Hacker News: smolder

New comment by smolder in "Don't be a meat proxy"

smolder — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:27:27 +0000

There is no meat proxy subverting discourse. There are just a bunch of dumb disinterested people in the way of a real community.

New comment by smolder in "Don't be a meat proxy"

smolder — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:24:54 +0000

Don't spread ignorance like this.

New comment by smolder in "Don't be a meat proxy"

smolder — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:17:28 +0000

This is a weak argument but I hope you develop it into a better one.

New comment by smolder in "TinyNES Review – A Super Niche NES Console"

smolder — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:08:03 +0000

Yeah, a proper mini NES would just be a dongle that attached to a cartridge. It's not hard to make an NES equivalent. It's kinda weird that people want these "authentic" things, since you can emulate them in a toenail form factor. The people who think emulation or fpgas aren't good enough are dumb people.

New comment by smolder in "qm – Multiplayer agent harness for work"

smolder — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:18:36 +0000

Fake, boring, non-accomplishment.

New comment by smolder in "AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job"

smolder — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:09:47 +0000

> Are these people cooked?

Yes. This is a weird kind of denial about the LLMs that cost nation-state levels of energy doing human nerd work.

They aren't perfect at all, but there's very little reason to be anything but a prompt engineer and proof reader anymore.

New comment by smolder in "AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job"

smolder — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:03:37 +0000

Blah blah. Software engineering is now prompt engineering. I'm not sure what the point of this article is.

New comment by smolder in "League of Legends designer shares game design field manual"

smolder — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:21:05 +0000

The example I always go to for oddly unsuccessful games, (good at least, I don't know about excellent,) was Super Monday Night Combat. It was something like Valve's Deadlock, a 3D MOBA game more than 10 years earlier, with a bit of The Finals aesthetic. (Coins, instead of blood, gameshowy, announcers quipping over the gameplay.) I had a lot of fun with it, but it seems like hardly anyone noticed it existed. They never got the critical mass of players needed to keep it going.

New comment by smolder in "League of Legends designer shares game design field manual"

smolder — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:08:56 +0000

I understand what you're saying. I hold a different view of what is well made or not. Commercial success isn't the only measure. I believe dark patterns detract from the cultural value of a thing, which is how they came to be called that. Meta is a valuable company, but they could have made less money and provided much more value to society with different practices. There's a "rising tide lifts all boats" approach to commerce, and then there's the candy crush, perpetual enshittification, monetary maximalist approach, usually with negative side effects.

But that's beside the point. I don't think League of Legends is especially predatory, I just think it's a mediocre game that was well marketed at the right time to go "viral".

New comment by smolder in "League of Legends designer shares game design field manual"

smolder — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:19:49 +0000

What makes it obvious to you, that LoL is well made? Userbase? Is candy crush obviously well made? Perhaps it is well marketed, more than well made?

New comment by smolder in "Android May Soon Restrict On-Device ADB"

smolder — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:11:27 +0000

RIP phones

New comment by smolder in "Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models"

smolder — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:07:20 +0000

You want an mp3 player with no DRM lockin and proprietary store and so on? Sorry, that's not competitive anymore. That will not happen for the same reason people don't make affordable dumb TVs anymore. The manufacturer needs a way to spy on you or get recurring revenue some other way.

New comment by smolder in "Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++"

smolder — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 07:55:06 +0000

There's basically no such thing as "bare C++" anymore. On any modern machine you are relying on piles of code. You can't just write to registers to edit vram and output video like on some 80s computer. It all happens on top of a thick stack of APIs, drivers and firmware.

New comment by smolder in "Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude"

smolder — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 07:59:52 +0000

That's a cool quote but utterly useless. You have a strong opinion and no argument.

New comment by smolder in "Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude"

smolder — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:03:19 +0000

Yes, ultimately the problem is that the law is vague or inadequate. The courts have their definitions of fair use, which are their best efforts at interpreting the law, and I have mine, which is different.

New comment by smolder in "Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude"

smolder — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:39:50 +0000

Yeah, I can't AB test against a world without copyright at all, but I think there's sufficient evidence to believe that a lot of stuff would never have gotten done without copyright to ensure it could be done gainfully.

The importance of striking a balance between incentivising creation and enriching culture was why the original copyright term was dramatically shorter. The modern term of owners life + 80 years or whatever it is, is clearly ridiculous. 20 years before entering public domain seems pretty reasonable.

There's unfortunately also some pressure against people using legitimate public domain works. E.g. youtubers getting copyright strikes for playing public domain music because it's too similar to a specific copyrighted recording.

New comment by smolder in "AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D Review: 3D V-Cache Gaming Performance for Less – HotHardware"

smolder — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:19:13 +0000

I assume they meant that gaming is the main market segment it serves, which from my understanding is correct. The X3D chips have great performance in games, which are generally constrained by memory latency. It's, of course, still a general purpose CPU that can do many things.

New comment by smolder in "Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude"

smolder — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:15:20 +0000

Right, it's about incentivising intellectual work. While I have big issues with the copyright system, like all the extensions lobbied for by Disney and friends, it did enable a lot of good work to happen.

New comment by smolder in "'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling"

smolder — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:55:50 +0000

Chinese Communist Party or Communist Party of China makes little difference. There is a clear convention and no clear reason to change it.

New comment by smolder in "Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude"

smolder — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:47:15 +0000

As far as I'm concerned, the courts are wrong, and training on ill gotten copyrighted material is not fair use. Given the clear value of highly trained LLMs, the investment they have taken on, and the amount of disruption to the existing economy they stand to make, in a just world, the people who created the training data deserve some level of compensation. I think, in the US, they are very afraid of falling behind China, who doesn't give a shit about intellectual property, but that doesn't mean we aren't crossing an ethical boundary, acting like them.