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What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes
Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
1832
A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime
The FCC is proposing to require KYC for anyone who uses a phone. We can act now to stop further erosion of our privacy.
1833
No Man Is an Island
AI makes intellectual contribution superfluous.
1834
The Web in 2050
If you’re reading this page it means that you are accessing a ‘darknet’ web page. Darknets used to refer to places where illicit drugs and pornography were traded, these days it refers to lonely servers without any inbound links languishing away in dusty server rooms that people have all but forgotten about. Refusing…
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Email addresses are not good 'permanent' identifiers for accounts
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…
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Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses
Stella is the companion app for Meta's smart glasses. Inspecting version 273.0.0.21 of the Android build (com.facebook.stella), I found the entire computational and storage stack for on-device facial recognition: three face models, a local database schema, a cosine-similarity vector index dimensioned to
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American Airlines confirms UFO contact over New Mexico on Sunday
Deep Black Horizon posted an air traffic control broadcast from American Airlines flight AA2292 on Sunday. The aircraft was flying from Cincinnati to Phoenix and at 1:19 p.m. Central time, while over the northeast corner of New Mexico at around 37,000 feet, radioed Albuquerque Center about "a long cylindrical object…
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A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
For years, one of my businesses has been a regular user of Wise (formerly TransferWise). Wise is a financial service that lets you send and receive money across currencies, often at a better rate and lower fee than traditional banks. Sounds great, right?
1840
TikTok and the Sorting Hat
NEXT POST: Part II of my thoughts on TikTok, on how the app design is informed by its algorithm and vice versa in a virtuous circle.
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Splitting the Web
Splitting the Web par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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You are how you act
You are the sum of your behaviors not your intentions
1843
London's Free Roof Terraces
» email me » follow me on twitter » follow the blog on twitter » follow the blog on Bluesky » follow the blog on RSS
1844
What happens when you try to publish a failure to replicate in 2015/2016
Anyone who has talked to me in the last year would have heard me complain about my 8-times-failure-to-replicate which nobody wants to publis...
1845
Abolish the Department of Homeland Security
I have a love/hate relationship with the Cato Institute. Most of their analysis I strongly disagree with, but some of it I equally strongly agree with. Last September 11—the tenth anniversary of 9/11—Cato’s David Rittgers published “Abolish the Department of Homeland Security“: DHS has too many subdivisions in too…
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Non-Consensual Personalization
Illustration from unDraw I want to personalize things I use. I want to change the settings. I want to change the colors, the desi...
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Why Twitter Is Failing to Grow
No, it's not rampant abuse, weak leadership, or a product that intimidates new users. The roots of Twitter's stagnation go back to 2010.
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The OG Social Network: Other People’s Websites
“Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That’s Google’s stated mission. But what if the world's information becomes…
1851
A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials
Exploring the Applecore style
1852
IPinside: Korea’s Mandatory Spyware
Banking websites in South Korea can only be used with IPinside installed. This application collects lots of data about the user, and it makes that data accessible to each and every website. The protection is inadequate.
1853
Thoreau 2.0
This is a written version of a talk I gave on September 21, 2013 , at the XOXO conference in Portland.
1854
Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower
Sexism in tech is out of hand, and talking about it is risky business.
1855
Staying with the US Digital Service
A few months ago, I took a leave of absence from Google to do a stint with the US Digital Service. A lot of people know about the US Digital Service because they helped rescue the healthcare.gov we…
1856
Industrial Literacy
When you know these facts of history, you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it
1857
The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
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Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition
In this regularly updated article, which is without doubt the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions' problems on the entire Internet, we only discuss their main problems and deficiencies (which may be the reason why some people say Linux distros are not ready for the desktop) while everyone should keep in…