Hacker News: mjd

New comment by mjd in "It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)"

mjd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:48:04 +0000

Abandoned doesn't have to be forever. As I got older I had a longer time horizon and more skill, and found I was picking up and finishing projects I'd laid aside decades earlier.

Now when I put something aside I know there's a chance I might pick it up again in ten years. There wasn't much evidence of that when I was twenty-five.

It's been one of the best things for me about middle age.

New comment by mjd in "At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared"

mjd — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:10:38 +0000

I wonder if it is reasoning. To me the sequence looks something like this:

1. The story is promulgated by a long-retired ex-FBI analyst

2. Fox News picks it up and runs with it

3. Fox News watchers get excited about it on social media

4. Someone behind a desk at the FBI is assigned to pick up the phone and say tiredly “Yes, yes, we're investigating it all very seriously”

5.The FBI waits for the new Flavor of the Week to distract the Fox News people, then closes the investigation

Meantime, CNN reports on phase 4.

New comment by mjd in "Mark Zuckerberg reportedly working on AI clone of himself"

mjd — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 14:06:22 +0000

If they don't mark their territory by spraying urine, I'm not interested.

New comment by mjd in "At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared"

mjd — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:25:59 +0000

It's worse than that, it's 11 people who wore sweaters in various shades of red, orange, and pink, at some point in the past ten years.

“Anthony Chavez, 79, worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory until he retired in 2017. He reportedly disappeared on May 8, 2025.”

New comment by mjd in "At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared"

mjd — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:18:27 +0000

Last time I looked into this (last week, I think) it was a big wad of nothing. The people had disappeared over a span of many years. They weren't tied to any particular program, employer, or even any particular area of study, just “uh, tech stuff”. Some of them were technical experts, some weren't; one was an administrative assistant. One was killed by a campus shooter who also killed two students.

Typical example: “In the years since, several others connected to JPL have also died or disappeared: Frank Maiwald, a specialist in space research, died in Los Angeles in 2024 at 61.”

New comment by mjd in "Mark Zuckerberg reportedly working on AI clone of himself"

mjd — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:47:23 +0000

What I want to know is, how much longer will I have to wait for my Mark Zuckerberg AI sex doll?

New comment by mjd in "George Goble has died"

mjd — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:39:29 +0000

Arthur Clarke's “Report on Planet Three” touches on this.

New comment by mjd in "Will the AI data centre boom become a $9T bust?"

mjd — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 04:38:09 +0000

Did amazon.com go bust? Seems like I heard they were still in business as of a couple of years ago at least.

New comment by mjd in "John Bradley, author of xv, has died"

mjd — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:22:32 +0000

Most people are more than one person.

New comment by mjd in "John Bradley, author of xv, has died"

mjd — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:25:47 +0000

XV was excellent, and had some features I've never seen anywhere else. For example, it had a control panel that would allow you to take part of the color space and map it uniformly to a different part of the color space, for example, turning all the reds (and just the reds) green.

When my kid, now almost 22, was very small, she would sit on my lap in front of the computer, with XV displaying a picture of Elmo. “Green Elmo!” she would demand. I would adjust the sliders to turn the reds green, and we would laugh uproariously at green Elmo. Next it would be “Purple Elmo!”, and we would laugh even harder.

This kept us both amused for quite a while.

(Update: Here's a picture of what that control panel looked like. The turn-Elmo-green control is top center. https://xv.trilon.com/manual/xv-3.10a/color-editor-1.html)

New comment by mjd in "White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit"

mjd — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:48:37 +0000

In companies I've worked for, Sales has often come to management saying things like:

* I couldn't sell our product because our competitor's has a certain feature. How soon can we have that feature? * I can't make any new sales, but prospective customers keep telling me they need a solution for a similar problem. Could we expanded our product line? * Some customers could be using a certain feature of our product, but they find it too confusing. What could we do about this? * A big customer told me they have a problem our current product doesn't solve, so I told them we would be able to solve it by the beginning of next month

As you say, the sales department is the driver of development work, not vice versa.

New comment by mjd in "White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit"

mjd — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 10:40:02 +0000

Every company I have ever worked for has wanted to produce more better stuff to sell for more money. Some couldn't because they were resource constrained.

Where are these businesses that only ever want to sell the same amount of the same stuff forever?

New comment by mjd in "White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit"

mjd — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:52:31 +0000

Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it.

If a dev produces value for the company, and then the company can automate away the least valuable part of the dev's job, the dev is now more valuable. Why would tbe company get rid of them just at that moment?

Well, some will, because some companies are badly-run. Others will take advantage of the opportunity.

New comment by mjd in "The Story of Marina Abramovic and Ulay (2020)"

mjd — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:30:01 +0000

If it were the latter, why would it be misspelled in the title at the top of the page?

New comment by mjd in "Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables"

mjd — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 20:04:18 +0000

I didn't know about this. Thanks!

New comment by mjd in "Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables"

mjd — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:04:53 +0000

Bonus trivia: unlike nearly all plants, brassicas make do without symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza

New comment by mjd in "Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables"

mjd — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:02:44 +0000

If you liked this, you will be delighted to learn about the “Triangle of U”: the common brassicas are not just tetraploid, they are Frankensteinian mashups of earlier diploid species with different numbers of chromosomes!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_U

New comment by mjd in "70k Books Found in Hidden Library in This Germany Home (2023)"

mjd — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:03:47 +0000

The article doesn't say much about what was in the library, but it does mention that it contained 10,000 thriller novels.

New comment by mjd in "70k Books Found in Hidden Library in This Germany Home (2023)"

mjd — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:13:54 +0000

But you nobody can read 70k books, so what was the point? He had a library nobody knew about, full of books he hadn't read.

That's not a library, it's an imitation of a library built by someone who doesn't understand what a library is for.

New comment by mjd in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

mjd — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:02:47 +0000

The filibuster isn't part of the system; it's not even part of the law. It's just part of the rules that the Senate chose for their own internal procedures.