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Mapping the US healthcare system’s financial flows
Mapping Every Dollar of America's $5 Trillion Healthcare System
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
782
The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
Reader warning: there's gonna be a lot of pretend puke photos in this post. If you've fired up HBO Max recently, you've probably seen that o...
783
AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society
I’ve been thinking about why AI feels like such a destabilizing force for society, and it isn’t just the threat of even greater…
784
Kids who ran away to 1960s San Francisco
I followed my curiosity and ended up at the library reading hundreds of letters of runaway teenagers who came to hippie San Francisco
785
Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits
A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a
786
The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence.
787
Mozilla's latest quagmire
Defending Mozilla’s inclusion of AI features and tooling in Firefox misses the point, and only threatens to isolate them further.
788
Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"
People have been making fun of OpenAI models for being overly sycophantic for months now. I even wrote a post advising users to pretend that their work was…
789
It’s been a very hard year
Unlike a lot of places in tech, my company, Set Studio/Piccalilli has no outside funding. Bootstrapped is what the LinkedIn people say, I think. It’s been a hard year this year. A very hard year. I think a naive person would blame it all on the seemingly industry-wide attitude of “AI can just do this […]
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Don't push AI down our throats
AI is being done wrong.
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We're losing our voice to LLMs
We are losing something precious in the age of LLMs: our unique voices.
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I don't care how well your "AI" works
The other day I was sitting on the doorstep of a hackerspace, eating a falafel sandwich while listening to the conversation inside. The topic shifted to the use of “AI” for everyday tasks, people casually started elaborating on how they use “chat assistants” to let them write pieces of code or annoying emails. The…
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The Generative Burrito Test
A critical benchmark for image generation models: A partially eaten burrito with cheese, sour cream, guacamole, lettuce, salsa, pinto beans, and chicken.
796
Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled
In my recent analysis of YouTube’s information density I included the results from an advanced statistical analysis on the number of videos present on the home page, which projected that around May 2026 there would only be one lonely video on the home screen.
797
Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance"
Being "the enshittification guy" means that people expect you to weigh in on every service or platform that has been deliberately worsened to turn a buck. It's an impossible task (and a boring one besides). There's too much of this shit, and it's all so mid – a real "banality of enshittification" situation.
798
X Just Accidentally Exposed a Covert Influence Network Targeting Americans
How a new X feature led to the most sweeping public exposure of covert foreign activity on a major platform since 2016.
799
Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?
I’m not saying this will definitely happen, but I think we could be on the cusp of a significant shift in Windows market share for consumer computers. It is not going to drop to 2% in a year or anything, but I feel like a few pieces are coming
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Signal knows who you're talking to (2023)
Recently I got a friend to finally join me on Signal. He asked something about whether or not Signal is truly secure and private, like if it was safe from US government surveillance. I told him: “Well, it’s end-to-end encrypted, so they don’t know what we’re talking about, but they definitely know that we’re talking…
801
A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
The issues described in this article were resolved after this article was posted.
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The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy
Mozilla's new strategy document confirms their position, and the end of their stewardship of the open web.
803
The realities of being a pop star
According to my experience...
804
Make product worse, get money
It’s so easy
805
Over-regulation is doubling the cost
After building a software company to a multi-billion dollar exit, I made the jump to hardware. Now I’m working on carbon removal + steel at Charm Industrial , and electric long-haul trucking with Revoy . It’s epically fun to be building in the real world, but little did I expect that more than half the cost of…
806
The Banished Bottom of the Housing Market
How America Destroyed Its Cheapest Homes
807
Measuring the impact of AI scams on the elderly
We worked with Reuters to measure the impacts of AI scams on the elderly
808
AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
Best case: we're in a bubble. Worst case: the people profiting most know exactly what they're doing.
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Disney Lost Roger Rabbit
Gary K Wolf is the author of a fantastic 1981 novel called Who Censored Roger Rabbit? which Disney licensed and turned into an equally fantastic 1988 live action/animated hybrid movie called Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But despite the commercial and critical acclaim of the movie, Disney hasn't made any feature-length…