The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
You can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork. Everyone
California has $8.14 trillion in land sitting right under its feet. It's chasing billionaires instead.
LA Metro’s design specifications state that its escalators go 90 feet per minute, slower than nearly everything we found.
Alice and Bill have identical Apple devices. Only one gets Apple’s strongest iCloud protection.
Trump admin sees China behind opposition to AI data centers
Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers” 1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with ideas into its…
this captivating subtitle I wrote really makes you want to read it, doesn’t it?!?
Certainly the industry is transforming, however, the people and organizations falling into the trap of no longer reading and writing code only do so at their peril.
On the responsibility of engineers
The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it…
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract…
OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com. The value is while you are on ChatGPT and tied to your ChatGPT account. __obi is then sent to OpenAI from ordinary websites you visit. Any company that buys ads on ChatGPT installs
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
The balance of software copyright protection and openness has always been fraught with minutiae and detail that bores all but the most nerdy of pedants. Yet, through much effort and 40 years of debate we had reached an equilibrium. Now AI has thrown that out the window.
Documents show a Microsoft exec called AI the "largest theft of labor in human history.” New AI regulations are besides the point, the problem is we don’t apply existing laws to the powerful.
Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?
The rare moment when I need to open a powerpoint document is here. As usual, I have my institutional account logged into their “services”, because my university pays microslop something in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of euros in contracts with this large software provider.
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI.
The AI brain worms have been spreading and I don't have a solution, I just want to get off this ride.
[This post has been cross-posted to Terence Tao’s blog.] When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem stateme…
AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. Training a model to believe it might be a moral patient, as Anthropic’s constitution does, makes the alignment and containment challenge far harder.
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet: Store …
Apple recently announced an upcoming feature for their new Apple Watches called “Audio Intelligence,” which will always be listening to a...
This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the…
Investigating the use of LLMs in the Android FOSS community
I’m sad to say that CSS-Tricks is stuck in limbo again. The site was acquired by Digital Ocean in 2022, and it continued to run under their ownership until February of 2023, when DigitalOcean fired the people working on it. The site stayed latent for a year before DigitalOcean re-hired lead editor Geoff Graham in June…
At first, I thought I was addicted to internet forums. Then Facebook appeared and soon after I discovered Reddit, Hacker News, 9GAG, Instagram and other form...
Why AI doom rhetoric from Anthropic, OpenAI and other tech leaders functions as hype, regulatory strategy, and a distraction from present harms.
