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The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 49 posts.
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The Iron Law of Bureaucracy (2010)
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
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EU Council to Vote on Chat Scanning Proposal on Thursday
🇫🇷 French: Traduction du dossier Chat Control 2.0, stopchatcontrol.fr🇸🇪 Swedish: Chat Control 2.0🇩🇰 Danish: chatcontrol.dk🇳🇱 Dutch: Chatcontrole Table of contents: The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence and the End of Anonymous Communication Take action to stop Chat
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Will US companies hire fewer engineers due to Section 174?
It’s rare that a tax change causes panic across the tech industry, but it’s happening in the US. If Section 174 tax changes stay, the US will be one of the least desirable countries to launch startups
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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…
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Debanking (and Debunking?)
Crypto advocates kicked off a recent, somewhat politicized, discussion of debanking. Strap in for scintillating banking compliance trivia.
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Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer) (2020)
Rich countries consume much higher quantities via higher intensity/tech. It's NOT high and rising: wages, profits, administration, encounters, etc. Income well explains American behavior here too.
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There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
An important announcement There Is No Antimemetics Division has been picked up for publication by Penguin Random House! Find out more here. Everything below is for the original self-published version of the story only. An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring p...
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DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)
There is such a thing as a free lunch
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How decentralized is Bluesky really?
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto , is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon , Sharkey , Peertube , GotoSocial , etc, etc, etc in the present-day…
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New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024cited by 14History & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…
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Please don't mention AI again
The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.
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If English was written like Chinese (1999)
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
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The Shameful Defenestration of Tim
On Tim Peters' recent suspension as a Python core developer
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China is building more coal plants but might burn less coal
China is adding more coal capacity, but its plants are running less often.
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Recall: Stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC
Photographic memory comes to Windows, and is the biggest security setback in a decade.
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Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes
Want to learn more? Learn To Count to a Billion in Korean in 15 Minutes ! Or Learn to Read Russian in 15 Minutes !
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Accountability sinks
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...
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Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
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Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
This blog is intended to be a place to share ideas and results that are too weird, incomplete, or off-topic to turn into an academic paper, but that I think may be important. Let me know what you think! Contact links to the left.
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Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
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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 gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud
Recently a Dutch hacker was able to take control of 4 million solar panel installations (FTM (Dutch), Euractiv, Victor Gevers). And this wasn’t the first time something like this has happened either (PV Magazine). As usual, huge thanks are due to the many beta readers and experts who helped improve this article with…
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Response to DHH
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. …
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The online sports gambling experiment
Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers
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A common urban intersection in the Netherlands (2018)
Can urban intersections be designed in such a way that motor traffic, cycling and walking flow smoothly and that the potential conflicts of these very different types of traffic crossing each other…