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I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 598 posts.
212
I was laid off in retaliation for anti-discrimination whistleblowing
In order to protect women, gender nonconforming folks, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community from suffering as my peers and I have, I feel ethically obligated to go public with my ex…
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Some new snippets from the Snowden documents
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment
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We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). Despite the impressive technical ju-jitsu of transformer models and the billions of parameters they learn, it’s still a…
216
95% of Bay Area Cities Lost Zoning Authority
In 105 jurisdictions of the Bay Area, anyone can build any residential projected at any height or density so long as 20% of the units are for low income.
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Money Laundering and AML Compliance
A brief overview of what money laundering is, what financial institutions do about it, and why.
218
What the Goddamn Hell Is Going on in the Tech Industry?
Sweet merciful Jesus, I woke up this morning and my inbox was flooded with horrific stories about how employers treat people. I knew things were fucked, but this was so much worse than I imagined, and that's not even getting into the comments on Hackernews. I am going to dig into some of those emails, but first...
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So Long, Twitter and Reddit
It's been over three years since my last blog post. I think that the website code started to feel like it had bitrotted, and so making new blog posts became onerous. But I've taken the time to redo this website using Zig , so it's quite easy to add blog posts now, and plus I added dark mode .
221
The age of the grift shift
For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings forward etc. And there are of course a […]
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Mastodon is doomed?
Mastodon won't be the next Twitter, and it's not because of Bluesky. The ideals and execution won't scale.
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Tainting the CSAM client-side scanning database
The proposal of the European Commission for a regulation on preventing and combatting the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children is currently discussed in Dutch parliament. I recently wrote about some concerns and the risk of a DDoS attack . It turns out it is also possible to taint the database of images of…
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Getty Images v. Stability AI – Complaint
Copyright Lately is a copyright blog written, edited and published by Aaron Moss. That's me. I'm a partner at Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp (MSK) in Los Angeles. I specialize in copyright law, trademark, and other intellectual property, media and entertainment litigation matters.
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The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries
Global investment vampires have positioned themselves to suck our libraries dry
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Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
How many Seattleites can walk to fulfill their daily needs?
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Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift
Digital advertising is a scam from top to bottom. In fact, it’s several scams stacked on top of each other, wearing a trenchcoat, and some of the foundations of fibs are so effective that oth…
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Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow
How the computer killed capitalism.
229
Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder?
Can it be true that Apple is sent information about every image we browse in the Finder? Analysis of Visual Look Up and Live Text and when it happens.
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Do high interest rates fix high inflation?
Published: June 2023 In prior articles and newsletters, I’ve explored the causes of consumer price inflation over time. In short, the rate of consumer price inflation in an economy comes from a combination of 1) money supply growth and 2) significant changes in productivity and/or resource abundance. -Periods of fast…
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Stop the Medicare “Advantage” Scam Before Medicare Is Dead
At the very least, let’s stop the egregiously deceptive advertising. Only Medicare should be able to call itself “Medicare.”
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My ranking of every Shakespeare play
A few years ago I set out on a personal journey to study and watch a performance of each of Shakespeare’s 37 plays. I’ve reached my goal and, though it’s not a usual topic around here, I wanted to get my thoughts down while fresh. I absolutely loved some of these plays and performances, and so I’d like to highlight…
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Emissions are no longer following the worst case scenario
So where might we be headed instead?
234
How we turned the tables to catch my sister’s Bumble stalker
My sister’s stalker, who had used Instagram and Bumble to work out where she lived and start stalking her in real life, was recently…
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Electric bike, stupid love of my life
Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership
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ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving
If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that's an okay thing.
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Canadian internet bill S-210 is a step closer to becoming law
After years of battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, few Canadians will have the appetite for yet another troubling Internet bill. But given a bill that envisions government-backed censorship, mandates age verification to use search engines or social media sites, and creates a framework for court-ordered website blocking…
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The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
Yesterday, I ran my script to check how many comments on the monthly Hacker News Who's hiring post mention a remote option. Remote jobs reached a level of 75 % - 80 % and stayed there (it doesn't look like that's going to change soon), but what's striking is the drop in the …
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Beware of AI pseudoscience and snake oil
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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Passkeys: A Loss of User Control?
This blog post doesn't have the answers. I'm trying to learn about passkeys, but I don't claim to be an expert. I do have a lot of questions, especially for Apple, because I'm an Apple user and developer. According to Betteridge's law of headlines , "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the…