Hacker News: maxbond

New comment by maxbond in "Residential proxies detected on White House network"

maxbond — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 00:52:13 +0000

The track record for preventing people in positions of trust from seeking out mental health care is terrible. It's just brushing problems under the rug and waiting for them to turn rancid. Don't interpret not seeking help as the nonexistence of a problem, especially if their career depends on it.

New comment by maxbond in "Have I befriended a murderer?"

maxbond — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 21:42:39 +0000

Have you ever served on a jury? It's easy to get out of jury duty. The people who really don't want to be there, usually aren't. When I did grand jury, everyone wanted to be there and was very engaged. To me this is like saying people aren't interested in juicy gossip, having an opinion, debating the smallest details, and wielding power - that's not been my experience.

But the bigger problem is that, if the process were really so precarious, then that's exactly why we would want stronger controls. There may be a good argument for a different threshold but it isn't this one.

New comment by maxbond in "YC's Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens"

maxbond — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 16:31:40 +0000

Superchats and other livestream gifts

New comment by maxbond in "The 'Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen' post is misleading"

maxbond — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 14:09:22 +0000

You've expressed your criticism plainly without addressing anything the post might've done well. I think that's absolutely fine, but why would your criticism apply to the post but not your own comment? Personally I think it's because the standards of peer review don't apply to HN comments, but I don't think they apply to blog posts either.

New comment by maxbond in "Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen"

maxbond — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 05:00:49 +0000

> And without any environment feedback, it has no trouble writing, from scratch, small game-playing networks that outplay networks trained with PPO for 100 million steps.

This is basically a claim that the bitter lesson doesn't turn out to be true. Exciting and I want to learn more but I am immediately suspicious.

New comment by maxbond in "OccupySaaS"

maxbond — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 07:46:54 +0000

I would be happy to see these companies have their lunch eaten by open source but I don't understand who the audience is for this populist framing. Tech workers by and large wouldn't have supported the Occupy movement. The people sympathetic to Occupy generally don't like the tech industry and especially not AI. It's difficult to imagine serious teams deploying anticapitalist branded software within their enterprise. Who is this project for?

New comment by maxbond in "Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model"

maxbond — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:23:51 +0000

It's an hour. It'll tell you the expiry time on the status line now but that information is also available in /usage.

New comment by maxbond in "MicroZig to Adopt Strict No LLM / No AI Policy"

maxbond — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 02:21:50 +0000

I agree the onus should be on people not to create a nuisance but I don't think it's a realistic expectation. Descriptively, normatively I agree that people ought to be considerate and reasonable.

New comment by maxbond in "MicroZig to Adopt Strict No LLM / No AI Policy"

maxbond — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 02:20:07 +0000

Expression is as much about what is excluded as what is included. They've made it clear they aren't making a prescription for other people's projects. I don't see any reason to interpret this as an attack on other's expression rather than simply their own expression.

New comment by maxbond in "MicroZig to Adopt Strict No LLM / No AI Policy"

maxbond — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 02:09:18 +0000

I'm wondering if you foresee remaining open to new contributors or focusing on a trusted set of like minded contributors? How much time are you willing to spend enforcing this policy? (To put my cards on the table I think it's good for projects to pursue different and incompatible agendas and if you are volunteering to conduct this experiment I think that is great and genuinely wish you the best, I'm just wondering whether this will become a tarpit that either soaks up all of your time or makes onboarding new contributors take an inordinate amount of time.)

New comment by maxbond in "Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones"

maxbond — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:06 +0000

Yeah, this is a much better version of my argument.

New comment by maxbond in "Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones"

maxbond — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:42:13 +0000

> People don't understand that good things are meant to be copied so that consumers have the best product

I get how my comment comes off that way but I do agree and am broadly in favor of knockoffs. I think there's a distinction between a knockoff and a bootleg, where a knockoff steals ideas and a bootleg steals the execution. And a good game is a tasteful knockoff of a bunch of previous games, great artists steal and such.

New comment by maxbond in "Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones"

maxbond — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:44:47 +0000

It's not personal for me either, but I am going to let you satisfy your curiosity on your own.

New comment by maxbond in "Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones"

maxbond — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:06:49 +0000

We're simply imagining different cases. I'm thinking about straightforward copyright violations I've read about recently in the games industry.

Regardless, I don't see why Valve couldn't fund a lawsuit based on a novel legal theory.

New comment by maxbond in "Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones"

maxbond — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:04:38 +0000

It's a good question and the answer is mixed. Some of the problem has been directly bootlegging games in other markets like China, so stealing the code and assets outright. That's definitely a copyright violation most places, I would assume it is in China too, but the point is moot without Valve's backing because no indie is going to conduct a lawsuit in a foreign country.

A clean room knockoff isn't but I don't think the cases would necessarily even be brought or won. There's a lot of quick buck artists who see gaming as a soft target. Success is in convincing them there's risk involved rather than actually winning in court or extracting settlements.

That will still leave a lot of AI game development people feel is slop. That's probably the reality going forward. But reducing that to the people who are interested in making games (even if we are unhappy with their results) and removing the people who are revolving through the latest AI get rich quick schemes is probably achievable.

New comment by maxbond in "Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones"

maxbond — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:45:45 +0000

The developer or publisher would bring the case. Valve would fund it.

New comment by maxbond in "Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones"

maxbond — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:22:08 +0000

This isn't much of a response, what they said amounts to that you should work harder to cultivate a community that you can then funnel into their platform. "Launching isn't the finish line" is obviously true but what has been happening is that people are sniped before launch based on their demo and marketing material, so it's not all that relevant.

Valve ought to be funding lawsuits against these bootleggers. Steam can only exist if indie developers feel confident they can publish there. It's as much a threat to them as anyone else, and indie studios can figure out for themselves they need to market harder but can't necessarily embark on a lawsuit.

New comment by maxbond in "Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?"

maxbond — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 01:32:54 +0000

Amazon didn't start by creating their own lines of products. Later when they were in a monopoly-like position they were and to poach only products their partners were doing brisk business in. So they were able to grow without holding any inventory or taking any risks on product development.

Why would OpenAI start a hundred companies when there's plenty of prospective founders to take that risk on their behalf?

New comment by maxbond in "Feds suspect ransom negotiator ran ShinyHunters extortion site"

maxbond — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 09:07:36 +0000

This is a very narrow framing, and that is what I am trying to get at. Obviously it would be absurd to deliberately provide welfare to criminal enterprises. But our adversaries get a vote in what happens. There is a level of risk at which you are forced to pay the ransom.

If we don't get trapped in this false binary we might consider other options. I think the takeaway from my comment should be, if you want to make it illegal to pay a ransom to these groups, then you will also need to dismantle their infrastructure and organization. Otherwise you're just putting the ball in their court and hoping they'll fumble it. It's not that we're "scared," it's that that isn't a strategy.

New comment by maxbond in "The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines"

maxbond — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 07:07:05 +0000

Maybe some people respond very well to hydroxyzine but it would not be typical for it to stop a panic attack. It is very mild.