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Overcoming the friendship recession
My thoughts on the friendship recession and what I'm doing to maintain friendships.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
692
Just a little AI resistance, as a treat
At the recent EMFCamp, I bumped in to Professor Kate Devlin who was talking a little about the AI Resist List. I think one of the useful things we can do is loudly complain about shitty uses of AI. Here's an example. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm contacting companies which send malformed calendar invites. One…
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Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter. So when Twitter was accidentally
695
The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future of software, books, music, and movies, in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse, while the human-made variant moves into a luxury segment of its own.
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The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them
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Across the Globe, People Increasingly Say Social Media Is Harming Democracy
Most think social media leads to manipulation and division, but they also say it informs people and gives them a voice in politics.
699
Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
An emoji flipbook presentation by Alex Komoroske about how dysfunctional organizational dyanmics arise even when individuals are well-behaved
700
I'm Making Strandfall, a Solarpunk Orienteering Larp
Blending the real and digital worlds, once more.
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Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
The vinyl record is an analog medium. How can it be affected by the loudness war? So what’s the impact?
703
How to defer US taxes
Your government wants you to create taxable wealth.
704
Incentives are for losers
OR: you must look at this fish and go insane
705
Julia
An aphasic space station monitors an anomalous object, while keeping the last two humans alive.
706
Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
Understanding “extend and pretend”
707
Three Six Mafia – Data about "6/6/6 dating" (2024)
Most guys my age have "the chat". The one with your college buddies that only exists to share memes, argue, bully, and occasionally announce that you got a promotion or had a kid. I am like most guys.
708
Just say no to OpenAI and Anthropic
I recently read End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. It's an excellent book and I highly recommend that everyone read it. Tech oligarchs make up an important component of the end-times-fascist coalition. One thing that stood out
709
Last gasps of the rent seeking class?
Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on…
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The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s
The dreams of a forgotten movement from the 1930s live on
712
Hacker leaks 281 GB of data from Germany's far-right AfD party
Germany's far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party has confirmed that it has suffered a security breach, after a hacker published what appear to be hundreds of thousands of the controversial political party's internal emails.
713
The Test
Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO and wearer of the most midlife crisis looking leather jackets in the world, was on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Now I don’t really want you do go through all of what was being said in that recording/writeup. It’s painful. You feel your mental capabilities decaying with every minute of listening ……
714
Hamburg's Stadtpark: A Park Built to Be Used
In 1914 Hamburg built a park for people to use rather than admire, and more than a century later that is still what it is.
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America could have $4 lunch bowls like Japan but for zoning laws
Zoning and food safety laws add up to outlaw tiny restaurants operated by one or two staff.
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Starlink militarization and its impact on global strategic stability (2023)
In this piece, two researchers from PLA-affiliated National University of Defense Technology argue that Starlink will negatively impact global stability, in light of its clear military applications, increased risks of accidents and collisions in space, and SpaceX's close relationship with the U.S. military. The…
718
America's Cyber Defense Agency Is Burning Down and Nobody's Coming to Put It Out
CISA lost a third of its staff and its acting leader uploaded sensitive docs to public ChatGPT, while China sits inside U.S. critical infrastructure.
719
The Rise of the Bullshittery
A few thoughts on how the modern economy has stopped rewarding people who know what they are doing, and started rewarding people who know how to look like they do.
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It wasn't AI that flipped Proton's charge
Proton's CEO called a request for security testing "loser thinking". Using AI to write code is fine, but for a privacy company, the guardrails around that code are the product.