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How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 715 posts.
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Declining America
Recently I got an invitation from an organization I respect, to a gathering of senior people, unconference format. Yes, it’s mostly about AI. No, it doesn’t reek of boosterism. My guess is that the discussions would be relatively intelligent and unbeliever contributions would be welcome. I declined, because it’s in…
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The AI Aesthetic
Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of…
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Shunning AI is the human choice
LinkedIn may be awash with boosters, but shunning AI is the human choice.
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Everybody's Lost Their Minds
The AI brain worms have been spreading and I don't have a solution, I just want to get off this ride.
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Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog
Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal b…
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Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers? Update: seemingly not Update: Oh yeah!
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Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
Here is a photo of my family. I love them more than anything. Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the...
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Why is Hacker News like that?
Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers” 1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with ideas into its…
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EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs
A technical look at the EU age verification reference app — the gap between marketed and shipped cryptography, relay attacks the protocol can't stop, and why the 'privacy-preserving' system is a trojan horse for digital ID infrastructure.
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This blog is written in en-GB
Someone left a comment on my blog recently asking if I'd mind making my language more inclusive. They didn't get some of the cultural references I'd used and suggested it would be easier if I used tropes which were more globally known. Here's the thing. No. All my blog posts start with a simple declaration: Copied…
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I'm not worried about AI job loss
We're not in a February 2020 moment, and ordinary people will be fine
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Thinking will become a hobby
These lines are very difficult for me to write because I feel like digging my own grave. AI systems are improving by leaps and bounds. From the early 2022 fumbling release of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly count the number of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math papers where an…
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LLMs can be exhausting
Some days I get in bed after a tortuous 4-5 hour session working with Claude or Codex wondering what the heck happened. It's easy to blame the model - there'...
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Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
Software is degrading all around us, for obvious reasons. I've written about this before. All else equal, if you increase your code production by 10x but you don't reduce your error rate by a factor of 10, then your production app is buggier than it used to be. I've seen threads where people also have...
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Resisting Cognitive Surrender
Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas. Home . Site Map . Subscribe . More at expLog . — Kunal
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This year’s insane timeline of hacks
An archive of this year’s insane timeline of hacks few people are talking about
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False claims in a widely-cited paper
A couple months ago we had a post, This paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it. It’s fatally flawed, and the scholarly community refuses to do anything about it. which was about…
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The last time my family was replaced by technology
My great-great-grandfather thought he’d be replaced by technology too. He was a farrier in Mandres-en-Barrois, the small village in rural France where I grew up.
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How to disable or avoid intrusive AI
One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides "what is taking up all my cloud storage?") is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don't want it. This is a guide for people who would like less intrusive AI in their tech environment. Maybe you lik
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Why American ambulance rides are so expensive
The unfortunately botched economics of emergency care
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Privilege is bad grammar
When I got my first real job, I used to get so nervous about writing emails to my boss. I would run spellcheck, triple-check the grammar, read over it again ...
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Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict
Sometimes the law is not the law
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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.
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We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
What we lose when we no longer have to learn how our computers work.
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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.
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No Man Is an Island
AI makes intellectual contribution superfluous.