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AI Safety and the Age of Dislightenment
Model licensing & surveillance will likely be counterproductive by concentrating power in unsustainable ways
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
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Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
Connect with Lunduke and other members of Lunduke community
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The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
What if you could counterfeit so much money that it stopped being illegal?
785
Laniakea Books: Public domain books for everyone
Laniakea Books is a publishing house in London, England, which publishes public domain books only.
786
The many ways that digital minds can know – A better way to think about LLMs
LLMs do all the things people say they do at once, even if those people vociferously disagree, and they’re all useful.
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Pixar was never a masterpiece factory
the studio has always played to critics instead of children and manipulated with cheap sentiment
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You can't reach the brain through the ears
Why do we have to learn everything the hard way?
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Public exposure to BPA exceeds acceptable health safety levels
Population exposure to the synthetic chemical Bisphenol A (BPA), which is used in everything from plastic and metal food containers to reusable water bottles and drinking water pipes in Europe is well above acceptable health safety levels, according to updated research data. This poses a potential health risk to…
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Profits are driving inflation. When will politicians and the BoE admit it?
The Bank of England has raised interest rates to 4%, supposedly to tackle inflation. There is just one problem with this decision. The Bank knows that much of the inflation we are suffering is being driven by rising oil and energy prices, largely resulting from conflict in the Middle East. It also...
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Planning for AGI and Beyond
Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.
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The JavaScript era happened because we were fed a line
The age of frontend JavaScript frameworks eating the web world didn’t happen simply because some well-meaning developers found great DX. It happened because we were fed a line.
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Privatizing our digital identities
Trying to make the case for permanent irrevocable digital identities, which unfortunately today, by de-facto, are email addresses.
796
San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?
I lived in New York City for 8 years and never had anything major stolen. In San Francisco, it took 2 weeks…
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I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one.
798
Vinyl Chloride and the Ohio Train Derailment
The recent Ohio train derailment and subsequent fire that released vinyl chloride into the environment has been a terrifying experience for the nearby population. The accident rekindles memories of the 1979 train accident in Mississauga, Ontario, when over 200,000 people had to be evacuated after a wheel bearing…
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The Military-Industrial Stock Buyback Complex
Why is the US military ceding ground to China? As a new DOD report shows, big defense contractors are middlemen whose main purpose is stock buybacks and dividends.
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The Erosion of Free Will: Why Society's Loss of Belief in Freedom Is Dangerous
Pay attention to how people are talking about freedom. It's a leading indicator of cultural (and economic) trends.
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Politics and the English Language (1946)
"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
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Against Alcohol (2022)
A review of ‘Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health’
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Record labels panic as A.I. generated song becomes ‘hit single’
Welcome to the new world.
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The Long Shadow of Checks
A lot of more modern financial infrastructure follows the paths blazed by checks, at least in the U.S.
806
Bring Back Webrings
I built a webring for personal websites.
807
The city of the future looks like a former military bunker in Taipei (2016)
Back in 2016, I wrote an article for How We Get To Next on an informal settlement called Treasure Hill, in Taiwan, that could be a prototype for the future of sustainable urban living. How We Get To Next is still online in archived format, but with bitrot being what
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Humans Need Play
On a vicious pattern that breeds burnout.
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The Internet Free Zone (1997)
The Internet Free Zone Home Page.
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Remote work is the best thing to happen to families in decades
Yet commentators and politicians keep missing it