The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com. The value is while you are on ChatGPT and tied to your ChatGPT account. __obi is then sent to OpenAI from ordinary websites you visit. Any company that buys ads on ChatGPT installs
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
The balance of software copyright protection and openness has always been fraught with minutiae and detail that bores all but the most nerdy of pedants. Yet, through much effort and 40 years of debate we had reached an equilibrium. Now AI has thrown that out the window.
Documents show a Microsoft exec called AI the "largest theft of labor in human history.” New AI regulations are besides the point, the problem is we don’t apply existing laws to the powerful.
NEW YORK—The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit today held that border agents may search travelers’ electronic devices without suspicion. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) submitted an amicus brief in the case, arguing that…
Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?
The rare moment when I need to open a powerpoint document is here. As usual, I have my institutional account logged into their “services”, because my university pays microslop something in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of euros in contracts with this large software provider.
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI.
The AI brain worms have been spreading and I don't have a solution, I just want to get off this ride.
[This post has been cross-posted to Terence Tao’s blog.] When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem stateme…
The word is on the street: the Chaos Computer Club is hosting 40C3 from 27 to 30 December 2026 – Europe’s biggest hacker party, conference and platform for technology, society and civil liberties. We understand the Congress to be a huge shared stage and therefore invite you to help shape it. The Call for Participation…
ER visits for gambling disorders doubled after single-event sports betting was legalized and Ontario's online gambling market expanded.
AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. Training a model to believe it might be a moral patient, as Anthropic’s constitution does, makes the alignment and containment challenge far harder.
In 1980, Negativland released its first self-titled album with handmade covers and distributed it through a few record stores in the California Bay Area. “We thought we might sell 100 in the next five years, and we sold all 500 in three months. So we kept going,” said band co-founder Mark Hosler of the experimental
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet: Store …
We've heard you: "Fix the Wayback Machine!" Here's what's going on. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we've put protections in place to keep the service running. One recent change: we rewrote the message you see when a request is blocked with a 429 error…
Apple recently announced an upcoming feature for their new Apple Watches called “Audio Intelligence,” which will always be listening to a...
This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the…
A more circular economy is not only important for the environment. It can also strengthen consumer rights and improve societal resilience. In this report, we show how consumer policy can make circular choices easier, safer and more attractive for consumers.
Investigating the use of LLMs in the Android FOSS community
I’m sad to say that CSS-Tricks is stuck in limbo again. The site was acquired by Digital Ocean in 2022, and it continued to run under their ownership until February of 2023, when DigitalOcean fired the people working on it. The site stayed latent for a year before DigitalOcean re-hired lead editor Geoff Graham in June…
At first, I thought I was addicted to internet forums. Then Facebook appeared and soon after I discovered Reddit, Hacker News, 9GAG, Instagram and other form...
Why AI doom rhetoric from Anthropic, OpenAI and other tech leaders functions as hype, regulatory strategy, and a distraction from present harms.
Of all the LLMs I’ve used and driven daily, Claude is the one that absolutely contradicts my instructions.
I have a weird soft spot for roundabouts. Maybe because I'm a software engineer and the roundabout strikes me as the simple, elegant solution while the traffic light intersection is the ad-hoc, over-engineered mess.
I have a difficult confession to make — a shameful incident that I have never spoken of, even to those closest to me.
A bungled Assetnote scan
You are relying very heavily on the priors of the model to do a good job for you. What happens when you cannot judge whether those priors are good?
Xe Iaso's personal website.
