The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
The demo scene was recently proclaimed a UNESCO Living Cultural Heritage in Sweden, following several other European nations. As a scener, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. It's amusing on some level, there's maybe even a bit of pride involved, but also fear that it might bring unwanted attention to a Good…
All the same privacy harms with online tracking are also present with AI, but worse.
There is cost to your lifestyle.
The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google’s CEO demanding to know why Gmail was blocking messages from Republican senders while allegedly failing to block similar missives supporting Democrats. The letter followed media reports accusing Gmail of disproportionately flagging…
It started out harmlessly, a comment on hacker news roughly 16 years ago.
An experimental strategy for contaminating Large Language Models
When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.
Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden's DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum , proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they'd used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of…
The personal blog of Thomas Steiner
Seriously. Please just leave me alone.
The X account of a Turkish opposition leader with 9.7M followers is restricted in Turkey. Although his new account is not restricted, many users say they don't see his posts on their homepages.
At this summer's HOPE conference, Joshua Aaron spoke about ICEBlock, his iPhone app that allows users to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5 mile radius, and to get notifications when others report ICE sightings near them. You can see the full talk, and the lively/infuriating Q&A,
Refuting the common and flawed argument of
A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn't. The UK's widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in the world, over British territory.
In which I attempt to be pragmatic. Are you allowed to run whatever computer program you want on the hardware you own? This is a question where freedom, practicality, and reality all collide into a mess. Google has recently announced that Android users will only be able to install apps which have been digitally signed…
Do you register with Google, Amazon or Microsoft to use the web?
The Register recently published a story titled Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russian dev. They should be ashamed of this story. This poor open source developer is getting beat up now to score some internet points. It’s very upsetting. But anyway, let’s look at some receipts. If you’re…
The end of an era.
I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.
I do not enjoy writing about technology. Aside from the shiny, birdlike emotion I get from opening a new Apple product every three years, I do not enjoy using much of modern technology. I view my phone with mistrust and resentment, even as I allow it to eat my time with distractions to recover from a day of ostensibly…
Will Smith is being accused of generating fake fans with AI, but it's complicated: the crowds are real, but the videos were manipulated by Smith's team and YouTube itself.
“Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don't like me!”
The DMCA online safe harbor is a notice-and-takedown scheme. Web hosts aren’t liable for copyright-infringing third-party uploads unless and until the copyright owner submits a proper takedown notice to the host, at which point the web host can remain legally...
I replaced my ChatGPT personalization settings with this prompt a few weeks ago and promptly forgot about it: Be extraordinarily skeptical of your own…
What the hell is going on right now?
A guest post by David Schneider-Joseph
The comfort we get when offloading our cognitive load to LLMs is bad for us. Cognitive load should exist, and if we reduce it too much – if we stop thinking – we can actually unlearn how to think. Kids who always choose the easy route and copy their homework from other students eventually find […]
This is the story of how a circle of popular science communicators, who built their brands on championing free inquiry, worked to suppress scientific critique. Of how Eric Weinstein, the man who co…
