The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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…
A North Korean atlas that shows the world from the perspective of one of the most isolated countries on the planet.
Flock's 'licence plate readers' read much more than license plates. A judge says what they record must be released.
If delivered today, the last of Huxley’s 7-part lecture series at MIT would probably be categorised under motivational talks or self-help strategies. It surv...
Consider just saying what the problem is
On the need for a world without us
A couple of days ago, the small server hosting this website was temporarily knocked out by scraping …
offensive security & software engineering
I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is ...
Mag World: an intuitive sense of scale, using orders of magnitude
The more I speak about being poor, the more I realize how fundamentally other folks misunderstand what it means to be poor versus being broke.
A brief theory of young men, "the loneliness crisis," and life in the 21st century
Also: World League Basketball
Just before a decisive meeting in Brussels, digital rights expert and former Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sounding the alarm. Using a "deceptive sleight of hand," a mandatory and expanded Chat Control is being pushed through the back door, in a form even more intrusive tha
Hi! I'm a raccoon, and this is my trash can :] It's full of my thoughts about the mess of being human. No human is perfect, including me, and that's why we are so fascinating.
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Last week the Department of War finally killed the last vestiges of Robert McNamara’s 1962 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). The DoW has pivoted from optimizing cost and performa…
Why do people take screenshots of text?
Last weekend I was trying to pull together sources for an essay and kept finding “fact check” pages from factually.co . For instance, a Kagi search for “pepper ball Chicago pastor” returned this Factually article as the second result:
ChatGPT and LLMs amplify both insight and illusion. They are not knowledge engines, but confidence engines shaping how we think and learn.
I ‘ve done such a thorough job of de-Googling that I forgot to show up for a meeting with someone, because I hadn’t checked my Google calendar in ages. (No, they were not amused.) In my defense, I proceeded to explain to them that having de-Googled, I was also in the process of de-Appling, which is a special bonus…
A follow up to The Ofcom Files. Some notes on Ofcom’s strategy to date. As many of you know, I represent the U.S. website 4chan, pro bono, in its U.S. federal lawsuit against the UK…
Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his…
On January 6th, 1995 two bank robbers in Pittsburgh confused law enforcement by not making any attempts to conceal their faces but instead brazenly looking at security cameras as if they were invisible. The reason is that they actually thought they were.
Gmail doesn't just offer to write your emails for you, they actually do it, and it's up to you to delete the text it wrote. Hard to make a screen shot to demo without revealing personal i…
A personal account of building HeheStreams, facing the consequences, and going to prison as a startup founder who had a piracy website.
