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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Security Risks of TSA PreCheck
Former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley wrote an op-ed pointing out the security vulnerabilities in the TSA’s PreCheck program: The first vulnerability in the system is its enrollment process, which seeks to verify an applicant’s identity. We know verification is a challenge: A 2011 Government Accountability Office report…
Unix's technical history is mostly old now
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Should we drain the Everglades?
no pls dont
Notes on Effective Altruism
Long and rough notes on Effective Altruism (EA). Written to help me get to the bottom of several questions: what do I like and think is important about EA? Why do I find the mindset so foreign? Why am I not an EA? And to start me thinking about: what do alternatives to EA look like? The notes are not aimed at…
The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)
Why is it getting so much worse?
IPad: The Microwave Oven of Computing
tech, simplified.
Thank you Google for breaking my YouTube addiction
Thank you Google for breaking my YouTube addiction | exotext
Every Entrepreneur Should Try Magic Mushrooms
Stumble upon great links shared by curious readers. Discover worthwhile stories, explore unexpected corners of the web, and find something new. Join free.
Headlines compared: Polish newspapers from 1939 and news websites from 2022
These two quotes, repeated on various occasions, celebrations and remembrance days are supposed to remind us to learn from the past and avoid the mistakes our ancestors made.
The Dogma of Otherness (1986)
The Dogma of Otherness insists that all voices deserve a hearing, that all points of view have something of value to offer.
Energy vs. Sovereign Bond Markets
October 9, 2022 Latest Articles: A Look at the Lightning Network Energy: The Area Under the Curve This newsletter issue focuses on recent problems with developed country sovereign bond markets and how energy supply constraints pose an ongoing problem for them. The Sovereign Bond Bubble During much of 2019 and 2020…
How to read Plato (1995)
This page is part of the "e-mail archives" section of a site, Plato and his dialogues , dedicated to developing a new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The "e-mail archives" section includes HTML edited versions of posts that I submitted on various e-mail discussion lists about Plato and ancient philosophy. Note: I…
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?
Repairability
My Macbook Pro I have a Macbook pro retina 15 inch, that I bought in 2016. A few days back, the battery started bulking up and the laptop ha...
Covid and Cascading Collapses
I’ve been looking at this chart a lot over the past few weeks.
EU Parliament commitee approves cash cap and ban on anonymous crypto payments
The majority of the EU Parliament's lead committees today approved far-reaching new anti-money laundering laws: Anonymous cash payments over €3,000 will be banned in commercial transactions. Cash payments over €10,000 will even be completely banned in business transactions. And anonymous payments in
AIs are now re-writing history
Dr Robert Smith is a technologist, complexity scientist, entrepreneur, writer and sought-after public speaker. He is an artificial intelligence (A.I.) expert and has worked with clients, companies and institutions across the private and public sectors. Having grown up in Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights…
They want your ethics for $105
If you have a blog, you've probably gotten those emails that want to "collaborate" on a guest post—which often means "let us post sketchy links for SEO purposes." Recently, I got one which was a little different flavor than the usual spam, so I bit and replies. The end result was at the same time fascinating…
Varieties of Argumentative Experience
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
EU court: Reverse engineering OK, API not protected by (c) and more
This case (SAS v WPL) has a lot in common with the Oracle v Google case in the US.
Where is all of the Fediverse?
Spurred on by the problems at Twitter, a lot of my social media timeline has “moved out” of Twitter/“X” on to what people mostly describe as mastodon or the “fediverse”. The fediverse being the collection of decentralised “instances” (aka servers) sometimes using different software but speaking a common protocol…
What Manning Revealed
A blog about media, politics, music, film, culture, by Greg Mitchell.
Doctorow & Stross's "The Rapture of the Nerds" creative commons edition released
We promised it, and here it is (slightly delayed by a signing tour and epic-level jet lag): "The Rapture of the Nerds" by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross is available as a Creative Commons licensed download right here: The Rapture of the Nerds .
Behind the Scenes: The pots, pans, and people that make millions of meals
Our recipe for feeding includes giant paella pans, combi ovens, and a lot of love!