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Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?
I generated 1,000+ SVGs across 7 frontier models to test whether AI labs are training on Simon Willison’s pelican-riding-a-bicycle benchmark.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,213 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
512
Everything's broken and nobody's upset
Software doesn't work. I'm shocked at how often we put up with it. Here's just ...
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NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur
The NYT's Taylor Lorenz falsely accuses a tech investor of using a slur after spending months trying to infiltrate and monitor a new app that allows free conversation.
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Defamed by ChatGPT
Yesterday, President Joe Biden declared that “it remains to be seen” whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “dangerous.” I would beg to differ. I have been writing about th…
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Inside the Mirrortocracy
There's a problem with Silicon Valley and the subcultures that imitate it. It's a design bug woven into people's identities and sense of self-worth. Fixing it will be painful. Influential and otherwise very smart people will deny till their last breath that it even exists. But I believe it should be fixed before it…
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GDPR – A Practical Guide for Developers (2017)
You’ve probably heard about GDPR. The new European data protection regulation that applies practically to everyone. Especially if you are working in a big company, it’s most likely that there’sContinue reading
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Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks
Regarding Tynt, a service that breaks copy-and-paste on websites.
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Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused
Legal Twitter is having tremendous fun right now reviewing the latest documents from the case Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (1:22-cv-01461). Here’s a neat summary: So, wait. They file a brief …
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Hacker News Fires Steve Yegge
It's great that you aren't quitting google, but it seems like you misspoke rather than being misinterpreted. It's kind of random that you claim that people misheard the word "project" when it is easy to check the actual video and realize that you didn't say that word. Your exact quote was "I am officially quitting…
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The Uncharity of College: The Big Business Nobody Understands
How Colleges Make More Money Than God By Giving It Away
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Google, the Stupidity Amplifier (2016)
Google, the Stupidity Amplifier by Greg Egan
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Does Georgism work? Is land a big deal?
A guest post on Georgism by Lars Doucet
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Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown (2013)
Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no…
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When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind
One of the use cases I thought was reasonable to expect from ChatGPT and Friends (LLMs) was summarising. It turns out I was wrong. What ChatGPT isn’t summarising at all, it only looks like it…
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The main thing about Phenylacetone meth is that there's so much of it
Since around 2009, methamphetamines have been made with phenylacetone (P2P). Is there a chemical different causing schizophrenia?
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Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)
Based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005—one entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification."
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The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
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Russiagate is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media
The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it
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Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco apartments
Everyone agrees that housing in San Francisco is expensive, and that the high costs are hurting the city. But there is a lot of disagreement...
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An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
The following article, and the two addenda that follow, were written by an investment manager who works with very wealthy clients. I knew him from decades ago, but in 2011 he e-mailed me with some concerns he had about what was happening with the economy. What he had to say was informative enough that I asked if he…
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Better than Free (2008)
[I’ve revised and condensed this short essay into an updated version, which you can read on my Substack here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/better-than-free] The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we … Continue reading →
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The Democratization of Censorship
John Gilmore , an American entrepreneur and civil libertarian, once famously quipped that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This notion undoubtedly rings true for those who see national governments as the principal threats to free speech.
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An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…