1741
Punk is dead and so are we
footnotes
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
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1742
Microsoft is driving users away
What will be the end of Windows? Microsoft.
1743
Selfish reasons to want more humans
A bigger world is better for everyone
1744
1745
Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
The Shirky principle is the adage that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. More broadly, it can also be characterized as the adage that “every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving”.
1746
Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
Some years ago, Matt Daniels [1] wrote a great article on who has the largest vocabulary in hip-hop. I thought it was brilliant: comparing Shakespeare to famous hip-hop artists. It got me thinking and gave me the inspiration of doing something similar with a genre I love: Power Metal. People …
1747
The Fed is behind the Capital One/Discover merger
In 2010, Congress capped fees for debit card networks so merchants don't get gouged by Visa and Mastercard. But the Fed stuck in a loophole for Discover. And that is leading Capital One to buy it.
1748
Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.
1749
Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age
Posted on Wednesday 21 Feb 2024. 1,196 words, 13 links. By Matt Webb.
1750
Why is no one making a new version of old Facebook?
12 Challenges readers Thandeka Xaba and Toby Mather raised some great points in the comments for yesterday’s Typology piece (thanks so much!).
1751
Rotten Apple
Apple are planning to kill mobile web apps. This is not an exaggeration. We must stop them.
1752
China is building more coal plants but might burn less coal
China is adding more coal capacity, but its plants are running less often.
1753
The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
I used to be a big fan of Spotify. Today I cancelled my subscription.
1754
1755
"Rabbit Test" Unwins the Hugo
I cannot convey the supreme depths to which I’d rather be doing anything else with my Saturday afternoon other than writing this blog post, but here we are. If you have been blessedly insulat…
1756
Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy 1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my…
1757
Airline Takes Revenge After Bad Review, Posts Passenger's Passport Online
YouTuber Josh Cahill, who has nearly 700,000 subscribers, reviews flights and courts drama, it seems. Just a couple of months ago he was banned by Qatar Airways over a negative review. Now he’s taken on East Timor’s Aero Dili.
1758
I taught the Iliad to Chinese teenagers (2021)
Several years ago I had the chance to lead two seminars with a group of high-performing Chinese high school seniors. Each seminar had between 20-35 kids; each of these students was a graduating sen…
1759
1760
Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest
A proposal to end exclusionary zoning would allow for 100,000 more homes in Berkeley's neighborhoods.
1761
The game theory of seduction and marriage with Jane Austen
The enduring success of her early 19th century novels are in large part due to their persistent relevance
1762
Raising Children on the Eve of AI
How do we prepare them for what we're not prepared for?
1763
Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable
When Findaway Voices first appeared, it made it comparatively easy for independent authors to do audiobooks. Audio was still hard, mind you, but it was possible.
1764
I'm an Old Fart and AI Makes Me Sad
Previous major advancements in Computer Science and its applications always felt empowering to me, AI feels different.
1765
Trading trust
The Brookings Institution did a fascinating survey series over the last five years. I have two takeways from this: The first is that focused and persistent propaganda is able to shift public opinio…
1766
Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional pressures for easier grading
Recent news reports have highlighted grade inflation at elite universities: Harvard gave 79% As in 2020-2021, as did Yale in 2022-2023 , compared to 67% in 2010-2011. At Harvard, the average GPA has risen from 2.55 in 1950 to 3.05 in 1975 to 3.36 in 1995 to 3.80 now. At Brown, 67% of grades were As in 2020-2021, 10%…
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1768
Not all TLDs are Created Equal
In light of the recent cancellation of the queer.af domain registration by the Taliban , the fragile and difficult nature of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) has once again been comprehensively demonstrated. Since many people may not be aware of the risks, I thought I’d give a solid explainer of the whole…
1769
The likelihood of unilateral solar geoengineering
People are starting to take geoengineering seriously.
1770
My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)
You should neither trust outward appearances, nor let them intimidate you. There is always a discord between the appearance that a person or organization projects, and their actual nature. For this reason, always be careful about the people and organizations in whom you place your trust.