Hacker News: saghm

New comment by saghm in "Show HN: Gemini 4 Argon plays StarCraft"

saghm — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 02:20:15 +0000

Fair enough, that's a pretty stark difference. It sounds like the exact precision of the actions that a bot can do is pretty much beyond human abilities.

New comment by saghm in "US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership"

saghm — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:50:05 +0000

That sounds like an argument around also enforcing some sort of consumer protections when shutting down a storefront, not an argument against protections for consumers when live service games are shut down

New comment by saghm in "US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership"

saghm — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:48:56 +0000

I don't see the parallel here. You're saying you think that if companies are required to make the server binaries available after shutting down a live service game, people are going to be spammed by banners? Or is there some other emergent effect you're concerned about that you expect me to be able to infer?

New comment by saghm in "US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership"

saghm — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:46:55 +0000

> Binaries are slightly less contentious, but still problematic for MMOs and other titles where they're just not designed to run on consumer gear, might have credentials baked in or might reveal trade secrets to competitors

They are expected to run for at least a certain amount of time though, so maybe the solution is a requirement to post how many years it's guaranteed to be around, and if it isn't kept around that long, the server needs to be made available.

I don't think it's particularly relevant what hardware it's supposed to run on. Trade secrets are a legal privilege, so it's totally fair for society to say that certain other factors are more important in this extraordinarily limited set of circumstances, and if you're baking credentials into your server code directly, that's kind of your own fault, and I don't see "intentionally doing things in a riskier way" as something valuable to preserve.

New comment by saghm in "You could have invented transformers from memory"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:30:24 +0000

There's a certain irony in praising clear explanations as a defense of an explanation that needlessly veered into value judgment

New comment by saghm in "You could have invented transformers from memory"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:29:21 +0000

I didn't downvote, and I don't think there's a problem with explaining why something isn't clear. There's a difference between expressing criticism and saying that something doesn't belong here, and which I'd argue is evidenced from the fact that the reaction to my comment critiquing yours doesn't seem to have ruffled many feathers (at least not yet!)

New comment by saghm in "Show HN: Gemini 4 Argon plays StarCraft"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:56:11 +0000

At least when I first heard about trying to make AI play StarCraft against humans (not the built-in AI of course, which the pros wouldn't have any trouble with), there was a lot of talk about limiting their "actions per minute" to the same level as high-level human players. What confused me was the premise that someone hitting 200 APM would be doing 200 useful things per minute; as far as I was ever able to observe, a huge portion of those actions were either just to look at different things by hitting a hotkey for a unit or building in a different area or even just keeping their fingers in motion so that when they did need to do something it could flow from the movements they were already doing rather than having to actually think through starting and stopping.

New comment by saghm in "You could have invented transformers from memory"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:47:34 +0000

I'm surprised to this take, because I feel like I see math stuff posted here fairly often, and often with a large number of people commenting on it in substantive ways. Often times the math savvy crowd will even help explain stuff to people like me who are not particularly fluent in advanced math.

New comment by saghm in "I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:38:43 +0000

Asking basically the same thing as the sibling replies, but hopefully in a less aggressive way: can you elaborate on what led you to reply like that in the first place? As someone with no horse in the race (I don't use Home Assistant), the first reply you gave genuinely does seem like it was intended in good faith, even if it was not satisfying to the user, and I can understand that angry users are not fun to interact with, but I'm struggling to wrap my head around why your second reply was "This issue is closed as won't fix" without any elaboration about why. The explanation that seems most likely to me is that you were annoyed at the user and decided not to spend any time looking into the issue, which would be unfortunate but maybe understandable if that's what you're apologizing for. Without any explanation about why you quickly dismissed and then suddenly turned around and changed your mind later though, I think you've risked the apology coming across more as damage control than genuine regret.

New comment by saghm in "You could have invented transformers from memory"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:21:11 +0000

> This is a software development site, wouldn't this be much more clear to this audience written as psuedo code instead of a complex series of greek and latin letters

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a forum where people can post arbitrary links to other sites, some of which might have audiences that might not be "the exact set of people who read Hacker News". I'm not sure you'd be able to make a compelling argument that alexwang.ai is aimed at software developers and no one else.

New comment by saghm in "Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:45:24 +0000

> But there are likelier reasons to restrict cyber than world domination.

I mean, greed alone would seem to be enough, and it would be fully worth calling out as bullshit.

New comment by saghm in "US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 18:46:47 +0000

How about "you need to release the binaries for the servers if you turn them off"? The intent of this sort of regulation is to prevent bait-and-switches were games become unplayable after players have invested their time and money.

New comment by saghm in "MS Paint Adds Freeform Rotation (2026)"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:32:31 +0000

"The recommended settings you want" is a wild turn of the phrase. Unless I want exactly what they're recommending, they can't possibly be both.

New comment by saghm in "/dev/null: social network for developers"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:26:00 +0000

And having those passwords leaked is probably only another 1-2 prompts away

New comment by saghm in "US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:24:02 +0000

> is that the Supreme Court of the United States made it their concern by rejecting an established practice of deferring to expert regulators instead of electable people who probably lack the relevant knowledge and experience

The current Supreme Court unfortunately unfortunately seems to lack the knowledge and experience to recognize the logic in this thinking (or just doesn't care because it doesn't fit their agenda)

New comment by saghm in "US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:21:58 +0000

I could use the same argument to oppose pretty much any legislation that isn't like, solving healthcare or preventing climate change. For any given issue, there's almost always something more important than it to at least some people, so if the best argument against fixing a problem is "there are other problems that should be fixed", that's a pretty strong argument in favor of the fix.

New comment by saghm in "US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:17:16 +0000

>> They need to make the server binaries available, along with client functionality to let you choose a server.

> Game companies are not going to give you their source code.

Okay but what about the thing they actually proposed?

New comment by saghm in "Jev meets the Trolley Problem"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:40:26 +0000

Oh, I don't disagree with you. I'm pretty far left-wing and in general think that people with at least as much money as me should be paying high taxes. I would be in favor of higher taxes for wealthy people (which I realistically am included in, even if I'm not making millions of dollars or anything) and putting some of that towards funding for the IRS.

New comment by saghm in "Non-Determinism Doesn't Matter"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:37:08 +0000

Every professional compiler I've ever used has given me the ability to choose what optimization level to use. No professional LLM I've ever used has given me any choice whatsoever to modify the temperature.

New comment by saghm in "An Apology"

saghm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:12:33 +0000

It's not particularly meaningful to criticize something only after the point where the opinion has any actual effect on it. Most people who think something is bad and want to do something about it will describe it as bad right away, not wait until it no longer exists.