Hacker News: kylebyte

New comment by kylebyte in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

kylebyte — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:13:24 +0000

And any push to use 2 to build infra to make 1 easier is hard to sell when a lot of engineers think AI will be able to perfectly do 1 in some nebulous time in the near future.

New comment by kylebyte in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

kylebyte — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 05:39:07 +0000

It reminds me a lot of adderall's effect on people without ADHD. A pretty universal feeling that it's making you smarter, paired with no measurable increase in test scores.

New comment by kylebyte in "I doubt that anything resembling genuine AGI is within reach of current AI tools"

kylebyte — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 22:11:47 +0000

I'd believe this more if companies weren't continuing to use words like reason, understand, learn, and genius when talking about these systems.

I buy that there's disagreement on what intelligence means in the enthusiast space, but "thinks like people" is pretty clearly the general understanding of the word, and the one that tech companies are hoping to leverage.

New comment by kylebyte in "I doubt that anything resembling genuine AGI is within reach of current AI tools"

kylebyte — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 09:49:16 +0000

The problem is that intelligence isn't the result, or at the very least the ideas that word evokes in people don't match the actual capabilities of the machine.

Washing is a useful word to describe what that machine does. Our current setup is like if washing machines were called "badness removers," and there was a widespread belief that we were only a few years out from a new model of washing machine being able to cure diseases.

New comment by kylebyte in "The Timmy Trap"

kylebyte — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 19:09:20 +0000

If I came up with something novel while watching a sunrise, which I wouldn't have come up with had I not been looking at it, where did the novelty really come from?

New comment by kylebyte in "It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA"

kylebyte — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 17:52:07 +0000

The backend has plenty of complexities, but frontend developers have to deal with something just as complex - the user.

Given ramp up time, most backend engineers could build a bad frontend, or build a good one if they have a really good UX team that thought through everything and are just implementing their work.

In the real world though where UX is understaffed and often focused on the wrong problems - I've had to rescue too many frontends built by backend focused teams to share your confidence.

New comment by kylebyte in "Meta got caught gaming AI benchmarks"

kylebyte — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 17:53:50 +0000

The problem is less that those high level engineers are only good at deterministic work and more that they're only rewarded for deterministic work.

There is no system to pitch an idea as opening new frontiers - all ideas must be able to optimize some number that leadership has already been tricked into believing is important.

New comment by kylebyte in "Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit"

kylebyte — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 23:42:23 +0000

Every day I am more convinced that LLM hype is the equivalent of someone seeing a stage magician levitate a table across the stage and assuming this means hovercars must only be a few years away.

New comment by kylebyte in "Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario"

kylebyte — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 19:57:22 +0000

I was unclear, I meant chunks of the world becoming unlivable from climate change could easily be the catalyst for a nuclear war. So the worst case for both is the same in my mind.

New comment by kylebyte in "GPT-4 Update: 32K Context Window Now for All Users"

kylebyte — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 19:55:42 +0000

Could the recipe limitations be because of the danger an incorrect recipe could put the user in? It's probably unlikely you'd make something toxic, but a made up recipe could easily be a fire hazard.

New comment by kylebyte in "Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario"

kylebyte — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 10:11:30 +0000

I'm pretty sure the worst case of your nuclear war scenario is actually the worst case of the climate change one.

Chunks of the world suddenly becoming unlivable and resources getting more scarce sounds like a recipe for escalation into war to me.

New comment by kylebyte in "High-level emulator for iPhone OS apps"

kylebyte — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 10:03:09 +0000

My guess is that while it may not be too much effort to get a mostly accurate emulator that works well enough for hobbyist use, it'd be a lot of effort to get something up to the compatibility and usability standards of an official product.

Many older apps may use undocumented functionality or non obvious quirks of the system that an emulator may miss, which means you'd need to have a QA team testing individual apps for compatibility.

Part of Apple's brand is usability and a lack of rough edges. The downside of that is that building a tool like this up to their standards would be prohibitively costly.

New comment by kylebyte in "iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters"

kylebyte — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 20:55:56 +0000

I have pretty much the same mental image, though with the 40's and 50's having some color probably mostly from period movies about that time.

What I really wonder is whether the photos and videos we're taking in the present will have some kind of subjective effect on how people remember our current time. It feels like we're finally at a point where most media has the fidelity to capture an objective image of the world, but that could just be that since we have the reference point of living through these times our minds can fill in the blanks.

Maybe the original comment I replied to's grandkid will want to borrow their old iPhone 12 to take retro pictures with someday.

New comment by kylebyte in "iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters"

kylebyte — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 20:22:32 +0000

It's weird to think that for people without clear memories of it, the 2000's might be imagined in the style of early digital photos the same way the 70's look like Super 8 footage or the early 20th century is sepia toned in my head.