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Those correction notices, in full
In light of our recent discussion of the unwillingness of authors of published papers to acknowledge their mistakes, I thought I’d post the four correction notices that I’ve felt the need to issue.
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 450 posts.
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Mortgages are a manufactured product (2022)
Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.
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Japanese words and names sound African (2022)
A blog by Professor Farooq Kperogi about Nigeria, America, politics, education, culture, identity, media, language, English grammar, and much more.
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Structuralism as a Philosophy of Mathematics
For mathematical insight, according to the structuralist imperative, investigate mathematical structure and consider mathematical concepts only as invariant under isomorphism.
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To forget is an ethical act
On and off for the last several years I’ve been manually curating my roughly 40,000 lifetime tweets. I recently finished, and in the process embarked on a
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The People Deliberately Killing Facebook
Enjoy this post? Why not try the podcast version? Please download it, and also all the other episodes. Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now
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The art and history of lettering comics
Todd Klein's online book exploring little-known aspects of comics: lettering, letterers, logo design and more.
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How to stop losing 17,500 kidneys
"Someone left a human liver at the wrong hospital’s cargo bay in 90 degree heat, and no one noticed for an hour and a half."
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The Tech Industry Doesn't Understand Consent – Opt-Out Is Not Consent
Thanks to Samantha Cole at 404 Media, we are now aware that Automattic plans to sell user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com (which is the host for my blog) for “AI” products. In respon…
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A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
[Edit May 2024: This concept was republished in Asterisk Magazine.] Just a couple of hours drive east of Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley, home to Palm Springs, some of the most productive agri…
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The internet is slipping out of our reach
With AI encroaching every open forum on the internet, the future of human discourse is bleak.
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Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
A lot of community applications died when API access to twitter, reddit & others was severely restricted, but they can't stop us from sharing our own data with each other!
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Please stop putting cookie pop-ups on your website (2022)
TL;DR; - they prevent companies from denying services to people that use technology to block tracking and ads. ...
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FICO and the Credit Bureau Cartel
Mortgage lenders face destruction as a cartel of Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax work with FICO to drive them out of business. Regulator and anti-monopolist Rohit Chopra is pushing back.
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The online sports gambling experiment
Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers
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Why Tolkien Hated Dune
A short intro to the philosophy of ethics J.R.R. Tolkien maintained a very private, but very negative opinion of Frank Herbert’s Dune. In Tolkien’s Library, entry 964, Tolkien is quoted…
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I'm going to keep opting out
Marketing, solicitations, advertising, political contact, direct mailers, email campaigns, cookies, ads — it's all opt out. It puts the burden on you to opt out of each communication each message, each outreach from a loyalty program. It can feel like weeding a garden, but that garden is your attention. The weeds keep…
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Trading trust
The Brookings Institution did a fascinating survey series over the last five years. I have two takeways from this: The first is that focused and persistent propaganda is able to shift public opinio…
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Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a tiny news archive
The best websites are home-cooked meals. Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive was birthed after I realized there was no obvious way to fetch the previous articles of the “Easy Finnish” daily news broadcast. This annoyed me as a student of the language. “Here we have a stream”, I thought, “of high-quality, human-written…
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The scarcity of the long term
The chief hurdle in constructing a Death Star is not the energy, materials, or even knowledge needed. It’s the long time needed. A society can change their mind mid-way over centuries, and simply move on. The galaxy is likely strewn … Continue reading →
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Dean of Engineering at University of Nevada wrote a paper that’s bad
“As we look to sleep and neuroscience for answers we can study flies specifically the Drosophila melanogaster we highlight in our research.”
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Deluge of Fake Mac App Store Reviews
Yesterday I discovered a deluge of recent fake customer reviews for a number of top paid apps in the United States Mac App Store. (Each country has its own version of the App Store with separate reviews.) I've now checked the reviews for all of the current top 40 paid apps in the Mac App Store, and 8 of those apps…
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Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"
There's a strain of anti-anti-monopolist that insists that they're not pro -monopoly – they're just realists who understand that global gigacorporations are too big to fail, too big to jail, and that governments can't hope to rein them in. Trying to regulate a tech giant, they say, is like trying to regulate the…
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Against the Dark Forest
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.
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Airline Takes Revenge After Bad Review, Posts Passenger's Passport Online
YouTuber Josh Cahill, who has nearly 700,000 subscribers, reviews flights and courts drama, it seems. Just a couple of months ago he was banned by Qatar Airways over a negative review. Now he’s taken on East Timor’s Aero Dili.
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"Rabbit Test" Unwins the Hugo
I cannot convey the supreme depths to which I’d rather be doing anything else with my Saturday afternoon other than writing this blog post, but here we are. If you have been blessedly insulat…
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Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)
This week I finished the most recent book in my self-guided study of 20th century technology, namely The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner. As the title implies, it’s a chronicle of research and development wing of AT&T, a history that lasts...
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The Dying Computer Museum
One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather …
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