MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Logical (YC F25): a local-first proactive desktop AI copilot
by samkaru | 2025-11-26 20:11:05+00:00
Hey HN!

My co-founder and I have been building Logical, a proactive desktop AI copilot that watches what you're doing (locally), understands the context of your workflow, and surfaces helpful actions before you prompt it.

- Quick demo: https://www.loom.com/share/090a065315934aa7b36a7676f9394d1f

- Try Logical: https://trylogical.ai/signup

Logical lives on your desktop, infers what you're trying to do across apps – email, meetings, documents, PDFs, terminals – and:

- Gives you a reply suggestion when you hit "Reply" on an email thread

- Offers to "Check schedule" when you open a message asking for a quick chat

- Automatically extracts to-dos during calls and from pretty much anywhere on your screen (and reminds you to follow-up)

- Suggests a formula in Excel as you work that you can apply with one click

- Explains terms of research papers as you highlight them

No prompting. No switching context. No copying text around.

* Why we built this *

Despite big progress in LLMs, the dominant UX is still: User does work –> realizes AI could help –> stops –> writes a prompt.

But your computer already has the context of what you're doing. It knows what window you're in, what text you're reading, which script just errored, and what meeting you're sitting in. We wanted an AI that uses this ambient context to proactively assist – more like a real teammate than a chatbot.

* Privacy and data handling (something we deeply care about) *

Right now:

- We offer a technical guarantee that no user data ever touches Logical servers.

- Context is sanitized locally (our local pipeline strips PII / sensitive text before anything is sent off).

Long-term, we aim to move everything on-device as small language models and consumer AI chips mature.

We've seen interest from founders, researchers, engineers, and privacy-sensitive users who want AI benefits without cloud exposure.

* What's under the hood *

- A context engine that digests signals and user data from apps (both local, and if you choose, cloud-based services).

- A sanitization pipeline that removes identifiable or sensitive details before model usage.

- A local vector store + lightweight knowledge graph for immediate retrieval.

- An intent engine that infers "what you're trying to do" in real time and surfaces actions at the right moment.

* What's next *

- Windows support. Logical is currently Mac only.

- Letting developers plug into the context engine and intent engine to offer richer experiences on their apps. At least until desktop MCP is good enough.

- Fine-tuned integrations with more apps and workflows.

Would love your feedback:

If you're interested in: proactive AI; OS-level context awareness; on-device AI; privacy-preserving AI; building AI that actually reduces friction instead of adding more prompts

Happy to chat in the comments! hello@trylogical.ai is always open for feedback.
by mindcrash | 2025-11-26 20:11:33+00:00
Unfortunately got some experience with that...

Busy getting my new build together so today I bought a 8 Tb WD Black 2280 SSD, a 2 Tb WD Black 2230 SSD and 2 x 64 Gb Crucial SODIMMs for (in comparison) a whopping 1850 USD...

Yes, that's pretty much a complete PC. Or at least it used to be.

Hopefully prices for Radeons remain a bit stable for the coming weeks, I'm still figuring out which one to buy to replace my aging Geforce 1080 and drive my 3840x2160 widescreen...
by jacksondc | 2025-11-26 20:12:10+00:00
This is a strange comment. The author claims to be a human—"what we've done", "we built something", "we pointed a metal box into the dark"—but nearly every sentence sounds distinctly AI-writen.

(Examples: "I keep coming back to this:", "Voyager isn't ... It's ...", "the assumption that the future would exist and might care", "on our doorstep", "see the end of the story", "depends less on ... and more on ...", etc.)
by zkmon | 2025-11-26 20:12:27+00:00
What has changed now? I still upload my static web content to my ~/public_html folder on live website, using sftp. Anything wrong with that? Why people coming up with this kind of news? The other day someone was saying scripting the HTML Table element using DOM API is gone.

Check internic.net landing page. Not changed in decades. You don't need to be so desperate for change.
by bpodgursky | 2025-11-26 20:12:58+00:00
Would the US even fight?

We've lost the shipbuilding race, auto race, drone race, without anyone in DC actually noticing. Most Americans don't even realize China has a manned space station. If China had a presence on the moon, would that wake up congress, or would they just put out a few tweets and go back to cultural dramatics?
by ascorbic | 2025-11-26 20:13:17+00:00
There are currently several hypotheses. Some say that it's just because it helps you lose weight, and obesity increases the risk of so many things. However while this is true, there are lots of examples where there are effects even when you control for weight loss. One of the more interesting theories is that it's down to their anti-inflammatory effects, because chronic inflammation is linked to so many conditions.
by bruce511 | 2025-11-26 20:13:21+00:00
>> Tools you pay for that feel overpriced

I get your thinking here - free market spots a gap and competes on price. But personally I think this is a "poor" business strategy.

Firstly, competing on price is a race to the bottom. There's always someone who's prepared to offer it for less. And that always means the offering ultimately gets worse over time.

Secondly if you go thus route you attract customers who are "price sensitive". They'll leave you as quickly as they joined for someone who offers a lower price. In other words you are self-selecting the worst possible kind of customer to have.

Thirdly you send a signal regarding quality. A $5 product is obviously worse than a $100 product, because if the $5 -could- charge more they -would-.

(Hint: for VC funded companies the customer I the VC NOT the person paying a subscription. So be careful comparing your pricing to VC company pricing if you are not VC funded.)

Yes, look for pain. If you make something good charge more, not less, than incumbents. Build a customer base of people who are quality sensitive not price sensitive.

30 years ago I had a product on the market at $199. It sold well, validating the market space. A not-quite-as-good competitor appeared for $99. He made some sales. I was tempted to reduce my price. An old head told me otherwise. Sales wise we'd say things like "you get what you pay for". We outsold the new-guy. Which meant we had lots more revenue for support, docs, polish and so on. Today we charge $399. The competitor folded after a couple years.

We aimed high, charged a lot, and focused on delivering quality. We attracted loyal customers who appreciated quality more than a few $ saving. 30 years, and 50 products later, we continue to dominate our space.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-11-26 20:13:30+00:00
Easy. Covid evolved forms. The genes are different. There are measurable differences in DNA. These are slight.

So from real time observation we know viruses and bacteria can mutate and have small delta changes in their DNA.

From this we can deduce that over long period of time many small changes can equate to big changes in DNA.

Because we know DNA describes macro characteristics of all living beings and effects behavior, physicality and speciation by logic we know that through induction many many small changes together equals big change and thus evolution can result in speciation and different creatures.

This is the literal conclusion through Direct observation and the inescapable logic of induction. Not to mention it's inline with fossil evidence AND covid is clearly not the only species where we observe mutations. Mutations are observed everywhere, including humans. Cancer is mutation and selection as well.
by fragmede | 2025-11-26 20:14:09+00:00
"hype". People spend a shitton of money to go to a Disney resort so their daughters can see a Disney princess up close and personal and have her say their name and ask them how they're doing. $299.99 for a TikTok where your daughters favorite princess asks her how's she's doing and tells her she's the best? Iger's gonna be buying the bank!
by mhitza | 2025-11-26 20:14:16+00:00
Would be nice to have an official confirmation. Once token get back to the user those are likely already counted.

Sucks when the LLM goes on a rant only to stop because of hardcoded safeguards, or what I encounter often enough with Copilot: it generates some code, notices it's part of existing public code and cancels the entire response. But that still counts towards my usage.
Ask HN: AI CLI agents for non-conding tasks
by Adrig | 2025-11-26 20:14:35+00:00
I started using AI CLIs with Obsidian for document writing, reviews, research, etc.

I use OpenCode to try out various models, but haven't really landed on one specific one. These days, I use Gemini even tho I never know if it'll get stuck or not.

I'm curious if others have experience with CLI / agentic workflows for non-coding work. I'd love to hear about your experience with the various models and how you use them.

So far, my + and - are:

+: Finally, control over the AI output, no more copy-pasting everything, contextualize every new chat. It's also way better to organize a task for the AI in Obsydian than in a chat interface. +: Agentic workflow is interesting, I can throw a task, go back to my work and review later +: API means you can keep your costs low if you're not a power user, it also means you can easily switch providers for different tasks +: I feel like a hacker -: It gets pretty complex when you want to expand the AI capabilities. Setting up RAG, MCP looks a bit daunting. You can create "agents," but they are basically a system prompt. OpenAI custom GPTs are so much easier to set up. Maybe, given the current size of the context window, I'm overthinking it. -: Initial setup was also not the smoothest, but I'm rusty in this area and Windows is not helping
by rbartelme | 2025-11-26 20:14:51+00:00
For all the folks saying, "Isn't this just a virus?"

The actual paper states that the genome encodes transfer RNA's and ribosomal RNA's. I think that's a really important biological distinction missing from the popular press junket. The primary source material is well written and elucidates a lot more than the Quanta article. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651781v1
by bloppe | 2025-11-26 20:15:23+00:00
Switching a complex cloud deployment from AWS to GCP might take a dedicated team of engineers several months. Switching between models can be done by a single person in an afternoon (often just 5 minutes). That's what we're talking about.

That means that none of these products can ever have a high profit margin. They have to keep margins razor thin at best (deeply negative at present) to stay relevant. In order to achieve the kinds of margins that real moats provide, these labs need major research breakthroughs. And we haven't had any of those since Attention is All You Need.
by shepardrtc | 2025-11-26 20:15:39+00:00
For input,

- GPT-5.1 is $1.25 / 1M tokens

- You are $0.50 / 1,000 tokens

Output:

- GPT-5.1 is $10.00 / 1M tokens

- You are $1.50 / 1,000 tokens

Am I reading that wrong? Is that a typo?
by thangalin | 2025-11-26 20:17:25+00:00
At Voyager 1's velocity, it would take ~456 million years to reach the heart of the Milky Way (Sagittarius A*), some ~26,000 light-years away. That's roughly the same amount of time that has passed since the Ordovician–Silurian extinction, when volcanic eruptions released enough carbon dioxide to heat up the planet and deoxygenate the oceans, resulting in the asphyxiation of aquatic species (about 85% of all life was snuffed out). The oceans remained deoxygenated for more than three million years.
by glitcher | 2025-11-26 20:17:54+00:00
Oh wow, near the end of the article there's an interview clip with Suno's CEO where he uses this absolutely astounding logic to justify and prop up their AI products:

"It's not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music."
by vablings | 2025-11-26 20:18:03+00:00
The biggest issue here is that it hurts smaller consumers. Scaling up a fab to produce ram takes 5+ years, people generally buy new hardware ~5 years so this lifecycle of hardware for some people is now locked out. Let's say you was due for an upgrade this year you now might be priced out of the market for the next 5 years and basically due to poor business practices

There is a similar issue happening in the manufacturing space where metal foundries are basically "full" up on allocation for other customers and will refuse to sell to you unless your purchase order is six digits otherwise you pay a hefty premium which once again drives capital towards larger corporations. Compounded by a stagnant jobs market the means that scarcity is just going up and up and nobody is re-investing to meet consumer demands because the market is poisoned by speculation to the absolute extreme
by jonhohle | 2025-11-26 20:18:03+00:00
Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen.

Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If something was launched today it would get to the nearest star system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a radius of 1 light day).

100x faster than current (1,000km/s) would still take 76 years.

Definitely not before 2100 and almost certainly so long after that we will seem like a primitive civilization compared to those that do it.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-11-26 20:18:26+00:00
I went to the 'Obama restaurant' in Hanoi for bun cha (not vegetarian) more so because Anthony Bourdain. Like a good American I smoked a Cuban cigar afterwards in a cigar bar under an image of Che Guevara I passed on the way back to the hotel which was out of the way likely guided by Tony's spirit if such things exist. Nonetheless, the Bun Cha up in the mountains of Sa Pa is better as are Dominican cigars.
by hdjrudni | 2025-11-26 20:19:00+00:00
> I suppose the cloud storage is nice, but you can do much better; Google gives you double that for the same price ($99/yr).

Nuh uh. I get 6TB of OneDrive for $100/yr*. Granted, it's across 6 accounts.

For $100, I get 2TB of Google One.

Edit: OK, so they upped it to $130/yr.
by MichaelNolan | 2025-11-26 20:19:22+00:00
> It's hard to lose a contest you won 60 years prior...

If you pick a random person off the street and ask them who discovered the Americas will they answer 1. Leif Erikson, 2. Indigenous peoples or 3. Christopher Columbus? If you ask people who invented the smartphone will they say Apple or some other company?

It’s absolutely possible to lose a race you had previously won.
by thornewolf | 2025-11-26 20:20:52+00:00
This comment is likely AI. Consider author post history as well.

(this comment)

> This idea sits in a really interesting space because on paper

(previous comments)

> I really like this class of work because it sits at a strange intersection:

> It’s wild how Voyager forces two truths to sit together:

The pattern is "<compliment intellectual stimulation> <make note of juxtaposition>"

> becomes workflow-aware, not just price-aware.

> human mental model instead of the mathematically convenient one.

> run for that mindset more than for the tech.

My meta comment is not breaking the HN guidelines by letter, but may be spiritually breaking guidelines. See:

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like.

I think clarification on AI-accusations should be added to the guidelines if it falls under this class of comment.
by AlexandrB | 2025-11-26 20:21:00+00:00
I like how the framing of the article assumes that AI is a revolutionary technology that everyone should be using and the adoption is just mysteriously slow. This was particularly funny:

> In recent earnings calls, nearly two-thirds of executives at S&P 500 companies mentioned AI. At the same time, the people actually responsible for implementing AI may not be as forward-thinking, perhaps because they are worried about the tech putting them out of a job.

Ah, those brave, forward-looking executives with their finger on the pulse of the future while their employees are just needlessly stalling adoption. Completely absent from the article is the possibility that the technology is not as revolutionary as claimed.
by kakacik | 2025-11-26 20:21:08+00:00
That plate with info about us, where to find us... not smart, naive. I get that 70s were probably way more enthusiastic and open minded re space space exploration compared to rather bleak times now when greed often takes prime and Star Trek TOS probably had its effect too, but next time we should do better.

Dark forest theory sounds more rational conclusion on long enough timescale than Star trekkish utopias. Although, in next million years, if intercepted it should be trivial to pinpoint where it came from just from trajectory.
by mbesto | 2025-11-26 20:21:35+00:00
Nope.

> Issuing side (the side that "issues" the cards) is usually the one that people describe as "all of the value"

In theory you could argue "all of the value" may be there, but that is locked up across issuing banks and the credit card companies themselves. You basically cannot compete there unless you have some novel way of creating a credit card that isn't Visa, MC or AMEX. There is also a reason banks haven't consolidated on the issuing side because it's an uninteresting business for them, otherwise they would. Hence the credit card side is all about volume and hence all of the value for software providers is on the acquiring side.

> The merchant's / acquiring side has significantly tighter margins and usually needs substantial volume before it can become an interesting business.

You're myopically looking at one part of the acquiring side. Controlling the merchant relationship means theoretically unlimited upside, versus the issuing side that is usually capped by regulated interchange fees or market pressure. There are thousands of providers that sit on top of Stripe (and other similar providers) and charge 4%~7% and capture the residuals (which is a higher BPS than Stripe itself), hence this is where the value is. Stripe et al compete on volume because they themselves get volume discounts on the underlying providers (e.g. if you have a high enough volume Stripe will charge you less than the rack rate...just like everyone else that provides a software gateway). I would argue the economic value created by providers sitting on top of Stripe is greater than the value Stripe generates for themselves.

> My inner child lights up at the thought of payment rails.

Payment rails for Visa/MC/AMEX is very different than your experience with moving money at banks in Kenya/Russia. I've actually seen the tech that runs the rails for payments in the US. If anyone thinks the Paypal dev experience is bad, wait until you see this shit.
by chimeracoder | 2025-11-26 20:22:22+00:00
> No, it isn't. “Men’s vitality” doesn’t mean “getting pumped with testosterone regardless of indications”

When I Google "men's vitality clinic", the top result I see is titled "Your experts for testosterone replacement therapy...". TRT is front and center.

> Being pumped with testosterone isn’t the outcome being sought from a men’s vitality clinic, it is (even for the people who are actively thinking about it) a mechanism (and not an appropriate one for every patient) for atteempting to acheive the desired outcome.

This is such a weird distinction to try and make.

I frequently see ads for these services, and even when they're not so explicit as that one is about what they're selling, it's extremely clear what demographic they're going after and what the hook is.

Testosterone being a Schedule III substance, "men's vitality" is the way that they can legally advertise an service that prescribes AAS. It's no more of a secret that men's vitality clinics prescribe testosterone than it is that fertility clinics are prescribing estradiol. Both of these are sex hormones that induce a specific effect on the body which the patient is looking for.

Can I imagine someone walking into a men's vitality clinic and being surprised that they're getting offered testosterone? Sure, and there's also that German couple who went to a fertility clinic because they weren't having a baby, and were surprised to learn that they needed to start having sex.

Clueless people exist. That doesn't mean that it's not readily obvious to anyone who's paying attention what these clinics exist to do, and how they do it.
by brennanpeterson | 2025-11-26 20:22:27+00:00
This isn't true. It used to be, as a new fab would appreciably add quantity. At 1M wspm in 2015, a new 100k fab at the most modern node would add effectively 20-30% capacity, and usually multiple.players at once, since all had cash.

Now, the relative shrink is tiny, so capacity adds are just wspm, in effect, and that gives 5%.

Put differently, you cannot invest your way out of the shortage, or into meaningful share....so you take profit.
by cm2187 | 2025-11-26 20:22:49+00:00
For writing excel formulas, while I think you can use VSTO/COM, you will get a poor performance if you do. The "right" way to do it is with ExcelDNA/ManagedXLL. But the excel calculation engine was never designed to support async/await, and your calculations operate within a UI thread. So if you need to make a network call in one of your excel functions, you quickly run out of options.