Hacker News: kfichter

New comment by kfichter in "Museum of Pocket Calculating Devices"

kfichter — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:57:51 +0000

Missing the venerable PF-8000!

Weird little device with a "touch screen" and character recognition.

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/...

New comment by kfichter in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

kfichter — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:55:28 +0000

I got the same. At 2pm on a Thursday!

You can get better code by exploiting model weights

kfichter — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 05:15:41 +0000

Article URL: https://kelvinfichter.com/pages/thoughts/train-harder/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284719

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

There's software, and then there's promptware

kfichter — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:48:03 +0000

Article URL: https://kelvinfichter.com/pages/thoughts/promptware/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137825

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by kfichter in "AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton"

kfichter — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:12:51 +0000

Who needs the money when you have an autonomous system to produce all the energy and resources you need? These systems simply do not need the construct of money as we know it at a certain point.

New comment by kfichter in "NASA's Juno mission leaves legacy of science at Jupiter"

kfichter — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 17:27:11 +0000

Usually just means the position is sponsored by a donor (in this case Frank B. Baird Jr.). Salary and sometimes other funding gets paid via endowment set up by the named person or someone else on behalf of the named person.

New comment by kfichter in "People still use our old-fashioned Unix login servers"

kfichter — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 14:32:20 +0000

I use VSCode's remote/ssh functionality all the time, particularly when I need to develop code on an environment that's more capable than my local machine (or when my internet is weak). Still use Git, no reason why you'd change that when working on a remote machine.

New comment by kfichter in "AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off (2022)"

kfichter — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 06:24:56 +0000

Tried this out for fun:

"Yeah, I get what you’re saying, but it’s not that black and white. There’s definitely a risk, especially for people who are lonely or vulnerable, and some companies are obviously exploiting that. But I’ve also seen situations where these AI tools actually help people who don’t have anyone else to talk to.

Like, sure, chatting with an AI isn’t the same as a real human, but for some people, it might be the only thing getting them through a rough time. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.

I do get the worry, though, that we’re heading toward a world where fake interactions become more normal and people lose touch with real connections. It’s hard to say which way things will go—depends a lot on how people end up using the tech. Could go either way."

New comment by kfichter in "How Olympics officials try to catch “motor doping”"

kfichter — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 23:00:42 +0000

Is this even remotely true

New comment by kfichter in "To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees (2009)"

kfichter — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 03:51:50 +0000

Reminds me of one of my favorite blog posts :-) https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/

New comment by kfichter in "Mummy Brown"

kfichter — Thu, 16 May 2024 18:45:03 +0000

Given the extensive effort required to mummify someone, I suspect these people cared!

New comment by kfichter in "NYC Rat Sightings (Daily)"

kfichter — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 23:36:15 +0000

Also, people just generally being outside less often

New comment by kfichter in "Show HN: NeedleDrop – Guess the movie from a song"

kfichter — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 18:02:07 +0000

A few different movies have this song in it, would be cool to accept any of the correct answers, depending on how easy that is.

New comment by kfichter in "Apple Vision Pro and ADHD"

kfichter — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 21:14:00 +0000

I also pulled the trigger here hoping to be able to replace my desktop setup. What were the key issues you were having that made you feel like it's just not there yet for that use case?

New comment by kfichter in "FAQ on Leaving Google"

kfichter — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:27:01 +0000

Don't forget inflation!

New comment by kfichter in "The high price of empty office space"

kfichter — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 22:45:08 +0000

Cut funding to funnel money into the pockets of large businesses under the guise of "supporting illegal migrants". It's genius, really. You get to siphon off the tax pool and blame it on migrants.

New comment by kfichter in "Google launched a new AI, and has already admitted at least one demo wasn't real"

kfichter — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 12:26:48 +0000

It's described in the article -- it wasn't a real time conversation, they simply took still images from videos and sent them to Gemini along with a text prompt, and then the resulting responses were trimmed for effect.

New comment by kfichter in "Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)"

kfichter — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 19:38:05 +0000

I'd be interested in hearing this recording if you're willing to share it

New comment by kfichter in "The Attention Mal-Economy and My Brush with Terence Tao"

kfichter — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 06:09:40 +0000

What was the actual error in the blog post? Seems like the most interesting part was left out

New comment by kfichter in "Mark Zuckerberg Is Coming for Sam Altman and OpenAI"

kfichter — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 06:01:02 +0000

> The risks to Meta were manifold. People spending time speaking to ChatGPT might ignore their friends on WhatsApp.

ChatGPT replacing human interaction/friendship seems like a stretch (at least for the moment). Seems much more likely that Meta just realizes that these chat apps are going to replace traditional search engines and there's a huge opportunity to unseat Google.