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Mental illness, attention deficit disorder, and suffering
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,047 posts.
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Disney's writer wage theft, a year on
In November 2020, SFWA came forward with a stunning accusation: Disney had told the beloved writer Alan Dean Foster (author of the original, bestselling Star Wars novelization) that they would not ever pay him the royalties he was owed.
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Internet Archive joins opposition to the “SMART Copyright Act”
In the past few weeks, governments around the world have renewed their efforts to restrain free expression online. In Canada, a revised "Online Streaming Act" comes as the latest in a long-running attempt to bring streaming under a restrictive regulatory regime. In the UK, a new "Online Safety Bill" seeks to censor…
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I finally understand methane lifetimes
How to arrive at a number you can trust
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Is everything falling apart?
Jonathan Haidt thinks so. I’m not so sure.
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Lets talk about blockchains
A blockchain, put simply, is a way of building distributed consensus in a trustless system. It allows multiple entities (i.e. computers) to collaborate and do computations without needing to trust in either a central authority or in each other, as every computation must be verified before it is accepted. There are…
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Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense
I’ve been concerned about the excesses of the blockchain industry and their spread into all parts of society for some time now. Here I’ve summarized my thoughts regarding the subject.
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The SymPy/HackerRank DMCA Incident
Thank you to Ondřej Čertík, Oscar Benjamin, Travis Oliphant, and Pamela Chestek for reviewing this blog post. Any errors in the post are my own. On April 19, 2022, for approximately 11.5 hours, the do
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Is it the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books”?
Measuring the extent of self-reviewing at the New York Review of Books from 1963-2022
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Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments
Online health information is terrible. How can we fix it?
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No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices
Every few years, a dodgy stat does the rounds claiming you can save £££ if you switch off all your gadgets at the wall. The standby mode of your TV is bleeding you dry!!! Energy Saving Trust@EnergySvgTrustA quick way to #saveenergy at home is to turn off tablets, laptops and consoles as soon as you stop using them…
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Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school
Discover Khan World School @ ASU Prep, a fully online school for grades 6-12 with mastery-based learning, global collaboration and college credit options.
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Twitter buyout puts Mastodon into spotlight
The news of Elon Musk buying Twitter has put Mastodon into the public spotlight as an alternative social network, rapidly exploding our growth with over 30,000 new users in just a single day. This is because at Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bought and owned by any billionaire, and strive…
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Why Pessimism Sounds Smart
Optimism requires believing in an unknown, unproven future
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An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California
Update (April 27): Boaz Barak—Harvard CS professor, longtime friend-of-the-blog, and coauthor of my previous guest post on this topic—has just written an awesome FAQ, providing his pers…
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World military expenditure passes $2T for first time
(Stockholm, 25 April 2022) Total global military expenditure increased by 0.7 per cent in real terms in 2021, to reach $2113 billion. The five largest spenders in 2021 were the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom and Russia, together accounting for 62 per cent of expenditure, according to new data on…
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There Is No CD Revival
Unless Maybe You are Adele
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Marriage and luxury beliefs at the United Nations
There is probably no greater gift that two parents can give to their children than to provide them with a safe, stable and nurturing environment until they feel confident and independent enough to leave the nest. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has placed the support of safe, stable and nurturing…
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Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
A peek behind the curtain into the struggles of the Chinese censorship office
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Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
Some of the forces blocking really new ideas in science
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No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
Garbage in garbage out
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The candy stores of Oxford Street
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A simple explanation of how money moves around the banking system (2013)
Twitter went mad last week because somebody had transferred almost $150m in a single Bitcoin transaction. This tweet was typical: There was much comment about how expensive or difficult this would …
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Crypto, the Left and Technofeudalism
Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, and the folly of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-heavy negotiating tactics with the IMF. Luckily, we have found this person in […]
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EU DSA: Industry and government interests prevail over citizens’ digital rights
After 16 hours of discussion, negotiators from the European Parliament and EU governments have just made deal on a new EU Digital Services Act. Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer sat at the negotiating table as Rapporteur for the Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) and summarises: "We were able to p
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“Multiple personality disorder” probably doesn't exist
TikTok culture can be incredibly toxic, but those on the left refuse to ever condemn it for fear of echoing conservatives
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What would open sourcing the Twitter algorithm actually look like?
What would “open sourcing the Twitter algorithm” actually look like? In Part 1 of this series, we focus on understanding how Twitter’s algorithmic feed works under the hood.
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I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
Organizing my thoughts regarding an argument about the Dunning-Kruger study and statistics in general