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Ofcom concedes defeat in 4chan case
Insofar as a political organization like Ofcom is even capable of admitting defeat, it did so in the 4chan enforcement today. In testimony before the Commons Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Comm…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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The Decoherence Trap
Of all the forms of tech debt, decoherence is the worst. It compounds exponentially with a system's rate of change, and AI is now producing it faster than ever, leading us deeper and deeper into the abyss...
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William Gibson and the trademarking of cyberspace
Autodesk did trademark cyberspace, and William Gibson did get mad. But the story that Gibson retaliated by trademarking Eric Gullichsen was a prank by Timothy Leary.
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The Brain Sandwich
The brain sandwich is a practical AI coding workflow: understand the problem, let an agent help, then verify and explain its work before sharing it.
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The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
Did you realize the film was actually manipulating you?
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More on Anthropic's Scion ripping off Mononoke
Answering questions and concerns.
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Jev meets the Trolley Problem
I asked Jev and 13 other decision models the Trolley Problem.
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I know why the mathematicians weep
On technological grief
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AI was great until it was not
A cautionary tale.
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Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive
I sell fentanyl six days a week under the El at Kensington and Somerset, and every bag I sell is net life-positive. Each bag carries a small but real chance of killing whoever buys it. Each bag also sends $1.80 to the Against Malaria Foundation, which GiveWell estimates saves a child’s life for about $5,500. My…
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Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke
It is important to provide credit.
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How the Military Will Hack the Election
Task Force Raider’s role in 2026 elections has military officers uneasy
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Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?
For my piece on Catholic miracle apologetics , I read (correction: skimmed) a 25,000-word post by rationalist blogger Scott Alexander. My piece, which cited (but does not focus on) his, ended up being a cool 2,700 words. I don't think it would benefit from being longer, and it was the result of me cutting around 70%…
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Were software engineers blue-collar workers all along?
There’s a common idea among economists that you can broadly split employees into two categories. “White-collar” workers are typically people who work in offices doing service-based, knowledge-based, managerial, or administrative...
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Just say no to OpenAI and Anthropic
I recently read End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. It's an excellent book and I highly recommend that everyone read it. Tech oligarchs make up an important component of the end-times-fascist coalition. One thing that stood out
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My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping
On Friday, I did a Reddit AMA with the r/WebScrapingInsider subreddit about the law of web scraping. You can see the entire discussion here. I posted an introduction to the AMA, which I am sharing here: __ Hi everyone, and...
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Thinking will become a hobby
These lines are very difficult for me to write because I feel like digging my own grave. AI systems are improving by leaps and bounds. From the early 2022 fumbling release of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly count the number of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math papers where an…
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Will Linux phones become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly?
Linux phones now have the hardware and software to succeed, but it is an open question whether they will become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly.
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Do dentists know what they're doing?
After all, they’re just practicing
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I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall
Many of us are inconsistent in our economic desires. I would like the price of my home to rise, because it increases my wealth, but I would also like the prices of all other homes to fall, so that I could sell my house and buy an even nicer house. Also, I would like to
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Lobbying is corruption
On lobbying, corruption, and the same animal under two names
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Lobbying
Have you tried to explain lobbying to a non American unfamiliar with the concept?
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No Man Is an Island
AI makes intellectual contribution superfluous.
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Ideas aren't getting harder to find (2022)
You can still discover stuff, I promise
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Programming Isn't Special
Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?
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The people holding up the internet
Four billion phones ask one text file what time it is, kept by a UCLA lecturer in his spare time. We counted who maintains the code under your phone.
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I'm the AGI that's wiping out humanity
Alex Moon is an Australian-British software engineer and artist based in the North East of England.
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We are going to kill "unalive"
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.