just push your script and schedule it.

Of course a provider can offer convenient shortcuts, but at the cost of getting tied into their ecosystem.

Anthropic is clearly battling an existential threat: what happens when our paying users figure out they can get a better and cheaper model elsewhere.

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upvoteby TeMPOraL9 hours ago|
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> what happens when our paying users figure out they can get a better and cheaper model elsewhere.

They solved that with subscriptions. For end-users (and developers using AI for coding), it makes no sense to go for pay-as-you-go API use, as anything interesting will burn more than the monthly subscription worth of $$$ in API costs in few hours to days.

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upvoteby hirako20008 hours ago|
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Yes but that's anthropic API pricing, some of the highest per token.

Sure subscription is a sort of tie in, but only if users are fooled into investing in workflows bound to anthropic. That's what the company is hooking them to do with this scheduler, banning open agentic framework and the rest.

The moat, if any, will be the tooling. Token is becoming a commodity, they know it.

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upvoteby talkin10 hours ago|
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> for some reason the industry stubbornly refuses to solve the "cron job as a service" problem for end-users, whether on the web or in the OS.

Such a service will always be destroyed by the bell-ends who want to run spam or worse activities.

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upvoteby TeMPOraL9 hours ago|
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That doesn't explain lack of such functionality at the OS/platform level. It technically exists on Linux and Windows, but is heavily optimized towards sysadmin use, and essentially hidden from regular users on the "normie UI surface". Most people don't even realize their computers could do things on a timer.

(And on Android, AFAIK there's exactly nothing at all. There's not even common support for any kind of basic automation; only recent exception is Samsung. From third-party apps, there's always been Tasker - very powerful, but the UX almost makes you want to learn to write Android apps instead.)

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upvoteby WJW10 hours ago|
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What is wrong with things like the Zapier scheduler? (ie https://zapier.com/apps/schedule/integrations) For running locally, there's also a plethora of cronlikes for every OS under the sun.

I think the core problem is not so much that it is not "allowed", but that even the most basic types of automation involves programming. I mean "programming" here in the abstract sense of "methodically breaking up a problem into smaller steps and control flows". Many people are not interested in learning to automate things, or are only interested until they learn that it will involve having to learn new things.

There is no secret conspiracy stopping people from learning to automate things, rather I think it's quite the opposite: many forces in society are trying to push people to automate more and more, but most are simply not interested in learning to do so. See for example the bazillion different "learn to code" programs.

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upvoteby TeMPOraL9 hours ago|
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It's not default. People don't need courses for this, they need availability and nudges. None of the platforms people use expose such features to users, much less encourage them to try. On the contrary, they hide or remove it from base UI layer entirely, and the UI choices made clearly suggest platform vendors don't even consider the possibility of regular people being interested.

Computing isn't, and has never been, demand-driven. It's all supply-driven. People choose from what's made available by vendors, and nobody bothers listening to user feedback.

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