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I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014)
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 85 posts.
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TikTok's Enshittification
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
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The retaliation: Pranking my roommate with targeted Facebook ads (2014)
Ghost Influence by Brian Swichkow2023335 points75 commentscited by 37Society, Policy & Culture details
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.
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Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
Connect with Lunduke and other members of Lunduke community
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AI Written, AI Read cartoon
One piece of slang that has long embodied the short attention span Internet age is TL;DR, short for “too long; didn’t read.” With the explosion of generative AI tools, we’re rapidly entering the age of TL;DW: “too long, didn’t write.” A January survey from Fishbowl found that 40% of nearly 12,000 workers have used…
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Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
Journalists should stop saying that the evidence is just correlational
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Meditations On Moloch
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
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Seeing like a bank
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
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The age of average
In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired a market research firm to survey the public on what they wanted in a work of art. Across 11 countries they then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. Each piece was intended to be a unique a colla
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A Tale of Unwanted Disruption: My Week Without Amazon
On Wednesday, May 31, 2023, I finally regained access to my Amazon account after an unexpected and unwarranted lockout that lasted nearly…
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How to Kill a Decentralised Network
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
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Autoenshittification
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist…
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I Am No Longer Speaking at RustConf 2023
I will no longer be speaking at RustConf 2023 about A (Possible) Future for Compile-Time Programming.
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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The expanding dark forest and generative AI
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
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The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
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Money Laundering and AML Compliance
A brief overview of what money laundering is, what financial institutions do about it, and why.
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Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, …
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We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
( This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. Note: early draft, contains some typos, I'll fix them next week when I get home. )
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South Korea’s online security dead end
Websites in South Korea often require installation of “security applications.” Not only do these mandatory applications not help security, way too often they introduce issues.
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I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
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When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?
John Maynard Keynes? Paul Samuelson? Winston Churchill? Joan Robinson? Apocryphal?
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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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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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Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne fo…
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The dark forest and the cozy web (2020)
An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web