Hacker News: TimByte

New comment by TimByte in "Websites are closing their doors to AI agents"

TimByte — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 09:03:41 +0000

> It’s also a “you can’t scrape us but we can scrape you” mentality these companies are getting into.

And the problem often isn't some advanced attack. It's enough to follow links with session params, generate endless urls or ignore robots.txt to turn a regular crawler into a load generator. A site owner needs crawler protection from specific behavior and not another list of known bot signatures

New comment by TimByte in "AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom"

TimByte — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:06:55 +0000

Quickly pulling up a manual through a chatbot offers only a surface-level grasp of an unfamiliar task

New comment by TimByte in "AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom"

TimByte — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:56:49 +0000

Our team migrated a chunk of internal parsers to local weights purely to kill off query costs. The cloud api bill dropped by two-thirds in a single month

New comment by TimByte in "AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom"

TimByte — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:51:00 +0000

> For example, the article suggests $1T from enterprise productivity tooling. A quick Google suggests the global enterprise productivity tooling market is only worth about $0.1T right now

We tried to justify enterprise assistant budget to the CFO last quarter. They sent us packing after asking exactly how many headcount reductions we could guarantee post-purchase, which stalled the conversation immediately...

New comment by TimByte in "Show HN: Lossless-memory – a personal AI memory that never summarizes"

TimByte — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:10:38 +0000

Placing LLL inside the user message right ahead of the new query keeps the common conversation prefix fully intact

New comment by TimByte in "Show HN: Lossless-memory – a personal AI memory that never summarizes"

TimByte — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:06:58 +0000

A timeline turns contradictory instructions into an orderly sequence of updates. Without it the model just gambles between the old guideline and the new one on every run

New comment by TimByte in "Show HN: Lossless-memory – a personal AI memory that never summarizes"

TimByte — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:03:55 +0000

As long as the relative time parser is hardcoded for japanese, english sessions are stuck with manual ISO dates. Wiring up dateparser or duckling would take an evening , so leaving that on the roadmap is an odd choice

New comment by TimByte in "Meta tried to shrink engineering teams around AI"

TimByte — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:39:32 +0000

Tell that to the engineers doing 70 % more triage while their compensation stays flat

New comment by TimByte in "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"

TimByte — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:44:45 +0000

Stories about Tim Cook sitting there being surprised by sales are total marketing. They simply ran out of memory chips because of the global shortage, so they repacked supply delays into a nice story about insane hype among AI startups. And hit two birds with one stone by throwing shade at their competitors

New comment by TimByte in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

TimByte — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:44:15 +0000

Apple hasn't been selling just ram for a long time, they sell vram. Try getting 512 gb of HBM on current Nvidia cards - it's gonna cost way more than $ 24k. And here you get the same amount of memory for weights right in a quiet unit under your desk

Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable

New comment by TimByte in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra for a big leap in performance and AI compute"

TimByte — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:40:22 +0000

Gonna go sell a kidney, should just about cover a base Mac Studio. Guess I'll need a payday loan for the power cable

New comment by TimByte in "AI is less likely to launch a nuclear strike when it reasons in Japanese"

TimByte — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:01:59 +0000

If a kaiju shows up in the prompt, the weights will immediately drift from game theory into fiction. And by the laws of the genre, the military is obligated to drop a nuke on it - just to make the monster even angrier so it goes and trashes Tokyo

New comment by TimByte in "AI is less likely to launch a nuclear strike when it reasons in Japanese"

TimByte — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 10:59:14 +0000

So nobody's bothered by the fact that five out of nine models went nuke in 100% of cases regardless of the language?..

New comment by TimByte in "AI migrated legacy COBOL programs to Java, bugs included"

TimByte — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:58:13 +0000

Yeah that’s why they delegated code gen to deterministic tooling and saved the model for input fuzzing - let it fight the data instead of legacy syntax

New comment by TimByte in "AI migrated legacy COBOL programs to Java, bugs included"

TimByte — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:53:33 +0000

For the article they just mocked it out for unit tests. But in reality you really can't - that’s a massive pain in the ass. Rewriting pure math is easy, but mocking CICS transaction isolation in java means spinning up these monstrous adapter frameworks that just tank performance

New comment by TimByte in "Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts"

TimByte — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:20:21 +0000

The whole point of Apple silicon isnt speed, it is capacity. You can grab a Mac Studio with 192 gb of unified memory and shove a model in there that would otherwise require building a rig with multiple rtx 4090 s. For local dev just being able to fit the weights in memory is often way more important than token generation speed

New comment by TimByte in "AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy"

TimByte — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:42:02 +0000

It would be interesting to measure not just the accuracy, but how many people actually decided to double check the answer

New comment by TimByte in "AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy"

TimByte — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:37:39 +0000

Obviously without a proper RAG pipeline or web search it is just going to hallucinate with maximum confidence. It would be more interesting to see the results with top tier models that have proper alignment to refuse to answer when token probability is low. As it is they just proved that people tend to trust well written text in a chat ui

New comment by TimByte in "What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)"

TimByte — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:49:45 +0000

The interesting taxonomy may be less about the source of the names and more about what properties they have

New comment by TimByte in "What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)"

TimByte — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:07:48 +0000

Somewhere in Cloudflare's DNS system, a random number generator briefly became the office matchmaker