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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,046 posts.
The Great Unwind
The economy is crashing because Wall Street spent trillions shorting Japan's currency and now they're being squeezed.
A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
The recent release of a tranche of files by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) under the “Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R.4405)” has once again prompted many people to closely examine redacted and sanitized PDF documents. Our previous articles on the Manafort papers and the Mueller report , as well as a study by…
I miss thinking hard
AI has changed the experience of being an engineer, starving my Thinker side while satisfying the Builder ...
I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored
I made 20 GDPR data deletion requests in the past year. 2 complied immediately. 6 complied after I filed complaints with data protection offices. 12 still haven't. The regulation exists, the enforcement doesn't.
221 Cannon is Not For Sale
Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life. It’s annoying, but thankfully I’ve avoided some of the more catastrophic outcomes when criminals begin impe…
AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was
How generative AI exposes the gap between copyright law and everyday enforcement, from fan art and private creation to commercial competition.
Where did all the starships go?
In this Weekly Chart, we look for sci-fi books and their changing titles.
Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair
Researchers analyzed samples of Utahns' hair going back a century to document a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations.
Julia
An aphasic space station monitors an anomalous object, while keeping the last two humans alive.
Parking lots as economic drains
They are draining the economic potential of our cities. We need to make them financially unsustainable.
Palantir: Financed by Epstein, Fueled by Thiel
Palantir took Epstein’s money, Thiel’s backing, and Trump’s blessing to build an AI war machine. If Gaza is the testing ground, America’s next. Are we ready to fight back?
FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap
FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels highlights open source, European digital sovereignty, BSD, Linux, community innovation, and free software.
Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog
Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal b…
Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
Like many organizations, Wiki Education has grappled with generative AI, its impacts, opportunities, and threats, for several years. As an organization that runs large-scale programs to bring new e…
Court Filings: ICE App Identifies Protesters; Global Entry, PreCheck Get Revoked
ICE is using a smartphone app called “Mobile Fortify” to scan faces and capture contactless fingerprints, instantly pulling back names and biographical data — and court filings say the same encounters are being followed by revocations of Global Entry and TSA PreCheck. That turns “trusted traveler” into chilling of…
Amazon's Spending on 'Melania' Is a Barely Concealed Bribe
Link to: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/business/media/amazon-melania-trump-film-critics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.IFA.R85v.5ZtNe8FttfaD
Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now
The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot, renamed to OpenClaw. It’s an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger …
Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
Last year I predicted there would be a significant (2008+) economic crash that year. The year is now 2026 and I was wrong. At the time my main argument was essentially this: The unemployment rate just follows these smooth curves, covid was an exception, and it was due to jump again. Not very scientific I […]
A lot of population numbers are fake
Do we have any idea how many people there are in the world?
That's not how email works
A confusing letter from HSBC informed me that I've not been receiving their emails, and I have to change the email address they use to contact me. Except I've been receiving all of their emails just fine! The problem, it turns out, is that surveillance capitalism is now so-widespread that the bank cannot conceive that…
I stopped following the news
A personal reflection on the decision to stop following daily news and its impact on my well-being.
The age of Pump and Dump software
A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
Software Pump and Dump
A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
The Adolescence of Technology
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
US Government wants DNA and social media from visitors
Yesterday the Trump Administration announced a proposed change in policy for travellers to the U.S. It applies to the powers of data collection by the Customs and Border Police (CBP).
Apple, What Have You Done?
I've been an Apple user for over a decade and generally very happy with that life choice, but since iOS / iPadOS 26 and MacOS Tahoe were released a few month...