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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
I am writing to inform you about a critical and time-sensitive situation facing the Open Source Lab (OSL). Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations. While the Oregon State College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, recent changes in…
By Laurence Boone, Boris Cournède, OECD Economics Department; and Marissa Plouin, OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Following a period when homele…
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Democracy can't function without a free press
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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The Noam Chomsky Website.
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…
The method is based on a recyclable filtration fluid consisting of a superbase-alcohol compound. One gram of the new compound can absorb 156 milligrams of carbon dioxide.
OpenAI is fighting a court order at the demands of The New York Times and plaintiffs, which involves retention of consumer ChatGPT and API user data indefinitely. Learn how we’re working to uphold user privacy, address legal requirements, and stay true to our data protection commitments.
Report incorrectly blocked sites on UK ISP and mobile networks.
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...
An independent nonprofit research lab, whose mission is to enable universal literacy in a humane dynamic medium. This involves inventing a humane form of computing, and developing educational and community-based institutions in which a culture can grow. [more]
Cybersecurity challenges for iPhone, iPad, and Mac
Historians are finally having their AI debate
A bill purporting to target the issue of misinformation and defamation caused by generative AI has mutated into something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out.The Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act aims to...
How NIST Turned Open Science into a Security Scare
And LOTR is brain-rot for technologists
why the death of nuance should scare you -your fav gen z philosopher xx
Summary * Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) is a $250 million cloud storage and backup solution provider based in California that operates through two business segments: B2 Cloud Storage allowing “customers to store data” and “developers to build applications,” and Computer Backup that “automatically backs up data” from devices…
John L. Young, who died March 28 at age 89 in New York City, was among the first people to see the need for an online library of official secrets, a place where the public could find out things that governments and corporations didn’t want them to know. He made real the idea – revolutionary in its...
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...
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…
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.
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…
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
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.
