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Nobody Cares About Security
Nobody cares about security. There. I said it. I said the thing everyone feels, some people think, but very few have the temerity to say out loud. But before you call me...
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 694 posts.
542
Why Tolkien Hated Dune
A short intro to the philosophy of ethics J.R.R. Tolkien maintained a very private, but very negative opinion of Frank Herbert’s Dune. In Tolkien’s Library, entry 964, Tolkien is quoted…
543
I'm going to keep opting out
Marketing, solicitations, advertising, political contact, direct mailers, email campaigns, cookies, ads — it's all opt out. It puts the burden on you to opt out of each communication each message, each outreach from a loyalty program. It can feel like weeding a garden, but that garden is your attention. The weeds keep…
544
Trading trust
The Brookings Institution did a fascinating survey series over the last five years. I have two takeways from this: The first is that focused and persistent propaganda is able to shift public opinio…
545
Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a tiny news archive
The best websites are home-cooked meals. Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive was birthed after I realized there was no obvious way to fetch the previous articles of the “Easy Finnish” daily news broadcast. This annoyed me as a student of the language. “Here we have a stream”, I thought, “of high-quality, human-written…
546
The scarcity of the long term
The chief hurdle in constructing a Death Star is not the energy, materials, or even knowledge needed. It’s the long time needed. A society can change their mind mid-way over centuries, and simply move on. The galaxy is likely strewn … Continue reading →
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Dean of Engineering at University of Nevada wrote a paper that’s bad
“As we look to sleep and neuroscience for answers we can study flies specifically the Drosophila melanogaster we highlight in our research.”
548
Deluge of Fake Mac App Store Reviews
Yesterday I discovered a deluge of recent fake customer reviews for a number of top paid apps in the United States Mac App Store. (Each country has its own version of the App Store with separate reviews.) I've now checked the reviews for all of the current top 40 paid apps in the Mac App Store, and 8 of those apps…
549
Llama 3 feels significantly less censored than its predecessor
Compared to Llama 2, Llama 3 feels much less censored. Meta has substantially lowered false refusal rates. Llama 3 will refuse less than 1/3 of the prompts previously refused by Llama 2.
550
Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"
There's a strain of anti-anti-monopolist that insists that they're not pro -monopoly – they're just realists who understand that global gigacorporations are too big to fail, too big to jail, and that governments can't hope to rein them in. Trying to regulate a tech giant, they say, is like trying to regulate the…
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Study Finds Microplastics in Nearly 90% of Proteins Sampled
Researchers at Ocean Conservancy and University of Toronto estimate that American adults could be consuming up to 3.8 million microplastics per year from protein alone
553
Against the Dark Forest
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.
554
Airline Takes Revenge After Bad Review, Posts Passenger's Passport Online
YouTuber Josh Cahill, who has nearly 700,000 subscribers, reviews flights and courts drama, it seems. Just a couple of months ago he was banned by Qatar Airways over a negative review. Now he’s taken on East Timor’s Aero Dili.
555
"Rabbit Test" Unwins the Hugo
I cannot convey the supreme depths to which I’d rather be doing anything else with my Saturday afternoon other than writing this blog post, but here we are. If you have been blessedly insulat…
556
Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)
This week I finished the most recent book in my self-guided study of 20th century technology, namely The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner. As the title implies, it’s a chronicle of research and development wing of AT&T, a history that lasts...
557
The Dying Computer Museum
One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather …
558
Anime is eating the world
New tech & business models are accelerating anime to even greater heights.
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The history of Alt+number sequences
Code pages and custom keyboard handling.
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Navigating Starlink's FCC Paper Trail
Guest Post: What I learned when I figured out how to navigate FCC filings.
563
Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
564
Age verification is incompatible with the internet
The recent move among U.S. states to add digital “age verification” to websites which serve adult content is a troubling one. Digital age verification systems are rife with privacy concerns, many requiring you to upload your government ID to third-party vendors or even directly to the website in question. Privacy…
565
Anxious Generation – How Safetyism and Social Media Are Damaging the Kids
A review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, exploring how social media and overprotective parenting affect children’s mental health.
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Pop culture has become an oligopoly (2022)
A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?
568
My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)
You should neither trust outward appearances, nor let them intimidate you. There is always a discord between the appearance that a person or organization projects, and their actual nature. For this reason, always be careful about the people and organizations in whom you place your trust.
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On being brought up by libertarian economists
The central fact about child rearing by my parents was the equal intellectual status of everyone in the family.