Hacker News: TallGuyShort

New comment by TallGuyShort in "UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told"

TallGuyShort — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:15:58 +0000

You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told"

TallGuyShort — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:14:57 +0000

You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told"

TallGuyShort — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:56:01 +0000

You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told"

TallGuyShort — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:53:55 +0000

Asbolutely. Tap to pay options, and the better ones have stopped pushing SMS for 2FA and they will prefer their own apps over third-party ones. JPMC, Capital One and E-Trade (now Morgan Stanley) definitely all do this.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told"

TallGuyShort — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:50:35 +0000

It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told"

TallGuyShort — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:43:58 +0000

So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?

Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.

Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told"

TallGuyShort — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:37:42 +0000

Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more.

It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare"

TallGuyShort — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 03:07:24 +0000

It's a direct quote, formatted as written. And actually so many people read it that he got invited to do conference key notes on his articles. Nice flex, though.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "Astra for Law"

TallGuyShort — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:49:47 +0000

I'm thinking back to some of my interactions with corporate lawyers and you know what? My bar (<- pun) for trusting Astra more than a lawyer is pretty low.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare"

TallGuyShort — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:12:44 +0000

"The “threat model” section of a security paper resembles the script for a telenovela that was written by a paranoid schizophrenic: there are elaborate narratives and grand conspiracy theories, and there are heroes and villains with fantastic (yet oddly constrained) powers that necessitate a grinding battle of emotional and technical attrition. In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them." -- James Mickens

New comment by TallGuyShort in "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"

TallGuyShort — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:16:01 +0000

For every Tweet that goes out on the company account and every blog on the company blog. But that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about vague sources like low-impact social media snippets getting cited on low-reputation blogs until someone more reputable comments on the apparent trend. There are absolutely marketing people who do that "unofficially".

New comment by TallGuyShort in "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"

TallGuyShort — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:14:27 +0000

> Apple does not have a psyops division

No, but they have marketing people, and marketing people in my experience (even in "big" corporate America) have personal (anonymized, but just created themselves) accounts they do stuff like this on all the time.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "Tim Curry has died"

TallGuyShort — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:37:32 +0000

I often chuckle at the observation that Tim Curry and Michael Caine's respective roles in the Muppet films were so beloved because Michael Caine acted like all the muppets were real actors, and Tim Curry acted like he was a muppet. He would have an impressive range of serious / comedic roles anyway, but I admire the ability for an actor that successful to be able to put himself be in such a silly role that well too.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days"

TallGuyShort — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:26:03 +0000

Yes, and that's not what people are reporting flaws in. The reports are "this daemon accepts arbitrary code and then runs it!"

New comment by TallGuyShort in "Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days"

TallGuyShort — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 03:13:44 +0000

This is common in the hype era of AI models that can look for security bugs. An open-source project I used to work on that is basically "distributed code execution as a service" keeps getting reports that the job submission function is a vulnerability. The reporters don't even understand what the project does.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology"

TallGuyShort — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 03:49:49 +0000

Okay but why did this chip have anything to do with that?

New comment by TallGuyShort in "IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology"

TallGuyShort — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:04:49 +0000

I really can't see where the 0.7nm is coming from. The white line looks like it's just an edge of a feature that is "15 rows of silicon atoms", which by some quick arithmetic on Wolfram Alpha has to be AT LEAST ~1.6nm, and the way the rows of atoms appear to be packed in that image and by the provided scale, it seems to be significantly more. Using the white line as a meaningful measurement seems to me to be more misleading than any other interpretation here.

New comment by TallGuyShort in "IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology"

TallGuyShort — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:56:57 +0000

1 picometer = 0.001 nanometers, 0.01 angstrom

1 angstrom = 0.1 nanometers, 100 picometers

1 nanometer = 10 angstroms, 1000 picometers

New comment by TallGuyShort in "IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology"

TallGuyShort — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:55:04 +0000

I always feel like I'm not quite getting quantum stuff no matter how much I read and learn: what does this advancement have to do with quantum computers?

New comment by TallGuyShort in "Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies"

TallGuyShort — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:29:43 +0000

I disagree - there's already a reproducibility crises in the literature of many fields. And medical adjacent-field like nutrition science are among the worst. I think the trends in our culture of people going against medical professionals and "doing their own research" (poorly, and from poor sources) is a net harm on society, and things like the reproducibility crisis and genuinely misleading studies described in the article only serve to harm and dilute the legitimate work done in the field and feed into that cycle. If even "research" by qualified professionals is actually allowed to be garbage by the responsible institutions, we truly are doomed.. It does no good to do discovery if you can't refine or even validate those discoveries.