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Raising Kids to Have an Analog Childhood in a Digital World
Kids were not meant to be brought up in the digital world that exists today as it is incompatible with human neurological development.
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 666 posts.
542
East German Stasi Tactics – Zersetzung (2021)
A look at the experiences of activists in East Germany (GDR) dealing with Stasi informants and infiltration before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
543
If you believe in "Artificial Intelligence", take five minutes to ask it
Here’s a Mastodon thread from a year ago. Just a quick check on how ChatGPT’s getting on … Me: Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when? ChatGPT…
544
Richard Stallman on ChatGPT
I define "intelligence" as being capable of knowing or understanding, at least within some domain. ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything, so it is not intelligence. It does not know what its output means. It has no idea that words can mean anything.
545
No Socials November
November seems to be a ripe month for challenges. Some people grow facial hair. Some people write many words daily hoping to come out with a novel on the other...
546
Where are vacation homes located in the US?
As of 2023, the US has around 142.3 million housing units: roughly one home for every 2.4 people in the country.
547
The Unreliability of LLMs and What Lies Ahead
The Unreliability of LLMs & What Lies Ahead
548
The gift card accountability sink
The gaps scammers exploit in gift cards are the result of deliberate policy tradeoffs.
549
Tomatoes roaming the fields and canaries in the coalmine
Many publishers are getting nervous about infiltration by paper mills, who can torpedo a journal's reputation when they succeed in publis...
550
What were the earliest laws like?
Hammurabi’s code doesn’t tell the whole story
551
For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?
The personal blog of Thomas Steiner
552
"ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy
When you paste ChatGPT’s response instead of your own feedback, you’re not being helpful. You’re being lazy and creating more work for everyone.
553
Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies
If delivered today, the last of Huxley’s 7-part lecture series at MIT would probably be categorised under motivational talks or self-help strategies. It surv...
554
The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void
WTF moment: Why my native OS refuses to return a "True" value.
555
Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the co…
556
GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work
The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google’s CEO demanding to know why Gmail was blocking messages from Republican senders while allegedly failing to block similar missives supporting Democrats. The letter followed media reports accusing Gmail of disproportionately flagging…
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No Instagram, no privacy
This means that I am oblivious to all of my friends’ fun broadcasted on Instagram. I don’t feel pressured either to update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online, on where I am, what I am doing or who I am hanging out with.
559
The Wrongs of Thomas More
A lengthy digression into the life of a saint
560
The dark side of account bans
I recently lost my Facebook account for two months, and was significantly cut off from certain aspects of society during that time. This is the dark side of account bans.
561
The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#Democrat, #VoteBlue, #Bernie, #JohnOliver, and 24 other hashtags Instagram censored on the day of Trump's inauguration.
562
Basketball has evolved into a game of calculated decision-making
Basketball has evolved into a game of calculated decision-making. From a game of points, assists, and rebounds, it has progressed into using thousands of data points to optimize every element of the game.
563
Instagram Addiction
i was addicted to instagram for about a month. it upended my life enough that i realized that i was living with something new-an undesirable habit. and once i realized this, it seemed like it would be wise to try to address it or at least think about it. easier said than done.
564
Failure Mechanisms in Democratic Regimes – An Army's Role
The United States was born of a desire to leave behind monarchial government and instead live under a republic. Although the structure of the United States was explicitly crafted to have both …
565
The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken
Something fundamental has shifted in how power works, and most of our institutions haven't noticed. We're living through what might be called "leverage arbitrage divergence"—a growing gap between...
566
"Wait, not like that": Free and open access in the age of generative AI
The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free
567
“The Mind in the Wheel” lays out a new foundation for the science of mind
OR: the ideas your mother warned you about
568
When random people give money to random other people (2017)
A post on Decision Science about a problem of Uri Wilensky’s has been making the rounds: Imagine a room full of 100 people with 100 dollars each. With every tick of the clock, every person wi…
569
Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)
This footage has gone viral online with the claim that it shows an 3 year old chimney sweep on the job: Millions of people saw the footage, shared it online an were upset by it, as they should be&#…
570
An election forecast that’s 50-50 is not “giving up”
tl;dr. In 2024, pre-election polls were off by about 2 percentage points. Election forecasters were aware of this and incorporated this into their uncertainties. But if you were not following the forecasts carefully, you might’ve not realized this. You might have mistakenly thought that, when predictions happened to…