The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 992 posts.
Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks. You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing…
For many years, data brokers have existed in the shadows, exploiting gaps in privacy laws to harvest our information—all for their own profit. They sell our precise movements without our knowledge or meaningful consent to a variety of private and state actors, including law enforcement agencies....
Why random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions
your data is trapped inside the box that is your program. you can only see what the program author exposes.
I have previously blogged about the relatively new trend of AI slop in vulnerability reports submitted to curl and how it hurts and exhausts us. This trend does not seem to slow down. On the contrary, it seems that we have recently not only received more AI slop but also more human slop. The latter … Continue reading…
Apple's rules and technical restrictions are blocking other browser vendors from successfully offering their own engines to users in the EU.
So many sci-fi movies, anime, and video games owe a massive debt of gratitude to William Gibson's seminal 1984 novel.
Am I now committing civil disobedience... just by keeping my personal literary website up as is?
Our research shows that even the latest "reasoning" models are vulnerable
Or: why I have a blog now.
Why being popular is not the goal of most small businesses
If you ask the new Grok 4 for opinions on controversial questions, it will sometimes run a search to find out Elon Musk’s stance before providing you with an answer. …
Axon Enterprise’s Draft One — a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers’ body-worn cameras — seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public, an EFF investigation has found.Our review of...
An independent nonprofit research lab, whose mission is to enable universal literacy in a humane dynamic medium. This involves inventing a humane form of computing, and developing educational and community-based institutions in which a culture can grow. [more]
WhatsApp is not private or secure. Please consider using Signal instead.
Young Americans today spend 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the 21st century. Why?
In Defense of Outdoor Play
If you are a user of LLM systems that use tools (you can call them “AI agents” if you like) it is critically important that you understand the risk of …
In many discussions where questions of "alignment" or "AI safety" crop up, I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magic...
We are products with labels
And why French is full of them
This post is about the reason I will probably never try to warn any organisation in Belgium about any vulnerability again. Recently I have been dealing with an attempt at coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) with an organisation in Belgium. This post is not about that, because I’m not allowed to write about it…
Recently, there's been a European Citizens' Initiative called "Stop Destroying Videogames" which by now has hit the milestone of 1'000'000 signatures. You're still encouraged to sign it if you care about its goals and are a EU citizen, since not all of those are likely to be valid signatures, but overall this is a…
This isn't innovation, it's tyranny
I signed up for Hinge. Holy shit with the boosts.
tl;dr: If you're an EU citizen, sign the Stop Killing Games initiative here. Or, if you're in the UK, sign this petition. A month ago, I had a second video on self-hosting taken down. YouTube said it was 'harmful or dangerous content'. I appealed that, but my appeal was rejected. Luckily, I have enough reach I was…
