Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 201 posts

Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning

#61

Post by zarzavat »

torben-friis wrote: post #14
MarleTangible wrote: post #4

It's incredible how many applications abuse disk access. In a similar fashion, Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB of podcasts for random reason and never deleted them. It even showed up as "System Data" and made me look for external drive solutions.

The system data issue on macOS is awful. I use my MacBook for a mix of dev work and music production and between docker, music libraries, update caches and the like it’s not weird for me to have to go for a fresh install once every year or two. Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.

The trick is to reboot into recovery partition, disable SIP, then run OmniDiskSweeper as root (as in `sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper`). Then you can find all kinds of caches that are otherwise hidden by SIP.

Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning

#63

Post by Terretta »

Arguably, even without LLM, you too should be dev-ing inside a VM...

https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant is still a thing.

The market for Cowork is normals, getting to tap into a executive assistant who can code. Pros are running their consumer "claws" on a separate Mac Mini. Normals aren't going to do that, and offices aren't going to provision two machines to everyone.

The VM is an obvious answer for this early stage of scaled-up research into collaborative computing.

Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning

#64

Post by zbentley »

pdntspa wrote: post #58
torben-friis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system data issue on macOS is awful. I use my MacBook for a mix of dev work and music production and between docker, music libraries, update caches and the like it’s not weird for me to have to go for a fresh install once every year or two. Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.

Equally egregious are applications that insist on using the primary disk to cache model data/sample data/whatever

What should they do instead?

Like, assuming they need the data and it's inconveniently large to fit into RAM, where/how should they store and access it if not the primary disk?

Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning

#66

Post by messh »

Terretta wrote: post #63

Arguably, even without LLM, you too should be dev-ing inside a VM... https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant is still a thing. The market for Cowork is normals, getting to tap into a executive assistant who can code. Pros are running their consumer "claws" on a separate Mac Mini. Normals aren't going to do that, and offices aren't going to provision two machines to everyone. The VM is an obvious answer for this early…

Yeah, very easy to do today. May VPS providers help with this, checkout:

https://exe.dev

https://sprites.dev

https://shellbox.dev

Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning

#67

Post by piyh »

torben-friis wrote: post #14
MarleTangible wrote: post #4

It's incredible how many applications abuse disk access. In a similar fashion, Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB of podcasts for random reason and never deleted them. It even showed up as "System Data" and made me look for external drive solutions.

The system data issue on macOS is awful. I use my MacBook for a mix of dev work and music production and between docker, music libraries, update caches and the like it’s not weird for me to have to go for a fresh install once every year or two. Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.

Even worse on ipad. My wife is an artist and 100gigs of "system data" is completely inscrutable and there's zero ways to fix it besides a full wipe.

Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning

#69

Post by bee_rider »

dewey wrote: post #49
MarleTangible wrote: post #4

It's incredible how many applications abuse disk access. In a similar fashion, Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB of podcasts for random reason and never deleted them. It even showed up as "System Data" and made me look for external drive solutions.

Don't run "du -h ~/Library/Messages" then, I've mentioned that many times before and it's crazy to me to think that Apple is just using up 100GB on my machine, just because I enable iMessage syncing and don't want to delete old conversations. One would think that's a extremely common use case and it will only grow the more years iMessage exists. Just offload them to the cloud, charge me for it if you want but every o…

Offloading to the cloud and charging the user seems like a bigger breach of expectations than the hard drive space.

Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning

#70

Post by dawnerd »

dewey wrote: post #49
MarleTangible wrote: post #4

It's incredible how many applications abuse disk access. In a similar fashion, Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB of podcasts for random reason and never deleted them. It even showed up as "System Data" and made me look for external drive solutions.

Don't run "du -h ~/Library/Messages" then, I've mentioned that many times before and it's crazy to me to think that Apple is just using up 100GB on my machine, just because I enable iMessage syncing and don't want to delete old conversations. One would think that's a extremely common use case and it will only grow the more years iMessage exists. Just offload them to the cloud, charge me for it if you want but every o…

Same with photos. You can enable the option to offload but there’s no way to control how much is used locally. I don’t know why messages does that either. Also no easy way to remove the hundreds of thousands of photos in messages across all chats.
Post reply on HN