601
Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
When the world's richest man can simply 'correct' an AI to reflect his own values, what does that tell us about the entire alignment discourse?
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 666 posts.
602
The Future of Fact-Checking Is Lies, I Guess
Last weekend I was trying to pull together sources for an essay and kept finding “fact check” pages from factually.co . For instance, a Kagi search for “pepper ball Chicago pastor” returned this Factually article as the second result:
603
Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
The Matrix.org network has great potential, but after years of dealing with glitches, slow performance, poor UX, and one too many failures, I’m done with it.
604
My 2026 Open Social Web Predictions
Predictions for 2026 include growth forecasts for various social media platforms, advancements in federated technologies, and anticipated shifts in how …
605
Behind Silicon Valley and the GOP’s campaign to ban state AI laws
Inside the effort to de-democratize AI
606
AI and the Future of American Politics
Two years ago, Americans anxious about the forthcoming 2024 presidential election were considering the malevolent force of an election influencer: artificial intelligence. Over the past several years, we have seen plenty of warning signs from elections worldwide demonstrating how AI can be used to propagate…
607
The Useful Personal Computer
To market their new products to people who had not already spent years pining for a computer of their own, the creators of the second wave of microcomputers had to face head on the question of what…
608
The Collective Ambition Behind Odysseus, a Game-Changing Sci-Fi Larp
A conversation with lead producer Laura Kröger on the making of Odysseus and what it would take to become a permanent institution.
609
The F-35 as a Subscription Service
by Benjamin Cook (into by Tom Cooper)
610
Signal knows who you're talking to (2023)
Recently I got a friend to finally join me on Signal. He asked something about whether or not Signal is truly secure and private, like if it was safe from US government surveillance. I told him: “Well, it’s end-to-end encrypted, so they don’t know what we’re talking about, but they definitely know that we’re talking…
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612
The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious
The great indentation war is over and it seems like we have a clear winner.
613
The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
The first public passenger locomotive, Locomotion No. 1, began service in September 1825. The first mass-casualty railway disaster happened seventeen years…
614
615
How OpenElections uses LLMs
In the 12-plus years that we’ve been turning official precinct election results into data at OpenElections , the single biggest problem has been converting pictures of results into CSV files. Many of the precinct results files we get are image PDFs, and for those there are essentially two options: data entry or…
616
Chat Control 2.0 through the back door
Just before a decisive meeting in Brussels, digital rights expert and former Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sounding the alarm. Using a "deceptive sleight of hand," a mandatory and expanded Chat Control is being pushed through the back door, in a form even more intrusive tha
617
Dinner at a North Korean Restaurant in Shanghai (2016)
Shrouded in secrecy and isolated from the world, North Korea exudes an air of mystery. Hardly anything is known about the country except media stories about their dear leader, Kim Jong Un – h…
618
What Happened to Piracy? Copyright Enforcement Fades as AI Giants Rise
"Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught." -Balzac
619
If you'd built a "tool" that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?
A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1]. The…
620
AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society
I’ve been thinking about why AI feels like such a destabilizing force for society, and it isn’t just the threat of even greater…
621
The Road Not Taken Is Guaranteed Minimum Income
The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.
622
Umberto Eco: Ur-Fascism
Celebrated Italian author and scholar Umberto Eco (1932-2016) published an article in 1995 entitled Ur-Fascism . Eco grew up during the time of Mussolini. In the article, he jumps from memories of…
623
ATProto and the ownership of identity
The new age of social-enabled apps
624
Apple's Best Option: Decentralize iCloud
What can Apple do in the face of a UK order to weaken encryption worldwide? Decentralize iCloud, to start.
625
The Poison Pill to End the MMR Is Tylenol
If you think Tylenol is bad for babies, wait until you hear about rubella virus
626
In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
The comfort we get when offloading our cognitive load to LLMs is bad for us. Cognitive load should exist, and if we reduce it too much – if we stop thinking – we can actually unlearn how to think. Kids who always choose the easy route and copy their homework from other students eventually find […]
627
AI Mafia Network – An interactive visualization
An interactive visualization — based on the Acquired Google Podcast Credits to Ben and David (who also appreciated this graph in the Acquired internal Slack!).
628
AI employees don't pay taxes
Principal software engineer with deep experience in full-stack TypeScript, custom web browsers and real-time, media-focused systems.
629
All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune
Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?
630
I speak at Harvard as it faces its biggest crisis since 1636
Every week, I tell myself I won’t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise. No one on earth—certainly no one who reads t…