121
Claude is a Contrarian
Of all the LLMs I’ve used and driven daily, Claude is the one that absolutely contradicts my instructions.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
122
The Beauty of Roundabouts
I have a weird soft spot for roundabouts. Maybe because I'm a software engineer and the roundabout strikes me as the simple, elegant solution while the traffic light intersection is the ad-hoc, over-engineered mess.
123
The contagion of fear
I have a difficult confession to make — a shameful incident that I have never spoken of, even to those closest to me.
124
I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc
A bungled Assetnote scan
125
Aligned to whom?
You are relying very heavily on the priors of the model to do a good job for you. What happens when you cannot judge whether those priors are good?
126
Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
Xe Iaso's personal website.
127
Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries
Small local libraries are now becoming travel destinations
128
P(doom)
Are we all going to die?
129
An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights
Dear Dario, You published We Must Pace the Frontier today, which committed Anthropic to embedded third-party evaluators and asked governments to require every other frontier company to match. Sam Altman agreed within hours.1 The stated goal is to slow down the pace of AI progress. I believe you’re being sincere, so…
130
We must pace the frontier
I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and…
131
The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire
New stories from the East German specialists behind this Cold War project
132
I have a theory that software drives people insane
I have a little pet theory that software drives people insane. Not in the "wash your hands every thirty minutes like Howard Hughes" kind of way, but more ...
133
AI Is Breaking This Thing We Call Trust
AI-generated work can look finished without being understood. That uncertainty erodes trust, slows reviews, and leaves colleagues doing the missing work.
134
I think I hate the internet
I’ve just finished reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and was equally parts shocked and unsurprised by the events she witnessed at Facebook / Met...
135
The UN challenges five centuries of cartography
Have you heard? There's map news!
136
“Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain
This case involves Project Bluebird, a social media service previously named “twitter.new” and renamed to tweet.app immediately after this ruling (for reasons this post makes obvious). Project Bluebird’s service is designed to reimagine the Twitter service that Musk imploded when...
137
What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
tautology.town is a blog that contains tautologies.
138
The two Christian saints who are the Buddha
Let me tell you the story of saints Barlaam and Josaphat of India. A king named Abenner, who persecutes Christians, hears from his court astrologers that his son will attain great power and rule ov…
139
How the Chorleywood Bread Process transformed British bread
How a Hertfordshire research lab quietly transformed an iconic British staple food, and the complexion of the countryside - without anyone actually noticing
140
We have a year to fix security everywhere
consumer-grade hardware can run an LLM that hacks the planet. we can stop it, but we don't have much time.
141
The car industry A/B tested selling a car with and without CarPlay
A couple years ago, GM made waves by saying that soon, all their new cars would be completely free of Apple's CarPlay and Android Auto support, instead opting for the "Android Automotive OS" in their cars. Admittedly, I'm a huge fan of CarPlay for basic safety reasons and
142
How I feel about AI
It's complicated
143
Doomscrolling ourselves to death
James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages
144
The revolt of the reader
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life.
145
The Real Luxuries In Life
Labor Day weekend has always been the back to school marker for me. I'm 60, closing in on 61, and thinking a lot more about what I actually care about. Amy texted me a list yesterday.
146
.name Termination
Nearly twenty-five years ago I registered neil.fraser.name to provide a stable presence on the Internet. It has been the home of this website, my email address, and a server for APIs. It predates YouTube, Facebook, and smart phones. Minutes after my daughter was born, I also registered beverly.fraser.name .
147
I don't have a smartphone or at least I wish I didn't
I Don’t Have a Smartphone… par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
148
The safest job from AI may be writing
Today, tech folk are scrambling to change their workflows to meet newly inflated 5X productivity quotas, while getting pummeled under the co...
149
I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked
The frozen pizza aisle has become the national security risk du jour
150
Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
How NAT broke the concept of an internet connection