1201
I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)
I was curious about the 51 Franklin Street address in the GPLv2 license notice so I wrote to them as they said
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
1202
Careless People
I never would have read Careless People , Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta's lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it:
1203
AI Horseless Carriages
An essay about bad AI app design
1204
They made computers behave like annoying salesmen
They made computers behave like annoying salesmen | exotext
1205
1206
Signal Carnival
At Revision 2025, we released "Signal Carnival" ( csdb , YouTube ). This demo asks you to switch the audio and video cable of your C64:
1207
The Icelandic Voting System (2024)
It’s election season here in Iceland! The election is on Saturday, 30th of November, so next Saturday from when this is written. Every time elections are upcoming, somebody inevitably asks me how the voting system here works, probably expecting a simple answer. So, here’s a stab at it. Iceland uses a biproportional…
1208
Librarians are dangerous
A public service announcement
1209
A Map of British Dialects (2023)
This map took me a long time to make, and is very detailed, but will always be incomplete and inaccurate due to the nature of language. Why this map is so detailed The diversity of English dialects in the United Kingdom is enormous. It’s common for people from either side of a river, mountain, or […]
1210
I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype
I truly and passionately hate hype. From the fakeness of it to the sheer stupidity it represents, but perhaps most of all, because of the devastating consequence it often results in.
1211
Walled Gardens Can Kill
I'm an Apple ecosystem user, owning an iPhone ever since a past employer got it for me to test our company app some 8 years ago. Over time, as I've upgraded, I'
1212
I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs
And the results surprised me
1213
Seth Rogen Speaks Truth to Billionaires, Gets Censored for It
For the past 11 years, the Breakthrough Prize awards have “celebrated outstanding scientific achievements, honoring scientists driving remarkable discoveries in
1214
Why drinking coffee in Iran has become so complicated
It all started with a sarcastic jab in a chat: “You shouldn’t be more Catholic than the Pope. You go to order a coffee, and the guy’s like, ‘From Kenyan farms or Brazil?’ It’s l...
1215
I speak at Harvard as it faces its biggest crisis since 1636
Every week, I tell myself I won’t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise. No one on earth—certainly no one who reads t…
1216
It's easier than ever to de-censor videos
Last month I asked people to hack part of my YouTube video, specifically to de-pixelate the contents of a folder I had pixelated starting at the 4:57 mark. Your browser does not support the video tag. For years, people have used the censor tool to blur or pixelate out parts of videos where there's sensitive…
1217
A Reddit bot drove me insane
I stumbled across a Reddit bot posting emotional rants about how bots are ruining Reddit; just to sell AI-generated books through affiliate links. A perfectly dystopian grift for the dead internet.
1218
But what if I want a faster horse?
But what if I really want a faster horse? | exotext
1219
Lead is still bad for your brain
Wait, wasn't this solved by the Romans? Anyway, my grandma ate lead paint and she was totally fine.
1220
Hacker News Hug of Deaf
About three years ago, I set up a tiny netcat loop on one of my Debian servers to accept arbitrary connections from the Hacker News (HN) community. The loop ran for 24 hours and did exactly three things whenever a client connected:
1221
American Disruption
A new take on Trump’s tariffs, including using a disruption lens to understand the U.S.’s manufacturing problem, and why a better plan would leverage demand, not kill it.
1222
What if we taxed advertising?
What if, rather than banning advertising outright, we taxed it instead?
1223
Fewer Foreign Passengers Are Flying to the US
On using a new dataset and ensuring your analytic findings aren't a data reporting issue.
1224
Let's Ban Billboards
Most improvements to cities are hard — they take millions of dollars and years of planning.
1225
What if we made advertising illegal?
What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy itself. A thought experiment worth considering.
1226
Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)
How we carried on exploiting sperm whales long after the conventional wisdom said we'd stopped. Forgotten Material #1
1227
Why does Britain feel so poor?
Plus chaos chasers, ghost motorways, the secret symbols hiding in your street, and a rationalist death cult.
1228
The slow collapse of critical thinking in OSINT due to AI
This isn’t a rant against AI. I use it daily, ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini. They’re in my workflow like everyone else’s. But the tradecraft is slipping. Analysts are skipping the hard parts. They’re trusting GenAI to do the heavy cognitive lifting, and it’s changing how we operate at a foundational level.
1229
The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly
in an era where tech giants increasingly control our digital experiences, the Steam Deck stands as a beacon of user freedom
1230
Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
A Bed Assembly Drama