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Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict
Sometimes the law is not the law
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close
I’ve been buying a copy of Maximum PC magazine at the airport newsstand on every long-distance trip I’ve taken over the past two decades. I’m primarily a Mac user but Maximum PC, which started life as boot, bought at these … Continue reading →
1804
The end of the level playing field
I am old enough to remember the gogo days of cable TV when entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a new cable channel would go, hat in hand and cap table in tow, to the big cable companies and beg to get distribution on their networks. When the Internet came along in the early 90s, we […]
1805
Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
Here is a short and curious Twitter thread from app developers and security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry: Apple’s analytics data include an ID called “dsId”. We were able to verify that “dsId” is the “Directory Services Identifier”, an ID that uniquely identifies an iCloud account. Meaning, Apple’s…
1806
Google's Monopoly-Based Foreign Policy
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
1807
Aaron Swartz, Vindicated
Almost without exception, people who invest in businesses do so without personally inspecting the business, overlooking its processes, seeing its bank statements, meeting its managers and going on the road with its sales-force.
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Something is wrong with children's videos on the internet
I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want…
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Culture shock
Looking at the United States as an Indian, two months in.
1813
Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
[Translations: Japanese] New media technologies often cause an allergic reaction when they first appear. We may find them painful before we find them indispensable. I watched the movie The Hobbit. Twice. First I saw it in its “standard” mode. A … Continue reading →
1814
Famous HNers and their sites
Update: Here’s the link to the HN discussion about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32291993
1815
Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose
Reasoning scores climb while per-token compute drops. Labs are stripping world knowledge out of models, and I think that's the right trade.
1816
Mark Cuban: If you want to see more jobs created -- change patent laws
Sometimes it’s not the obvious things that create the biggest problems. In this case one of the hidden job killers in our economy today is the explosion of patent litigation.
1817
The retaliation: Pranking my roommate with targeted Facebook ads (2014)
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.
1818
Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
I read this recently and it got me thinking:
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The Tim Cook memo: line by line
Apple just won in their case against Samsung and Tim Cook has posted a memo to Apple employees. I’m not one of those but I feel pretty upset about the stupidity of this lawsuit, the verdict and patents in general. Here is the text of the memo with my comments: Today was an important day for Apple and for innovators…
1821
LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
The primary reasons LinkedIn is the mustached, trench coat and wire frame glasses wearing mouth breather of the internet are the “People You May Know” and “People Also Viewed” features.
1822
It looks like you’re trying to take over the world
Fictional short story about Clippy & AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning research literature.
1823
The bait-and-switch hidden in today’s cookie announcement
T oday is going to be the day that you read a lot about the UK’s intention to kill cookie pop-ups as part of its post-Brexit Data Reform Bill. By now you should have somehow realised that there’s a bit more to it than that, and that your work is not set to get any easier.
1824
Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is emailing me? “Signing off”? Is he leaving Wikipedia? Is he dying?! No, just asking for more…
1825
The art of asking nicely
There are upsides to working with a neural net that trained on a huge collection of internet images and text. One is that, instead of ominous grey geometric blobs [https://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-at-drawing-but-will-try-anyways] when it doesn't understand your
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The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto
A group of cryptocurrency researchers and critics annotate the irresponsible cryptocurrency puff piece that was originally published in the New York Times.
1829
We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
What we lose when we no longer have to learn how our computers work.
1830
You commit three felonies a day
In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the governmen