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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
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Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
Our research shows that even the latest "reasoning" models are vulnerable
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Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
Americans 60 and older spend about seven waking hours a day alone. This rises to over 10 hours a day among those living on their own.
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Basic Security Precautions for Non-Profits and Journalists
Basic security precautions for non-profits and journalists in the United States, early 2019.
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Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
Movable type was not invented by Gutenberg but in China and later advanced in Korea, so why didn't Asia have a printing revolution?
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America's Growth Ponzi Scheme
The American pattern of development creates the illusion of wealth. Today we are in the process of seeing that illusion destroyed…and with it the prosperity we have come to take for granted.
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It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs
The majority of wealth is now concentrated at the top of the social ladder. This is particularly true in the US, and the gap is widening every year. This, I believe, is because of efficiency, not China. Today the best ideas can efficiently and quickly propagate worldwide, and everyone can…
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Let's talk about LLMs
Everybody seems to agree we’re in the middle of _something_, though what, exactly, seems to be up for debate. It …
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COBOL underpins the entire financial system
COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial life of the world.
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Teenager Who Reads News Online? According to the DoJ, You May Be a Criminal
During his first term, President Barack Obama declared October 2009 to be “National Information Literacy Awareness Month,” emphasizing that, for students, learning to navigate the online world is as important a skill as reading, writing and arithmetic. It was a move that echoed his predecessor's...
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Did Anthropic ask for this?
This past Friday, the US Government issued an export control directive that prohibits Anthropic from giving foreign nationals access to Claude Fable or Claude Mythos, their latest models.
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Cameron ‘Porn’ Advisor’s website ‘hacked’ – Threatens/Libels Blogger
I’m perhaps one of the last people you’d expect to see stepping up to defend Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) but you’d be wrong because there are principles that come into play wh…
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The Internet of Things – A Disaster
It's bullshit, no question, let's get past that part. How did Nest screw up this finished product?
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Attention is a luxury good
Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to. Luxury isn’t about quality, suitability …
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What is going to happen in 2015
Yesterday I wrote a post summing up what happened in 2014. In it I promised a post on what is going to happen. What I did not specify was how far forward I am going to look. It’s a lot easier to predict the future without a timeline on it. I think we all know, […]
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Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval
We need to go beyond the review-and-approval paradigm
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The Increasing Problem with the Misinformed
Baekdal is your premium site for media reports and trend analysis. Subscribe from €7.55/month
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Let Readers Read
Ask publishers to restore access to the 500,000 books they've caused to be removed from the Internet Archive’s lending library. Sign the Open Letter I’m Chris Freeland, a librarian at the Internet Archive. The lawsuit against our library—Hachette v. Internet Archive—is fast approaching the oral argument stage of its…