Hacker News: izzydata

New comment by izzydata in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

izzydata — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:09:08 +0000

It is a fine time to be going to the moon, but we could be doing multiple productive things at the same time. It just doesn't surprise me that there are so many people that are not caring so much about this.

New comment by izzydata in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

izzydata — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:34:52 +0000

People are struggling to afford every day life and we are surrounding by crazy things every day like cellphones talking to satellites in space. On any objective measure it is definitely amazing to send humans to the moon, but there are more pressing issues for most people right now.

If we as a species had more of our ducks in a row we may be able to better celebrate this as the achievement for humankind that it is.

New comment by izzydata in "Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp"

izzydata — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:53:01 +0000

The amounts of times someone invented something that was important to them and then never make any money from it only for some other entity to make tons of money from it is way too high.

New comment by izzydata in "My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary"

izzydata — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:11:39 +0000

They have different writing styles generally, but it is still pointless to call Star Trek a fantasy for the same reason why you wouldn't call Lord of the Rings a science fiction. If you have a spectrum from fantasy to science fiction with 5 being the middle then maybe Star Trek would be a 6 and Star Wars being more of a 5.

Personally I'd classify Dune to be more of a fantasy than Star Trek just because of the style it is written in being very mystical and prophetic.

New comment by izzydata in "My Astrophotography in the Movie Project Hail Mary"

izzydata — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:53:33 +0000

Star Trek is true scifi? I always considered it to be soft scifi due to it being more about social issues in space rather than the more hard scifi about the fictional science. At least the book of Project Hail Mary is closer to hard scifi than Star Trek as they spend a lot of time describing the science. The movie rightfully skips most of this tedium in favor of a beautiful spectacle.

This is the first time I've heard of the idea of "true" scifi though.

New comment by izzydata in "Passengers who refuse to use headphones can now be kicked off United flights"

izzydata — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 18:16:33 +0000

I was recently in Hawaii in the middle of the forest and this group nearby on the trail were blasting music from a bluetooth speaker. Whether it is compelte lack of self awareness or utter disregard for other people it is just disturbing behavior.

New comment by izzydata in "Oil and gas prices jump after Iran and Israel attack gasfields"

izzydata — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:52:50 +0000

It seems highly unlikely that the US will magically have trains and more walk-able living because gas is unaffordable. Especially if it was a drastic and sudden shock of supply. Myself as much as anyone is not in favor of the reliance the US has on cars and non-renewable energy, but causing chaos is not the way to do it.

New comment by izzydata in "Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn"

izzydata — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:50:19 +0000

This is obviously not a reversible trend. People having close proximity to one another, creating economies of scale where everyone does what they are best at instead of everyone doing everything for themselves is what allows big cities to be possible.

I'm sure all of this was inevitable as there likely hasn't ever been a time where humans were not getting together to form communities when it was beneficial to do so.

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

izzydata — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:03:32 +0000

I know I can because I've done it on my home machine, but my work computer is restricted by IT. I can't open regedit or install most software unfortunately.

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

izzydata — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:52:00 +0000

Microsoft, can you please let me remove recommendations from the start menu? Not just less recommendations. I want the category to not be displayed and taking up space.

New comment by izzydata in "AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations"

izzydata — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:57:32 +0000

Is there some way to remove nuclear strikes from being a thing the AI knows about thus eliminating it as an option? Perhaps it is too important to know that your opponents could nuclear strike you.

I'd be interested to see what kind of solutions it comes up with when nuclear strikes don't exist.

New comment by izzydata in "There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)"

izzydata — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:09:35 +0000

Ultimately I think it will be a self correcting problem, but there is going to be an extremely long period of absolute hell. Global warming is eventually going to cause food and water scarcity on a level that will wipe out a huge percentage of the Earths population. Then the Earth will recover from there being fewer humans.

If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.

New comment by izzydata in "There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)"

izzydata — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:05:15 +0000

There are people that believe the warming, but don't believe it matters because the Earth used to be much hotter at some point in the past so it is a natural cycle. Yet they fail to realize that humans didn't exist then so there is no good reason to believe an Earth that hot can support human life.

New comment by izzydata in "Why I'm Worried About Job Loss and Thoughts on Comparative Advantage"

izzydata — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:12:57 +0000

Capitalism really is like a disease of the mind. The idea that you absolutely have to and there are no alternatives to extracting as much wealth from a system as possible.

New comment by izzydata in "Intermittent fasting may make little difference to weight loss, review finds"

izzydata — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:26:27 +0000

It's always calories in and calories out. The idea is that intermittent fasting makes you less hungry over time and thus you take in less calories.

If they had their test subjects eat the same amount to see if intermittent fasting metabolized food better then it seems obvious that there would be little to no difference.

New comment by izzydata in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

izzydata — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:36:31 +0000

The generation ship genre of science fiction is very interesting to me, but I've never read one that didn't seem absolutely horrifying. I don't think it is a realistic option. Especially if we aren't even capable of stabilizing our "closed system" known as Earth. A generation ship would be the same problem but 100 times more difficult.

New comment by izzydata in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

izzydata — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:59:37 +0000

But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually. Maybe we overshot the maximum comfortable population by a bit and we are going to rebound for awhile.

Also an economy that requires an infinitely growing population feels like a pyramid scheme which is also an unsustainable system.

New comment by izzydata in "Why This Computer Scientist Says All Cryptocurrency Should "Die in a Fire" (2022)"

izzydata — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:21:23 +0000

Crypto should have stayed a silly tech demo that nerds used to trade with eachother for pizza.

New comment by izzydata in "FBI couldn't get into WaPo reporter's iPhone because Lockdown Mode enabled"

izzydata — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:01:33 +0000

Doesn't having standard multi-user functionality automatically create the plausible deniability? If they tried so hard to create an artificial plausible deniability that would be more suspicious than normal functionality that just gets used sometimes.

New comment by izzydata in "FBI couldn't get into WaPo reporter's iPhone because Lockdown Mode enabled"

izzydata — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:45:57 +0000

It doesn't seem fundamentally different from a PC having multiple logins that are accessed from different passwords. Hasn't this been a solved problem for decades?