The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
Imagine, just for a moment, that the Government wanted to keep a record of everyone's sexuality. They need to know this detailed demographic data because it will be highly useful in civic planning. It will help them work out what provision needs to be made for sexual health services, how many children are likely to be…
Why is the military and a cheese fortune teller contacting me about SondeHub.org
In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all…
OR: an apology to my English teachers
It’s not technically a tax. Taxes produce valuable public benefits, like medical research and parks. This is simply legal theft. Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ad…
The pale is growing
Pool your money and give your friends batteries that lower their electricity bills and keep essential devices running during outages.
One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides "what is taking up all my cloud storage?") is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don't want it. This is a guide for people who would like less intrusive AI in their tech environment. Maybe you lik
It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anything other than *my* needs should factor into the generation of text *for me* is patently offensive.
Reasoning scores climb while per-token compute drops. Labs are stripping world knowledge out of models, and I think that's the right trade.
I still do not use LLMs for anything I actually care about. There are a lot of reasons I could give: environmental, social, political. I could talk about ecosystem lock-in, learned dependence, self-soverignty, philosophical concerns, the intentional dismantling of labour bargaining power, and more. But before all of…
A fictitious Sean Byrne ended up on a U.S. government restricted-party list. Sixteen years later, Apple, Nasdaq and others have mistaken me for him.
I’m coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security, right here in my hometown of Baltimore. This means that my days have been taken up with two kinds of conversation: first, explaini…
Every AI-generated landing page, all at once, labelling itself as it goes.
I would like you to know that we passengers are trying our best. To you, this place makes sense -- you come here every day. You speak the lingo. You kno...
A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future of software, books, music, and movies, in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse, while the human-made variant moves into a luxury segment of its own.
Agents can write code faster than we can absorb it. Here's why it still matters for humans to understand what they build — and some techniques for doing that efficiently: explainer docs, quizzes, micro-worlds, and shared spaces.
A complete crawl of every restored link from 2009 to 2014 found that 76.7% no longer return a loading page.
A viral TikTok sardine diet and warming oceans have collided to create a real canned-sardine shortage — and it's not ending soon.
Hard work is grinding and only partly reliable. Luck is random by definition. Research on who you know is far more specific than most networking advice.
So while I work with police departments regularly, I think it is critically important that technology be used reasonably. While this may be off-putting to some of my clients, I worked with the Inst…
After a few weeks away from AI, I see my usage wasn't always productive or healthy.
A Newspaper Classifieds Story
On a small Japanese word that everyone has heard and almost everyone has misaddressed, and what changes when you find out who it is for.
The largest tell for me to tell where culture and sentiment is shifting for AI tools is usually X, viral GitHub repositories and Hacker News. One of these tells I’ve been seeing a lot lately is skills like I have ADHD and Agents.md instructions such as giving outputs in only ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.
If you haven't had Belvita breakfast cookies, you have probably had Biscoff cookies, which are similar. These are a classic airline snack. You've probably ha...
Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them
OR: you must look at this fish and go insane
The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is c...
