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Google Search Is Dying
(There is good discussion on this article on Hacker News and Reddit)
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
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My First Impressions of Web3
Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...
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Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do …
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Don't Fly During Ramadan
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to fly from New York (JFK) to Los Angeles on JetBlue. I was racially profiled, detained, and interrogated for hours.
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The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've used
This month marks the publication of "The Actual Star," a new, wildly ambitious, wildly successful novel by Monica Byrne, spanning 3,000 years of history from the ancient Maya to a distant future.
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I Am Deleting the Blog
[EDIT 2/13/21: This post is originally from June 2020, but there’s been renewed interest in it because the NYT article involved just came out. This post says the NYT was going to write a posi…
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An AI agent published a hit piece on me
Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
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When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
Do not get arrested challenge 2020
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.name Termination
Nearly twenty-five years ago I registered neil.fraser.name to provide a stable presence on the Internet. It has been the home of this website, my email address, and a server for APIs. It predates YouTube, Facebook, and smart phones. Minutes after my daughter was born, I also registered beverly.fraser.name .
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The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen
Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked.
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We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own
Refuting the common and flawed argument of
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When did Google get so weird?
I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks. Understanding this Google se...
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What if we made advertising illegal?
What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy itself. A thought experiment worth considering.
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Local AI needs to be the norm
Local AI models should be the default.
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Just Be Rich
No one wants to be the bad guy. When narratives begin to shift and the once good guys are labelled as bad it's not surprising they fight back. They'll point to criticisms as exaggerations. Their faults as misunderstandings. Today's freshly ordained bad guys are the investors and
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Why I’m Suing the US Government
Today I filed a lawsuit against the US government, challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 means that you can be sued or prosecuted for accessing, speaking about, and tinkering with digital media and technologies that you have paid for. This violates our First Amendment rights…
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LLM Inevitabilism
Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks. You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing…
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Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple …
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Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you
Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you.
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Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
Also here's a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk because I need some chill