1951
Michael F. Flynn has died
Hello family, friends and fans of Michael F. Flynn. It is with sorrow and regret that I inform you that my father passed away yesterday,...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
1952
Five Kinds of Friends (2022)
The word “friends” has at least five different meanings: Allies Backstage intimates Fun friends Mutual interests friends Soc...
1953
Ági Szabados Does Not Need to Apologize to Me
So, at the opening ceremonies of the Budapest International Book Festival this year, a couple of people gave prefatory remarks before I received the Budapest Grand Prize and participated in my own …
1954
How China's “debt traps” work
Raiding the Global South like a piggy bank.
1955
The world needs computational social science
The world needs computational social science, and it is not only, or even primarily, about the AI revolution. The reasons follow below and I also cover what a computational social scientist should …
1956
Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning
What would it sound like if the musicians parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic sang *his* parodies instead? I jumped off the deep end into the world of A.I. cover songs to find out, and the results are even worse than you imagine.
1957
Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
State partisanship and COVID vaccination rates are strongly predictive of COVID death rates even once you account for age.
1958
The Curse of Dialup World
An acquisition gets weird.
1959
The presumption that computers are working correctly
The first in a series of posts on the Post Office Horizon prosecutions scandal
1960
Meta in Myanmar
I’ve never trusted Facebook, mostly because I’ve been around tech for a long time and everything I’ve ever learned about the company looked like a red flag. But once I started to really dig in, what I learned was so much gnarlier and grosser and more devastating than what I’d assumed.
1961
Weird things you can buy online
It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different from your normal stuff.1 For example, last year I talked about owning a microscope. This year I debated doing another hobby but settled on a much dumber topic. Have you ever seen those lists of weird…
1962
Loadsharers: Funding the Load Bearing Internet People (2020)
The Internet has a sustainability problem. Many of its critical services depend on the dedication of unpaid volunteers, because they can’t be monetized and thus don’t have any revenue stream for the maintainers to live on. Services like DNS, time synchronization, crypto libraries - software without which the net and…
1963
1964
Japan’s silent movie culture is still going
There was a cultural divide in benshi preferences, rather like the difference in taste between those
1965
Unions work
The WGA's win may pave the way for more.
1966
1967
1968
The casino in your pocket
A very rough statistical analysis of a casino trick used by games on your phone (n=28).
1969
An analysis of the Google antitrust trial
We did an analysis of the Google antitrust trial. Last week, over half of the trial was held behind closed doors because the judge, Amit Mehta, is deferring to Google on the need for secrecy.
1970
Apple fucked us on right to repair (again)
Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through.
1971
The age of the grift shift
For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings forward etc. And there are of course a […]
1972
Ship of Fools
I recently had a 3 week holiday in Florida with my family. My 17 year old son is interested in rocketry and my wife is interested in wildlife. We got to see plenty of both and had a great time. The…
1973
Some new snippets from the Snowden documents
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment
1974
How unions won a 30% raise for every fast food worker in California
Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. 40 years of declining worker power shattered the American Dream (TM), producing multiple generations whose children fared worse than their parents, cratering faith in institutions and hope for a better future.
1975
1976
Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?
In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing. Will Congress or Biden act?
1977
A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials
Exploring the Applecore style
1978
How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people
HyperTalk, AppleScript, Prograph, Automator, Swift Playgrounds and Shortcuts – all wonderful tools in their day, but none has brought coding to the crowd.
1979
1980
Willingham sends Fables into the public domain
Here, below, is the press release I sent out today to explain what I did and why.