Top all-time · #205
Andy Baio
Personal blog · waxy.org · on HN as waxpancakeculturegames
Andy Baio writes Waxy.org, a personal blog at waxy.org about culture and games. Since 2007, 215 different Hacker News readers have linked it 277 times, most often “ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Andy Baio's blog for writing on copyright, DMCA abuse, and AI training data, plus his early Kind of Bloop lawsuit account. Several commenters cite it as a go-to reference.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- One commenter says they like the blog as a link blog, and another calls it a link blog they really like.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Waxy.org is the personal sandbox of Andy Baio. I made XOXO, Upcoming, Belong.io, Playfic, Kind of Bloop, helped build Kickstarter, and a bunch of other stuff too.
Most-linked posts?
- ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up23 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2007-03-04
- Kind of Screwed11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2011-06-23
- No Copyright Intended9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2011-12-11
- Kind of Screwed (2011)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-03-04
- AI Data Laundering8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2022-09-30
- An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-11-01
- Exploring 12M of the 2.3B images used to train Stable Diffusion5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-08-30
- Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-09-23
- /2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-04-16
- How Artists on Twitter Tricked T-Shirt Stores to Admit Their Automated Art Theft4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-12-08
What Hacker News says?
Do the same copyright issues arise with AI-generated videos learned from Shutterstock? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33239706 https://waxy.org/2022/09/ai-data-laundering-how-academic-and...
Comment linking /2022/09/ai-data-laundering-how-academic-and-nonprofit-researchers-shield-tech-companies-from-accountability/
on “GitHub Copilot investigation”Submitted An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model as a story · 726 points
HN discussionHere's a good example: http://waxy.org/2009/04/all_things_digital_and_transparency_... The short of it being that identity is paramount online. Stealing content can be a copyright issue, but stepping into someone else's voice and holding someone else's creative content as your own is simply evil. With proper, comprehensive attribution there's some flex to go around, but even then it's generally something done with c…
Comment linking /2009/04/all_things_digital_and_transparency_in_online_journalism/
on “A new approach to China”Submitted Kind of Screwed as a story · 611 points
HN discussionJust another of the myriad examples of how the DMCA is abused with no repercussions to the abusers at all. Remember when Youtube removed a video of someone in their garden with the rationale that the sounds of birds chirping infringed on some company's copyright [1]? And then they upheld the removal even following manual review, so the tired refrain that it was just an automated bot was not even applicable. [1] http…
Comment linking /2012/03/youtube_bypasses_the_dmca/
on “Police playing music while being filmed, seemingly to trigger copyright filters”Submitted A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements as a story · 593 points
HN discussionNot sure that parent's comment deserves a reply, but https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-... > we grabbed the data for over 12 million images used to train Stable Diffusion, and used his Datasette project to make a data browser for you to explore and search it yourself. > Read on to learn about how this dataset was collected, the websites it most frequently pulled images from, and the artists…
Comment linking /2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-used-to-train-stable-diffusions-image-generator/
on “Stable Diffusion is a big deal”Submitted The quiet death of Ello's big dreams as a story · 503 points
HN discussionNo, because it leads to an incoherent policy. Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two things to that over the years but they stuck to that. Reddit's policy then became, unofficially, "trust us to get rid of the crap." That sounds fine, but it has problems: 1. it's not the original policy. HN has a "trust us" policy and it works great but it's a…
Comment linking /random/arsdigita/
on “Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief”Submitted Why Not to Use Quora as a story · 500 points
HN discussion> You are perfectly entitled to write that Star Wars fanfic. Nope. It's a derivative work, and, as such, requires the permission of the people who own the copyright and trademarks. > You are not entitled to make money off it This matters less than you may think. There's a four-part test [1], and profit is considered, but the work not being for-profit doesn't make the work legal. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/title17…
Comment linking /2011/12/no_copyright_intended/
on “Open Source is Not About You”Submitted With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube as a story · 462 points
HN discussionIf you're curious you can see some of the imagery used to train SD here: https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/im... This is just a small fraction of the imagery and it does include pornography. I respect that if you're online and reading HN, you're probably mature enough to handle seeing pornography. So if you're curious to see some of the training data that made it in: choose from the dropdown…
Comment linking /2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-used-to-train-stable-diffusions-image-generator/
on “Diffusion Bee: Stable Diffusion GUI App for M1 Mac”Submitted Exploring 12M of the 2.3B images used to train Stable Diffusion as a story · 446 points
HN discussionThe author of the original post (Andy Baio) found exactly where the line was. He released a (great) chip tune version of the jazz classic Kind of Blue (named Kind of Bloop), fully handled the music copyrights, and was promptly sued by the cover artist for Kind of Blue who believed that the pixel art cover of Kind of Bloop was not adequately transformative. https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/
Comment linking /2011/06/kind_of_screwed/
on “An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model”Submitted Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines as a story · 364 points
HN discussionSoon we'll have to use Mechanical Turk[0] to identify existing opensource code similar to what Girl Talk did with "Feed the Animals"[1]. Unrelated, how is it that Mechanical Turk was never truely integrated w/ AWS? [0] https://www.mturk.com/ [1] https://waxy.org/2008/09/girl_turk/
Comment linking /2008/09/girl_turk/
on “We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot”Submitted AI Data Laundering as a story · 304 points
HN discussionYou can find a somewhat playable early "prototype" linked from here: https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_seque...
Comment linking /2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/
on “Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games”Submitted Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images as a story · 303 points
HN discussionI think in this instance the application Charles would be more helpful than Wireshark. See the below article for how someone analyzed wifi traffic from iPad: http://waxy.org/2011/02/how_i_indexed_the_daily/
Comment linking /2011/02/how_i_indexed_the_daily/
on “Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps ”Submitted Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late as a story · 244 points
HN discussionI want more people to have link blogs. I have one in the sidebar of https://simonwillison.net/ which I've been running since November 2003. You can search through all 6,836 links here: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark I can post things to it with a bookmarklet. It has an Atom feed. It's such a low-friction way of publishing. A lot of https://daringfireball.net works like this too. I also like https://…
Comment linking /
on “Where Have All the Websites Gone?”Submitted No Copyright Intended as a story · 183 points
HN discussionEven visibly putting someone's name in a watermark won't always prevent one from getting shared https://waxy.org/2014/01/ellen_degeneres_walter_mitty_screen...
Comment linking /2014/01/ellen_degeneres_walter_mitty_screener_leaks_online/
on “Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks”Submitted Agency stole bestselling author's book, used AI to relaunch as their own as a story · 137 points
HN discussion"It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. " An interesting dynamic of startups. You try to build a great place to work at, [0] and in building that startup you screw it up by building a bigger company. [1] [0] "Managing Software Engineers" ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar... [1] "ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up" ~ http://waxy.o…
Comment linking /random/arsdigita/
on “Tech layoffs more than double in Bay Area”Submitted The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS as a story · 130 points
HN discussionAndy Baio didn't make that image [0], and it's not a copy-and-paste - look at the tie for example [1]. [0] http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/ [1] http://waxy.org/random/images/weblog/kind_of_bloop_compariso...
Comment linking /random/images/weblog/kind_of_bloop_comparison-20100701-172352.jpg
on “Disney have stolen my artwork”Submitted The Death of Upcoming.org as a story · 91 points
HN discussion
