2221
The dark forest and the cozy web (2020)
An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
2222
UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
In an open letter, seven secure messaging apps—including Signal and WhatsApp—point out that the UK’s Online Safety Bill could destroy end-to-end encryption: As currently drafted, the Bill could break end-to-end encryption,opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages of…
2223
Highway to Ruin: The crash of Southern Airways flight 242 (2022)
When a Southern Airways DC-9 loses both engines during a storm, an attempt to land it on a rural highway goes horribly wrong.
2224
LSD: Not Even Once
Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. […] – Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple
2225
The loophole that made cars in America so big
Here's why American cars and trucks are so big
2226
The Sudan crisis and the Sahel gold rush
Sudan is a pivotal link in the increasingly fragile and violent geopolitics of both the Sahel and the Red Sea/Horn of Africa regions.
2227
Fire Mark Zuckerberg
DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at. Click to read DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at, by Ed Zitron, a Substack publication.
2228
The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements
How to “embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”
2229
The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
2230
Record labels panic as A.I. generated song becomes ‘hit single’
Welcome to the new world.
2231
When Interfaces Kill: What Happened to John Denver (1999)
How poor design killed John Denver dead.
2232
Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
Six propositions for evaluating the evidence.
2233
2234
Why don’t more people live close to friends?
A few theories why
2235
The Windows 11 Trash Party
Thomas Bandt was setting up a new computer for his kid, and it gave him the opportunity to really look at what Windows has become over the years. Here's what was showing by default in the Start menu: First, there was news about a mass shooting that had occurred
2236
Thought Examinations, Indoctrination Meetings and Struggle Sessions
On the mechanics of totalitarian terror in Mao's China.
2237
'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco
The goal was equity. The result: Meh.Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for…
2238
Alien Artefacts
The purpose of this blog post is to introduce the concept of alien artefacts 1 , a subcategory of legacy code. I use the term to describe particularly complicated and important pieces of software written by very smart engineers that are no longer working for the company—and thus not available to support it. The…
2239
2240
The Military-Industrial Stock Buyback Complex
Why is the US military ceding ground to China? As a new DOD report shows, big defense contractors are middlemen whose main purpose is stock buybacks and dividends.
2241
The least impactful way to spend $300M?
Buying status is as close to bad as a good act can be.
2242
Don’t record your social life on an append-only social network (2022)
The tech behind peer-to-peer (P2P) social networks such as Secure Scuttlebutt enforces permanency. Absolute permanency isn’t what you want in a social network.
2243
I’ve been single all my life
I’m single. I don’t know if this comes as a surprise to you. Of course, you have yet to hear me talking about a wife or a girlfriend. But I also rarely talk about dating and finding someone. The bigger surprise might be that I’m a lifelong single. In other words, I was never in any romantic or sexual relationship…
2244
Yes, it's OK to be mad about crime in San Francisco
Let's not make excuses for Chaos City.
2245
2246
2247
My diatribe against “skeptics” (2016)
April 10, 2023. The backlash was immediate after I spoke at the 2016 Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism , which bills itself as a “celebration of science and critical thinking.” Although the conference had allotted me 10 minutes for questions, the stage manager, Jamy
2248
I wish GPT4 had never happened
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
2249
Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk
In "Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation," a trio of business researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Pamplin College investigate the difference between the goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:
2250
Why human societies developed so little during 300k years
Why human societies developed so little during 300 000 years