571
Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration
We, people and civil society organisations from Europe and around the world, call on the European Commission to act now to break up the powerful Big Tech
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 992 posts.
572
Open source can't coordinate?
I was taking a shower this morning, and was pondering yesterday's problem, where I suspect that I have an outdated version of hotspot Linux profiler, but I can't just go and download a fresh release from GitHub, because hotspot is a KDE app, and I use NixOS. And NixOS isn't a problem --- it's a solution.
573
How OpenElections uses LLMs
In the 12-plus years that we’ve been turning official precinct election results into data at OpenElections , the single biggest problem has been converting pictures of results into CSV files. Many of the precinct results files we get are image PDFs, and for those there are essentially two options: data entry or…
574
Guess I'm a rationalist now
A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl…
575
I feel open source has turned into two worlds
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
576
It's true, “we” don't care about accessibility on Linux
What do concern trolls and privileged people without visible or invisible disabilities who share or make content about accessibility on Linux being trash without contributing anything to projects have in common? They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’…
577
PWM flicker: Invisible light that's harming our health?
I recently spent a few weeks running a conference for a community of researchers and writers in a historic chateau in the French…
578
Is there a half-life for the success rates of AI agents?
Building on the recent empirical work of Kwa et al. (2025), I show that within their suite of research-engineering tasks the performance of AI agents on longer-duration tasks can be explained by an extremely simple mathematical model — a constant rate of failing during each minute a human would take
579
Your Brain on ChatGPT
Check project's website: https://www.brainonllm.comWith today's wide adoption of LLM products like ChatGPT from OpenAI, humans and businesses engage and u…
580
What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding
There has been rather a lot of doomsaying (and perhaps astroturfing) lately about LLMs as the end of computer programming. Much of the discussion has been lacking nuance, so I’d like to add mine. I see claims from one side that “I used $LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDER to make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be…
581
Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications. Unfortunately, the necessary changes are risky and expensive, which means they won’t do it…
582
Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API
Previously I have covered a relatively obscure now-removed placeholder string in Android that doubles as an easter egg, the fictitious carrier by the name of El Telco Loco. But this time it is about methods and other parts of the publicly facing Android API that may generally be more humourous than they are useful…
583
Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable
Before the 1970s, most children affected by leukemia would quickly die from it. Now, most children in rich countries are cured.
584
When random people give money to random other people (2017)
A post on Decision Science about a problem of Uri Wilensky’s has been making the rounds: Imagine a room full of 100 people with 100 dollars each. With every tick of the clock, every person wi…
585
The Case for Software Craftsmanship in the Era of Vibes
From the Zed Blog: Working toward genuine, quality software in an era where code production is not the constraint anymore.
586
NASA Is Worth Saving
Casey Handmer June 2025 Download a printable PDF. NASA was founded in 1958 in response to Sputnik and the emerging necessity of a robust, government supported space exploration and technology devel…
587
The international standard for identifying postal items
The Universal Postal Union's S10 standard, in all its glory
588
The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
The first public passenger locomotive, Locomotion No. 1, began service in September 1825. The first mass-casualty railway disaster happened seventeen years…
589
Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety
Cambridge researchers urge public health bodies like the NHS to provide trustworthy, research-driven alternatives to platforms driven by profit.
590
Firefox OS's story from a Mozilla insider not working on the project (2024)
I clearly remember, but can't date it. I was working for Mozilla messaging at the time ( momo ), being the QA lead for Thunderbird. It was at the end of one of the Mozilla All-hands, maybe in 2011 or 2012. At one of the ending keynotes, we were introduced to Boot 2 Gecko. A hack that would let US - Mozilla own the…
591
Why Koreans ask what year you were born
Why age is crucial in Korea, affecting language, respect, and social relationships. What is Korean & international age?
592
The Gentle Singularity
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots...
593
Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination
Somehow I forgot to blog my site: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/ . I created it back in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for online resources t...
594
Mikeal Rogers has died
Mikeal Rogers, my best friend, my colleague, confidant, and one of a kind partner in countless late night chats and restless travel sprints, has died. Mikeal died of aggressive cancer. Words feel wholly inadequate because I want to capture the sweep of what he meant to me and to the
595
Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why
In the EU, digital sovereignty is trending. Businesses and authorities are starting to adopt sovereign solutions from Europe.
596
AI Angst
My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this…
597
Finding Shawn Mendes (2019)
In this day and age, celebrities have a lot of influence over our politics. Garthwaite and Moore estimated that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008 netted him an extra 1 milli…
598
FSE meets the FBI
I have for you a bizarre tale of scrapers, feds, data poisoning, Torswats, and everyone's favorite fedi instance. It veers technical, because I suspect it will be of interest to other people running servers with UGC (i.e., every fedi instance), and also because the mechanics of how I figured out what I figured out…
599
Building supercomputers for autocrats probably isn't good for democracy
The shameless spin around Stargate UAE
600
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
Re: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts There was a post recently that was dissing AI Skeptics. While the post is funny at times, I feel like it’s absolutely and completely missing the point of the skepticism. Or at least I feel that it is glossing over some massive pain points of said skepticism. Let’s go over some of…