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You are the scariest monster in the woods
We shouldn’t worry about AI destroying society because there’s something scarier out there (it’s us)
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Europe's Digital Sovereignty Paradox – "Chat Control" Update
Can you build tech independence while breaking encryption?
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Half of America's Voting Machines Are Now Owned by a MAGA Oligarch
They told us elections were rigged. Then they cloned stolen voting software. Then they bought the voting machines.
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Why the open social web matters now
The needs are real – and you have so much power.
1295
What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on
What do Americans die from, and what do the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News report on?
1296
If you'd built a "tool" that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?
A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1]. The…
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America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints
If the economy's single pillar goes down, Trump's presidency will be seen as a disaster.
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AI and the Future of American Politics
Two years ago, Americans anxious about the forthcoming 2024 presidential election were considering the malevolent force of an election influencer: artificial intelligence. Over the past several years, we have seen plenty of warning signs from elections worldwide demonstrating how AI can be used to propagate…
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Free software hasn't won
This is a translated version of a talk I gave at P.I.W.O in June, with cleanups and adjustments for the blog form.
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After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
Some argue that even if the current AI boom leads to an overbuild, it might not be a bad thing - just as the dotcom bubble left behind the internet infrastructure that powered later decades of growth. It’s a tempting comparison, but the parallels only go so far. The dotcom era’s overbuild crea
1301
The App Store was always authoritarian
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of…
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China's New Rare Earth and Magnet Restrictions Threaten US Defense Supply Chains
China has imposed its most stringent rare earth and magnet export controls yet, restricting products with even trace Chinese content. This bolsters its leverage ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting and heightens risks to U.S. defense and semiconductor supply chains.
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Heroin addicts often seem normal
At least, they did to me ten years ago
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Regarding the Compact
The U.S. Department of Education recently sent MIT and eight other institutions a proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," along with a letter asking that MIT review the document.
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All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune
Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?
1306
Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado
The Nobel Peace Prize 2025 was awarded to Maria Corina Machado "for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy"
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Nobel Prize in Literature 2025: László Krasznahorkai
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 was awarded to László Krasznahorkai "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art"
1308
Dark patterns: Buying a Bahncard at Deutsche Bahn
How do two well liked companies, deutsche Bahn and adobe, advertise their subscriptions? Badly. Deutsche Bahn, the fully state-owned railway company, is a we
1309
Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?
It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US.
1310
The weaponization of travel blacklists
[A Federal Air Marshal (FAM) tasked with surveillance of an airline passenger targeted by Quiet Skies lists and/or rules followed the traveler out to the curb and recorded the license plate number of the vehicle in which she left the airport, so that her airline reservations could be integrated with license plate…
1311
The email they shouldn't have read
A real-world horror story about contracts, control, and the dark side of managed open source.
1312
Seeing like a software company
The big idea of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State can be expressed in three points: Modern organizations exert control by maximising “legibility”: by…
1313
When ChatGPT turns informant
The largely overlooked privacy risks of using AI apps that not only remember your conversations, but are capable of using these to reveal your deepest secrets to others
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Apple's Unlawful Evil
Apple has removed ICEBlock, a totally legal app that helps people track the movements of the masked snatch-squads who illegally terrorize brown people in America's cities, capitulating to a warrantless demand from Trump's DoJ boss Pam Bondi:
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State Terror, American Style
Forget about “soft autocracy”
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1 Trillion Web Pages Archived
On October 22, 2025, the Internet Archive celebrated an extraordinary milestone: 1 trillion web pages preserved and available for access via the Wayback Machine. Event Recaps & Recordings | Photos | Impact Stories | Support the Internet Archive | Press Kit Since 1996, the Internet Archive has worked with libraries and…
1318
Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?
Investigating the seahorse emoji doom loop using logitlens.
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NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
How NIST Turned Open Science into a Security Scare
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