Hacker News: dessimus

New comment by dessimus in "12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)"

dessimus — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:25:19 +0000

The article says they returned after that long having forgotten about the experiment. I think they would have recognized there were positive results long before that if someone happened to be checking in at say Year 2, 5 or 10. It not like the land was still barren piles of orange peel at Year 14 and then suddenly Yahtzee!

New comment by dessimus in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

dessimus — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:24:36 +0000

>That site should be taken out back and put out of its misery.

With it gone, a large portion of it's users would come here, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of HN.

New comment by dessimus in "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email"

dessimus — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:19:52 +0000

>well by that logic, you can argue every top gov officials who didn't sign up for https://landing.google.com/intl/en_in/advancedprotection/ is incompetent

I would, yes. Maybe a director in the Small Business Administration is lower on the target list of gov officials that would need to be concerned, but certainly anyone in the Departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, State, Transportation, Treasury, and probably Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for sure.

> BECAUSE NSA IS part of the government ?

I don't know why multiple times in this comment section you allude to the NSA as being the only Federal agency tasked with any sort of cyber security responsibility, that is just plain wrong.

>you should have brought an internal recommendation memo targeted all fbi people

Yes, because I have access to any and all internal memos provided by the FBI to their employees. Internal memos are by their very nature are internal, so are generally not available for public consumption.

Also, your higher ed example is terrible, because as someone with a work history at a flagship state university's IT department, I can assure you that we provide all sorts of "memos", trainings, and tools to combat cybercrime, including special onboarding sessions to ensure new hires are protecting themselves and the university. We don't depend on the Art and Physics departments to make sure they keep their faculty 'in-line' following best practices in cyber security.

New comment by dessimus in "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email"

dessimus — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:12:10 +0000

What are you talking about? There's literally a Cyber Crimes[0] division of the FBI, and they run the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF). They probably know a thing or two about cyber security for high-ranked governmental officials.

[0] https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber

New comment by dessimus in "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email"

dessimus — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 09:56:23 +0000

If only the Director of the FBI had access to some sort of investigative team, maybe more than one, maybe even enough that they use a collective term for it, something like, I don't know: bureau?

New comment by dessimus in "Mark Zuckerberg Is Building an AI Agent to Help Him Be CEO"

dessimus — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:08:37 +0000

By that logic, the Taggart Baking Co. should have been one of the richest companies ever, since everyone compares their product to it as the greatest thing since.

New comment by dessimus in "Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website"

dessimus — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:40:50 +0000

I highly doubt that a consumer would see any financial benefit from this. Sure different grocery stores use different products as loss leaders, but the trade off is time, so rather than the cost of having one person go to one store and by X number of items, we're sending either one person to three stores for ~X/3 items, or three separate people to three stores. All of which will take more total time than 1 store, which puts more resource demand and will cost more to the consumer.

Also, it would rather be in the faceless ai shop's interest to arbitrage orders, always show the "middle" price but use the cheapest one for orders.

New comment by dessimus in "BYD is seeing a flood of new EV buyers"

dessimus — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:07:32 +0000

>The US is a huge economy with a massive military infrastructure.

Yeah, because famously neither Rome nor Spain nor England had massive military infrastructures for their times.

New comment by dessimus in "Super Micro Shares Plunge 25% After Co-Founder Charged in $2.5B Smuggling Plot"

dessimus — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:42:22 +0000

"Another Slot A motherboard :(, maybe the 4th one I buy from AliExpress will finally be that X870 motherboard I want!"

New comment by dessimus in "Super Micro Shares Plunge 25% After Co-Founder Charged in $2.5B Smuggling Plot"

dessimus — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:37:50 +0000

Equally important, it was of a US government official speaking, not content Bloomberg specifically created, such as one of their employees giving analysis.

New comment by dessimus in "Pentagon asks for $200bn for Iran War"

dessimus — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:38:41 +0000

I don't know that I'd trust the words of a President that "starts a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate."

https://youtu.be/5KV_nIgg008

New comment by dessimus in "Pentagon asks for $200bn for Iran War"

dessimus — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:55:42 +0000

Is it? Haven't seen POTUS on a carrier flight deck with a "Mission Accomplished" banner yet, so we got at least 15 years of war ahead.

New comment by dessimus in "US SEC preparing to scrap quarterly reporting requirement"

dessimus — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:32:07 +0000

It's only fraud if one doesn't keep enough cash on hand to b̵u̵y̵ ̵a̵ ̵p̵a̵r̵d̵o̵n̵ make a campaign contribution.

New comment by dessimus in "MM120, a pharmaceutical form of LSD, shown to reduce anxiety symptoms (2025)"

dessimus — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:22:08 +0000

Except just legalization is no guarantee of safety or purity. Look at the Vitamin Industry as an example. The general public thinks that manufacturers of those bottles in the vitamin aisle are required to follow the same standards set by the FDA as those in OTC pain relief in the next aisle over.

New comment by dessimus in "Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite"

dessimus — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:42:01 +0000

I agree, but I'm not the one claiming that an AI-Assisted rewrite is sufficient enough to now claim that one ignore copyright and change the license.

New comment by dessimus in "Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite"

dessimus — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:39:05 +0000

Interesting to see how this plays out. Conceivably if running an LLM over text defeats copyright, it will destroy the book publishing industry, as I could run any ebook thru an LLM to make a new text, like the ~95% regurgitated Harry Potter.

New comment by dessimus in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

dessimus — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:59:17 +0000

So, it sounds like you're actually arguing that the numbers are just a construct and that we should all just use UTC and set appropriate work hours to the times that most correlate to the solar day in our region rather than adjust the clock approximately 1 hour per 15 degrees around the equator and have an International Date Line.

I think this would make way more sense, when they say the Olympic Opening Ceremony start at 18:00, its 18:00 for everyone around the world. No one as to work out which TZ Italy is in or scheduling meetings with Tech Support in far flung locales does not require knowing IST is how far ahead or behind.

New comment by dessimus in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

dessimus — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:42:18 +0000

So non-employees join and provide free support to other users without having to pay them.

New comment by dessimus in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

dessimus — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:33:19 +0000

So a "Parker square" of pies then?

New comment by dessimus in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

dessimus — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:25:03 +0000

>Focaccia taught me to read the seals on olive oil in the supermarket and actually pick the right one for the break.

Come on, you can't just drop that morsel without telling us what we should be looking for in the right olive oil for focaccia.