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How the Consumer Computer Is Consuming Computing
When the personal computer went from being a "bicycle for the mind" to a surveilled shopping mall.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,047 posts.
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The silent majority in software
I was re-reading Nixon’s 1969 “silent majority” speech last week (Smithsonian ran a good breakdown in 2017), mostly because YouTube’s algorithm
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Stable Diffusion is a big deal
If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on with Stable Diffusion, you really should be. Stable Diffusion is a new “text-to-image diffusion model” that was released to the …
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Why none of my books are available on Audible
And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55.
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One kitchen, hundreds of internet restaurants
There are a few cloud kitchen restaurants that deliver food that is so shit that I want to know which other brands are being run from the same kitchen so that I can avoid them all.
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Finnish as a world language?
It is obviously difficult to answer this question with certainty. At the moment there seem to be several factors which would hinder such a development.
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The culture of rejection in computer science publications
Unlike most disciplines, in Computer Science, conference publications dominate over journals, and program committees carry out the bulk of the peer reviewing. Serving on a PC is a yeoman’s service, and the community owes them a debt of gratitude. However, I believe that a toxic culture has emerged. This blog is a call…
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The Penguin Random House trial
The Penguin Random House trial is ripping the lid off publishing
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Creativity requires solitude
Perhaps it will turn out that you were called to be an artist. If that is your fate, then accept it and deal with it, the highs and the lows, the burden and the greatness, without ever worrying about external rewards.
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The coming tsunami of fakery
How the Dead Internet Theory is fast becoming reality thanks to zero, marginal-cost content generated at infinite scale
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Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards
AWM #91: I wanted to clarify the tech work landscape for myself and instead I wrote this (??) 🪞
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Let’s Not Have a Beer
For the first time, I won a major raffle at a recent conference. However, I had to give the prize back since it was a beer dispenser and I don’t drink. If your reaction after reading the last line was “Why don’t you drink?” or “Most of us do and it’s your choice that you missed out.”, then this blog is for you. I’m…
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Class action against Oracle’s worldwide surveillance machine
Oracle claims to have amassed dossiers on 5 billion people, and generates $42.4 billion in annual revenue. ICCL's Dr Johnny Ryan is a lead plaintiff in a new U.S. class action to stop its global surveillance machine.
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Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)
Your email provider owns your online identity by controlling your email address. You can’t port your email address to another provider as with phone numbers.
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On Corpspeak
Syncing Up, Circling Back, Learnings and Asks, Oh My
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The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
Disaster Relief. We saw the best of Internet users when they pulled together to help each other through several natural disasters in 1994. The year brought floods, earthquakes, and other major tragedies. Almost immediately following each of these events, Net users gathered around their terminals and formed newsgroups…
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An odd discovery on Spotify
New releases; good catastrophes; an alluring and unnerving encounter.
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Gmail will call the cops on you based on the content of your emails
Correction: An earlier draft of this story misstated a technical detail; Mark didn’t email his photo to his doctor; rather, he took the photo with his phone and the image was automatically synched to his Google Photos account, triggering a scan .
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How messed up was Germany's energy policy?
It's not as bad as a lot of people are saying
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YouTube disrupted in Pakistan as former PM Khan streams speech
NetBlocks metrics confirm the disruption of YouTube on multiple internet providers in Pakistan on Sunday 21 August 2022. The disruption comes as former Prime Minister Imran Khan makes a live ...
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Workplace surveillance is coming for you
If you want to do something terrible with technology, you can't just roll it out on people with money and social capital. They'll complain and your idea will tank. Successful shitty tech rollouts start with people you can abuse with impunity (prisoners, kids, migrants, etc) and then work their way up the privilege…
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The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
Smart TVs have upended the way we consume television content. They are luring us in with great picture quality and the promise of customized and seamless viewing, but they are also collecting and sharing our data. Find out how to make the most of your smart TV without compromising privacy.
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How do cash transfers impact the people who don’t receive them? (2019)
GiveDirectly partnered with academic researchers to find out how cash transfers affect local economies, including nearby non-recipients. Read the results.
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Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
Or "Spiderman Is My Boyfriend"
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Religion as an Ego-modulator
William James, Aldous Huxley, and the functions of religion
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LibGen's Bloat Problem
Edit: I feel compelled to make a small clarification; I'm not arguing for purging all files greater than X MiB (even though I still think LibGen has a non-negligible amount of junk and duplicate content but neither are easy to remove without significant manpower and LibGen lacks mechanisms to crowdsource the work)…