[DontBreakAlex]

Nice, but I'm not getting a subscription for a filesystem utility. Had it been a one-time $5 license, I would have bought it. At the current price, it's literally cheaper to put files in a S3 bucket or outright buy an SSD.

[dewey]

They had long discussions about the pricing on the podcast the author is a part of (atp.fm). It went through a few iterations of one time purchase, fee for each time you free up space and a subscription. There will always be people unhappy about either choice.

Edit: Apparently both is possible in the end: https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#purchase

[mrguyorama]

Who would be unhappy with $5 owned forever? Other than the author of course for making less money.

[criddell]

People who want the app to stick around and continue to be developed.

I worry about that with Procreate. It feels like it's priced too low to be sustainable.

[piyuv]

I worry about procreate too. It’s way too cheap for what it is and it’s in the small set of apps that can justify a subscription.

This app though? No chance. Parent comment says “if you want to support the app’s development” but not all apps need to be “developed” continuously, least of all system utilities.

[tiltowait]

Is the author's desire not important here?

[dewey]

> Two kinds of purchases are possible: one-time purchases and subscriptions.

https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#purchase

[pmarreck]

Claude 3.7 just rewrote the whole thing (just based on reading the webpage description) as a commandline app for me, so there's that.

And because it has no Internet access yet (and because I prompted it to use a workaround like this in that circumstance), the first thing it asked me to do (after hallucinating the functionality first, and then catching itself) was run `curl https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/ | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | grep -v "^$" | clip`

("clip" is a bash function I wrote to pipe things onto the clipboard or spit them back out in a cross-platform linux/mac way)

    clip() {
      if command -v pbcopy > /dev/null; then
        [ -t 0 ] && pbpaste || pbcopy;
      else
        if command -v xclip > /dev/null; then
          [ -t 0 ] && xclip -o -selection clipboard || xclip -selection clipboard;
        else
          echo "clip function error: Neither pbcopy/pbpaste nor xclip are available." >&2;
          return 1;
        fi;
      fi
    }

[wizzwizz4]

Ooh, could you share the source code? That seems like a perfect example for my "relying on AI code generation will subtly destroy your data" presentation.

[pmarreck]

Hah, I have not actually had a chance to run it as a test yet

[wizzwizz4]

Best upload the source code somewhere, before you do. Otherwise, we'll never know why you lost all your files.

[pmarreck]

I had to do additional work on it, and it’s slower than the posted app, but it works

[saagarjha]

Would you trust Claude with your hard drive?

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

Trust, but verify. We should always read and understand what gets spit out anyways.

When doing something with any risk potential I first ask the model for potential risks with the output, and then I manually read the code.

I also "recreated" this tool with Sonnet 3.7. The initial bash script worked (but was slow), and after a few iterations we landed on an fclones one-liner. I hadn't heard of fclones before, but works great! Saved a bunch of disk space today.

[pmarreck]

wow, just learned about fclones, does this also work with OS X’s CoW cloning?

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

Yes.

[criddell]

I think it's priced reasonably. A one-time $5 license wouldn't be sustainable.

Since it's the kind of thing you will likely only need every couple of years, $10 each time feels fair.

If putting all your data online or into an SSD makes more sense, then this app isn't for you and that's okay too.

[botanical76]

I can't even find the price anywhere. Do you have to install the software to see it?

[sbarre]

The Mac App Store page has the pricing at the bottom in the In-App Purchases section..

TL;DR - $49 for a lifetime subscription, or $19/year or $9/month.

It could definitely be easier to find.

[jacobp100]

The price does seem very high. It’s probably a niche product and I’d imagine developers are the ones who would see the biggest savings. Hopefully it works out for them

[benced]

"I don't value software but that's not a respectable opinion so I'll launder that opinion via subscriptions"

[DontBreakAlex]

Well I do value software, I'm paid $86/h to write some! I just find that for $20/year or $50 one time, you can get way more than 12G of hard drive space. I also don't think that this piece of software requires so much maintenance that it wouldn't be worth making at a lower price. I'm not saying that it's bad software, it's really great, just too expensive... Personally, my gut feeling is that the dev would have had more sales with a one time $5, and made more money overall.

[pfranz]

The first option presented is a one month non-renewing subscription for $10. I think the intention is periodically (once a year, once every few years?) you run it to reclaim space. If it was reclaiming more than a few gigs I would do it.

The author talked about being very conservative on launch; skipping directories like the Photo library or others apps that actively manage data or looking across user directories. He stumbled into writing this app because he noticed the duplicated data of shared Photo libraries between different users on the same machine. That use case isn't even supported in this version. He said he plans future development to safely dedup more data--making a one time purchase less sustainable for them.

[amelius]

There are several such tools for Linux, and they are free, so maybe just change operating systems.

[augusto-moura]

I'm pretty sure some of them also work on MacOS. rmlint[1], for example can output a script that reflinks duplicates (or run any script for both files):

  rmlint -c sh:handler=reflink .

I'm not sure if reflink works out of the box, but you can write your own alternative script that just links both files

[1]: https://github.com/sahib/rmlint

[dewey]

It does not support APFS: https://github.com/sahib/rmlint/issues/421

[dewey]

I don't think either of them supports APFS deduplication though?