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Slow social media
How can we design better platforms?
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about
DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at. Click to read DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at, by Ed Zitron, a Substack publication.
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A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist
A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013 Here is an exchange between the Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine and myself this afternoon attempting to solicit my professional service…
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An Ode to Linux Desktop Users Everywhere
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels. The package makers, the man page writers. The rounded windows in Qt mixed with the less rounded windows of GTK. The ones who literally see things differently because of missing proprietary fonts. They’re not fond of rules, installation wizards, …
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A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
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How Far Can You Get From McDonald's?
This summer, cruising down the I-5 through California’s Central Valley to the Los Angeles Basin, I unwittingly stumbled upon a most exasperating development: the country strip mall . First, let me state that I don’t hate. I’ve got nothing against Petco, Starbucks, OfficeMax, et al. When overcome by the desire for a…
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A World Run with Code
What the world will be like when computational intelligence and computational contracts are ubiquitous. Transcript of a talk by Stephen Wolfram from a 2019 blockchain conference.
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How Japan saved Tokyo's rail network from collapse (part 1, 1945-1982)
The most consequential project in postwar Japanese rail history (not named Shinkansen)
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Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm
Searching Google Scholar for "certainly, here is" turns up a huge number of academic papers that include parts that were evidently written by ChatGPT - sections that start with "Certainly, …
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Open source does not imply open community
Open source software has existed long before the invention of the (D)VCS. The author likely hosted a barebones HTML webpage or a txt file describing the project. There definitely was an FTP server somewhere with tarballs. The author may have been reachable by email. If you were really lucky …
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On the new Dutch intelligence and security law
13th of June UPDATE: The Dutch government has failed to hire and house the promised new 10 oversight staff. Yet, the new law will be enacted July 1st, passing oversight to people that don’t exist. I surely enjoyed living under the rule of law, but it appears it was a passing thing. “The Netherlands hosts some of the…
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Goldman Sachs sent a computer scientist to jail over 8MB of open source code
In 2009, a brilliant software engineer Sergey Aleynikov was arrested by the FBI at Newark Liberty International Airport. The allegation? He stole Goldman Sachs source code, about 8 megabytes of it....
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Better than Free (2008)
[I’ve revised and condensed this short essay into an updated version, which you can read on my Substack here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/better-than-free] The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we … Continue reading →
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AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery
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Crypto for kids
When, in the spring of 2030, he almost incidentally invented the most terrible biological weapon known to humanity it took him about three seconds to realize that should his invention fall into the hands of one of the superpowers -- or into the hands of any common idiot, really -- it could well mean the end of the…
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Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?
I recently built a website that breaks down the cost of a UK electricity bill. It's interactive, and I'd recommend visiting it before reading this post. Check it out here: electricitybills.uk Here are three interesting things about the data. #1: The wholesale power cost is only one third of
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Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students
The ministry of education in Turkey recently announced that they will be offering Delphi free of charge to students of computer sciences. An estimated one million students will thus have access to …
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Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf
A viral TikTok sardine diet and warming oceans have collided to create a real canned-sardine shortage — and it's not ending soon.
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Sucks to be an old engineer
As if the coming wave of foreign engineers resulting from the inevitable immigration bill isn’t bad enough, I saw this comment left on a Wall Street Journal article: At my recent 40th Stanford reun…
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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 …
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ChatGPT is a bullshit generator but it can still be amazingly useful
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce
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LLM Inflation
One of the signal achievements of computing is data compression 1 : we take in data, make it smaller while retaining all information (“lossless” compression), transmit it, and then decompress it back to the original at the other end.
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