The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Cutting out the news has been one of the best lifestyle decisions I've made in recent years, second only to cutting out social media (though the two are not mutually exclusive). Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed…
When you launch an app, macOS connects to Apple's OCSP service to check whether the app's Developer ID code signing certificate has been revoked by Apple. In November 2020, Apple's OCSP service experienced a mass outage , preventing Mac users worldwide from launching apps. In response and remedy to this outage, Apple…
Middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.
If you’d like, you can listen to an audio version of this page. It includes all the contextually relevant bits of music, and a few ad libs not included in the text. But it doesn’t include the links and images, naturally.
An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins The way that a modern mafia pr...
Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@ging...
Here’s a little “fake stats in the wild” gem that I think you and your followers will find at the least somewhat amusing.
(or at least work better)
Kurt greeted us in his beautiful 19th century house and in his bare feet (of which more later). As the interview progressed it grew sort of
Behavioural economics, data science and artificial intelligence.
First of all, this blogpost is kinda long. Let me prove to you reading it will actually have some payoff:
The rest of the world is building subways like crazy. The U.S. has pretty much given up.
I offer "no economic boost," you receive "P(doom)"
Garbage in garbage out
One of the use cases I thought was reasonable to expect from ChatGPT and Friends (LLMs) was summarising. It turns out I was wrong. What ChatGPT isn’t summarising at all, it only looks like it…
Looking for Alice, part 3
Yesterday I discovered a deluge of recent fake customer reviews for a number of top paid apps in the United States Mac App Store. (Each country has its own version of the App Store with separate reviews.) I've now checked the reviews for all of the current top 40 paid apps in the Mac App Store, and 8 of those apps…
Last fall, under the aegis of Ham Radio Village , I was awarded a grant to take my one-day Tech class on the road. Ham Radio Village believes that more people in technical fields should have amateur radio licenses and that amateur radio is underrepresented in the hacker, STEM/STEAM, and maker communities. Currently…
4% of all the money in America flows through a few mafia-like health care conglomerates. The FTC just released a ground-breaking report on how they operate. And it is gearing up to sue.
Picture this: It’s ten years ago, and you’ve just launched a new WordPress blog. Within hours, sometimes even minutes, your content is indexed by Google. You search for a unique sentence from your…
I’ve used a lot of tools over the years, which means I’ve seen a lot of tools hit a plateau. That’s not always a problem; sometimes something is ju...
Surviving 3 years in North Korea as a foreign diplomat was not easy. Living and working in the Hermit Kingdom was certainly the unique experience of a lifetime.
About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine. But as you can see around 7/7 on that…
I’ve been meaning to write this one for a while, but the announcement of the Ladybird Browser Initiative makes now a particularly good time.
Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing.
A review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, exploring how social media and overprotective parenting affect children’s mental health.
