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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 715 posts.
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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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 .
Or how I decided to scream into the void about how awful the job market is. I'm still in a very sour mood after the latest rounds of interviews but ultimatel...
2.8k words, 13 minutes reading time
My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I've watched every episode of both the British and American versions. I've watched the show…
A confusing letter from HSBC informed me that I've not been receiving their emails, and I have to change the email address they use to contact me. Except I've been receiving all of their emails just fine! The problem, it turns out, is that surveillance capitalism is now so-widespread that the bank cannot conceive that…
Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it. To expand: Customer delig…
How mindless consumption is making our FYPs worse.
There's a simple three-part test for whether your city has enough nature. Most fall short.
rant and building of the slop YOLO project to detect other slop YOLO projects
A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
At some point, “moving fast” stopped being a practical concern and became a moral position. You see it damn near everywhere now. How fast can we ship this...
Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life. It’s annoying, but thankfully I’ve avoided some of the more catastrophic outcomes when criminals begin impe…
When OpenAI released the first version of Sora, I was excited. For years, I'd had this short story sitting on my hard drive, something I'd written long ago and always dreamed of bringing to life as a
Last week, the government announced that Canada has signed the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, with Ministers Anita Anand, Gary Anandasangaree and Sean Fraser touting the treaty’s child protection provisions and human rights safeguards, which were described as “among the strongest found in an…
What China’s jet engine program tells us about the limits of industrial policy
The Internet is almost anonymous and privacy-preserving by design. I mean, unless some administrator actively tries to track you, there is no built-in...
In 51,129 comments from six knife subreddits, the 5% most brand-heavy accounts wrote 11.3% of the brand mentions in buying threads, against 7.9% expected by chance. For one brand it is 31% against 8%. The full Reddit histories of those accounts are 4.5 years old and spread over 66 subreddits, the same as a comparison…
consumer-grade hardware can run an LLM that hacks the planet. we can stop it, but we don't have much time.
Today, the Web and Internet are owned and controlled by large for-profit corporations and a few governments 1 . Corporate ownership combined with government policies has left us as tenant and product. It has given us a surveillance economy and enshittification 2 .
A brief explanation of my pessimism about efforts to radically improve education.
Saving regret has less to do with procrastination than we thought, and more to do with whether your country absorbs economic shocks or lets them hit your savings
I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, but I don't think I am alone with it.
The release of Kimi K3 has opened a fresh round of angst and confused discourse. There's a loud cohort of journalists, business leaders, and politicians arguing that open source AI is a dangerous threat. OpenAI's Dean Ball:
The original 1881 serial ended in chapter fifteen with the puppet hanging dead from an oak tree. Italian children wrote in begging the author to continue. He resumed reluctantly. What followed — donkey-skin drums, dead-girl fairies, a satire of every other moralising children's book in Italy — became one of the most…
Dear Dario, You published We Must Pace the Frontier today, which committed Anthropic to embedded third-party evaluators and asked governments to require every other frontier company to match. Sam Altman agreed within hours.1 The stated goal is to slow down the pace of AI progress. I believe you’re being sincere, so…
