Max Niederman

Head of Quality @ Mechanize

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@tszzl I have never heard it used in this sense as far as I can remember, though it is of course very correlated.

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@paulg In general, AI increases both supply and demand for all intermediate software products (libraries, databases, cloud platforms, etc). I suspect formal methods will not be exceptional among these other intermediate software products.

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

Why must every transaction between two businesses be mediated through dozens of sales calls discussing things that could have trivially been communicated by email?

Surely I’m not the only one who despises products that you have to go through the sales call gauntlet to buy?

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

Lifehack to escape permanent underclass:

- Get offers from twenty early stage startups with set equity grants
- Tell each of them you can’t join for a year
- Wait a year
- Join the one that appreciated most, renege on the others
- Profit

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@0xf3mi but why though, buybacks are economically equivalent to dividends

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

Why do companies ever pay dividends instead of stock buybacks? Buybacks are significantly tax advantaged, and I don’t see any advantages at all to dividends.

Claude tells me it’s because dividends “signal stability” but I don’t understand why that would be the case.

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@jacobtechtavern The market cap should be the present value of all cash flows from the asset, including buybacks not just dividends.

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@Yulai_Jump But why do dividend oriented funds exist?

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@AngusTPT If your shares are overvalued this means you should be taking money from the market to put it in other assets by selling shares. You shouldn’t be distributing cash to investors via dividends or via buybacks.

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@PatrickHeizer @sichuan_mala But why not just do the consistent cash payouts via buybacks also?

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@captgouda24 @sichuan_mala Source for “essentially” meaning “having the same kind of commitments”? From what I’m seeing it’s mostly been applied in cases where the buyback didn’t change the proportion of any party’s ownership.

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@captgouda24 @sichuan_mala Why not just commit to buybacks instead of dividends?

[Mechanize @MechanizeWork]

Claude Opus 4.8 scores 70.9% on GBA Eval, the top score to date. Given 24 hours, it writes an emulator that plays most games, with working audio on all of them. It beats the previous best (GPT-5.5 at 53.2%) in under an hour.

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@TheStalwart @citrini It’s pretty unlikely that people will do that, but image models can be extremely good *lossless* compressors. In fact, that is a significant part of how they are trained.

In practice though storage is relatively cheap so it doesn’t make sense to use them for this.

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@dwarkesh_sp Models are quite good at proving theorems, but quite bad at coming up with interesting novel conjectures to prove.

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

Nominative determinism

[Mechanize @MechanizeWork]

We evaluated Gemini 3.5 Flash on GBA Eval. It could not build a working GBA emulator. On Piugba, the game just flashes on screen, unplayable and with no sound. Overall, it achieves a score of 6.7%.

[Max Niederman @MaxNiederman]

@t_blom @ycombinator Wait until he hears about cloud credits.