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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
For my piece on Catholic miracle apologetics , I read (correction: skimmed) a 25,000-word post by rationalist blogger Scott Alexander. My piece, which cited (but does not focus on) his, ended up being a cool 2,700 words. I don't think it would benefit from being longer, and it was the result of me cutting around 70%…
Personal blog of Stephen Diehl - Software engineer writing about technology, programming, and the future
If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.
I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of
How to rig an index to appease a billionaire
Insofar as a political organization like Ofcom is even capable of admitting defeat, it did so in the 4chan enforcement today. In testimony before the Commons Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Comm…
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.
I wrote recently about what Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are doing to your email: how four providers stopped being transport layers and turned into active intermediaries between brands and their customers, parsing, ranking, summarising, and increasingly answering on the recipient's behalf.
My head has been spinning after getting a spreadsheet roughly a week ago. Before we dive into my dirty laundry, let’s state the obvious: millions of people have a vague sense that AI is changing things. And LLMs sure are convenient for getting answers quickly. My team and I use Claude and other tools daily. […]
If you don’t know what OpenCode is, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The boot is made of TypeScript and the face is everything we have learned about security and systems software since the invention of the electronic computer in the 1940s. The creators describe it as an AI coding agent. As far as I can…
Bots have taken over
A groundbreaking study led by Stanford Law School Professor Julian Nyarko reveals that law professors overwhelmingly prefer AI-generated answers to st
Globally, electricity generation per person has grown by more than 50% this century.
coveillance.org
Scott’s foreword: Cynthia Dwork is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, and a pioneer in the fields of differential privacy and algorithmic fairness. On my recent travels to…
We regret that this event has been cancelled due to the red extreme heat warning issued by the UK Met Office.
Funny how quiet everyone got.
Did you realize the film was actually manipulating you?
What if this is as good as software is ever going to be? What if AI stops getting better and what if people stop caring?
By Jay Lund . . . Artificial intelligence (AI) will affect many economic and natural resource sectors as these new technologies develop and mature. We are in the early years of this process. Like most new things, AI has become an object of small and great hopes and fears – from hopes for saving and
The recent release of a tranche of files by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) under the “Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R.4405)” has once again prompted many people to closely examine redacted and sanitized PDF documents. Our previous articles on the Manafort papers and the Mueller report , as well as a study by…
Without permission, a marketing agency republished the entirety of John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows book, replacing its art with AI slop and adding new AI words. Their unauthorized site now ranks higher than the real one everywhere.
Is your vibe-coded app a Crapject or a Gift?
There's a moment in the movie Good Will Hunting which perfectly summarizes all the problems with AI slop and online noise and infinite advice content. Sean (played by Robin Williams) is sitting next to Will (Matt Damon) on a bench in Boston Public Garden. I live here, so I know it well. The area
Based on its own charter, OpenAI should surrender the race
After several intense and incredible years building Bluesky from the ground up, I've decided to step back as CEO and transition to a new role as Bluesky's Chief Innovation Officer.
Blog post by Marciano Planque: EOL
Do we have any idea how many people there are in the world?
The frozen pizza aisle has become the national security risk du jour
On technological grief
