The Moral Economy of the Shire
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 694 posts.
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
A few weeks ago, I went to DC to start engaging policymakers and be the voice of little tech. Here's why.
I’ll get to the good and bad news of the week, but first I want to note the big story - Donald Trump’s conviction by a jury in New York - and a little story with big implications - the Federal Bureau of Investigation raiding a corporate landlord in cahoots with a nation-wide rent-fixing cartel that affects up to 16…
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen
The highly controversial indiscriminate child sexual abuse regulation (so-called chat control) could still be endorsed by EU governments after all, as France could give up its previous veto. This is reported by Euractiv and confirmed by internal documents. France considers the new "upload moderation
Information addiction is rotting our brains
Eight years of organizing tech meetups
Posted on Friday 31 May 2024. 2,785 words, 28 links. By Matt Webb.
A path to continued model improvement.
In a post to China’s popular WeChat platform last week, one writer bemoaned the shocking loss of nearly a full decade of information from the early days of the country’s domestic internet. Within hours the writer's reflections had vanished too.
The best websites are home-cooked meals. Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive was birthed after I realized there was no obvious way to fetch the previous articles of the “Easy Finnish” daily news broadcast. This annoyed me as a student of the language. “Here we have a stream”, I thought, “of high-quality, human-written…
Recall is a new feature in Windows 11 which takes a screenshot every few seconds, runs local device OCR on it and stores the resulting text in a SQLite database. …
Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester have identified mechanisms in the brain’s hippocampal network that are rescued by ketones. These findings build on previous research showing that ketones can alleviate neurological and cognitive affects.
Photographic memory comes to Windows, and is the biggest security setback in a decade.
Over the past few years, I have tried to gradually reduce or eliminate my use of Google products and services. It has been difficult to ditch Google’s products in some categories, and in some others, it has been nigh impossible. Here, I list the services I have tried to find alternatives for, discuss the ease (or lack…
At least seven more Russian, Belarusian, Latvian, and Israeli journalists and activists have been targeted with Pegasus within the EU.
It can only be discarded
I bought a new M1 MacBook Pro in April 2022. A little over two years later, I'm seeing a service recommended message, and the maximum capacity of the battery is now down to 78%. Admittedly, my MacBook Pro experiences heavy usage: basically all day, every day. The batteries in my previous 2014 Intel MacBook Pro, which…
An updated version of the methodology to be used in the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, leaked by the news portal Contexte, reveals more details on the approach pursued by the Belgian Council Presidency: The text doubles-down on services that allow people to protect themselves. If services are used t
“Moveable Type,” the public art installation in the New York Times’s lobby, is ending its 17-year run. The Times, which is replacing the exhibit as part of an update to its lobby…
Former NBA player and TV sportscaster Bill Walton died on Monday at the age of 71. He was a quirky dude and as someone who’s been known to veer off onto seeming
Based on a new proposal by the Belgian Minister of the Interior, EU governments could endorse the much-criticised child sexual abuse regulation (CSAR or chat control) as early as June after all. This is what internal information leaked to Pirate Party MEP and shadow rapporteur Patrick Breyer reveals
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to engage in a mobile ecosystem outside of the watchful eye of the Big Tech giants and gatekeepers? A system tha...
This is a follow-up to my blog post Updating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma silently enables iCloud Keychain . In the addendum to that blog post, I discussed a workaround, which was to delete my WiFi password right before rebooting into the updater. In a trial run on my M1 Mac mini, the workaround was successful.
🏡 My home automation setup built with Home Assistant
Link to: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.html
Ever transferred assets between brokerages? Impressive, terrifying machinations happened in the background. No cats were harmed.