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Asbestosis
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 666 posts.
242
I'm quitting the Washington Post
Democracy can't function without a free press
243
What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding
There has been rather a lot of doomsaying (and perhaps astroturfing) lately about LLMs as the end of computer programming. Much of the discussion has been lacking nuance, so I’d like to add mine. I see claims from one side that “I used $LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDER to make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be…
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Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
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245
Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)
The Noam Chomsky Website.
246
Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API
Previously I have covered a relatively obscure now-removed placeholder string in Android that doubles as an easter egg, the fictitious carrier by the name of El Telco Loco. But this time it is about methods and other parts of the publicly facing Android API that may generally be more humourous than they are useful…
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Resurrect the Old Web
Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones. Their parents thought they w...
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AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
Historians are finally having their AI debate
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NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
How NIST Turned Open Science into a Security Scare
251
Discworld Rules
And LOTR is brain-rot for technologists
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Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting
why the death of nuance should scare you -your fav gen z philosopher xx
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The Gentle Singularity
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots...
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The worst possible antitrust outcome
Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden's DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum , proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they'd used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of…
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AI is Dunning-Kruger as a service
On January 6th, 1995 two bank robbers in Pittsburgh confused law enforcement by not making any attempts to conceal their faces but instead brazenly looking at security cameras as if they were invisible. The reason is that they actually thought they were.
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Automatically tagging politician when they use their phone on the livestreams
How does it work? Every meeting of the flemish government in Belgium is live streamed on a youtube channel. When a livestream starts the software is searching for phones and tries to identify a distracted politician. This is done with the help of AI and face recognition. The video of the distracted politician are then…
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Two narratives about AI
I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point ... Read more
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The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment
Your grandpa probably really did walk 5 miles to school in a foot of snow. A look at the changing numbers for how American students get to school.
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PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory
An exposé no one will read, about the widespread falsification of user posts in PhysicsForums, a scientific community founded in 2001. This is a microcosm of the death of the human-written Internet.
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Legal win
Just got word that the court dismissed several of WP Engine and Silver Lake’s most serious claims — antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out! These were by far the most signif…
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Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff
Cliff-edged fitness functions and the evolution of schizophrenia
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Don't Become the Machine
I was recently recommended a YouTube video with the following title: Only a slave quantifies its existence through productivity '''''',,,,,,,,,,,'''''....
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You will own nothing and be (un)happy
Hi! I'm a raccoon, and this is my trash can :] It's full of my thoughts about the mess of being human. No human is perfect, including me, and that's why we are so fascinating.
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Gmail AI gets more intrusive
Gmail doesn't just offer to write your emails for you, they actually do it, and it's up to you to delete the text it wrote. Hard to make a screen shot to demo without revealing personal i…
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The Dollar Is Dead
When belief dies, fiat dies with it.
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The coming knowledge-work supply-chain crisis
"Humans. Here they are. Bottleneck, bottleneck. Hi, good to see you. And some of you are terrified. You're going to be even bigger bottlenecks." - Tyler Cowen
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Death by a Thousand Slops
I have previously blogged about the relatively new trend of AI slop in vulnerability reports submitted to curl and how it hurts and exhausts us. This trend does not seem to slow down. On the contrary, it seems that we have recently not only received more AI slop but also more human slop. The latter … Continue reading…
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“An independent journalist” who won't remain nameless
Too many legacy outlets still refuse to credit indie journos. Enough is enough.