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An AI agent published a hit piece on me
Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 715 posts.
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.name Termination
Nearly twenty-five years ago I registered neil.fraser.name to provide a stable presence on the Internet. It has been the home of this website, my email address, and a server for APIs. It predates YouTube, Facebook, and smart phones. Minutes after my daughter was born, I also registered beverly.fraser.name .
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The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen
Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked.
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When did Google get so weird?
I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks. Understanding this Google se...
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Local AI needs to be the norm
Local AI models should be the default.
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Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you
Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you.
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Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
Also here's a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk because I need some chill
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EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
Today, the European Parliament allowed the suspicionless mass scanning of private communications ("Chat Control 1.0") to pass, a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor,
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Facebook is cooked
Through the mirror into the lightly-clothed AI gooniverse
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Everything I own, owned
Turning Claude loose on the firmware of five USB and WiFi peripherals, and finding a command shell in a microphone, a defeatable webcam activity LED, and unauthenticated memory writes over the network.
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The Amazon tax
It’s not technically a tax. Taxes produce valuable public benefits, like medical research and parks. This is simply legal theft. Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ad…
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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
src= alt="Always has been astronaut meme" / "Wait, the singularity is just humans freaking out?" "Always has been." Everyone in San Francisco is talking about t
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The dead economy theory
We can laugh at them but we have to take this seriously
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I miss thinking hard
AI has changed the experience of being an engineer, starving my Thinker side while satisfying the Builder ...
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The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.
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I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
Many ads in Apple News served by Taboola are clearly scams.
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The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
Americans, be warned: Age verification is identity verification.
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Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
A first-person account of a 1993 NVIDIA stock option grant, a decades-later discovery of a vesting discrepancy, and how the statute of limitations settled it.
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A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
Why is the military and a cheese fortune teller contacting me about SondeHub.org
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Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
Lots of US states, European countries, and Australia have introduced "age verification" regulations. They present it as the classic "save the children" talking ...
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“This is not the computer for you”
There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.
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Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain
The decades-long battle over lawful access entered a new phase yesterday with the introduction of Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act. This bill follows the attempt last spring to bury lawful access provisions in Bill C-2, a border measures bill that was the new government’s first piece of substantive legislation. The…
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I'm OK being left behind, thanks
Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre…
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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
On AI agents, grunt work, and the part of science that isn't replaceable.
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Do dentists know what they're doing?
After all, they’re just practicing
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I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
Identity verification and age verification is an increasinly common policy conversation at the moment, in numerous countries.
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25 years of mass surveillance is enough
This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the…