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How Long Can Life Wait?
Just because you haven’t moved from the sofa doesn’t mean you’re dead.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
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Rethinking legal education in the AI era
OverviewArtificial Intelligence is already impacting higher education and the legal profession, and the pace of change appears only to be accelerating. It is thus critical for us to use this moment to carefully reflect on how legal education should adapt. This memo describes the approach we are taking to legal…
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Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
Ever since a spate of mergers in the 1990s, Westlaw and LexisNexis have dominated legal research. And that might be why searching legal cases is so costly, even in the age of AI.
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The safest job from AI may be writing
Today, tech folk are scrambling to change their workflows to meet newly inflated 5X productivity quotas, while getting pummeled under the co...
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People Hate AI Art
If your initial reaction to reading that and seeing that is some variation of "ughhh" or rolling your eyes or "fuck this guy" congrats. You are normal.
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SFO Quiet Airport (2025)
The airport targeted gate announcements, overlapping PA messages, and tenant music. Instead of blasting departure calls terminal-wide, messages are limited to each gate and their immediate surroundings. In 2020, they worked with airlines to centralize and reduce announcements, cutting 40% of the paging.
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EFF letter to FTC on X consent order [pdf]
Strong safeguards on our information require eagle-eyed oversight when that data is abused and misused for profiteering ventures. X’s actions not only showed us this in the past, but continue to do so in the present day.
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Nonviolence
As a theologian, Martin Luther King reflected often on his understanding of nonviolence. He described his own “pilgrimage to nonviolence” in his first book, Stride Toward Freedom , and in subsequent books and articles. “True pacifism,” or “nonviolent resistance,” King wrote, is “a courageous confrontation of evil by…
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The Future of AI
The Parents’ Paradox: AI, Ethics, and the Limits of Machine Morality This post is based on a talk I gave at The AI & Automation Conference in London on February 25, 2026, and my slides. A…
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“CEO said a thing” journalism
"CEO said a thing!" journalism involves parroting the claims of a business leader or executive with absolutely no context, correction, or challenge whatsoever, no matter how elaborate the delusion.
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Somebody please stop the spam texts
I complain about spam texts and consider why I’m so hesitant to just reply STOP to unsubscribe.
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Cloudflare CEO is lying to you about the bot traffic jump
A magic trick is a trick. It misrepresents reality. What the Cloudflare CEO published as bot traffic increasing, is a trick. He misrepresents reality.
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Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant
Driving on Route-25a through East Shoreham, you’d never guess there was anything unusual about the gated road heading off toward the coast. But go down a ways… …and suddenly, it’ll appear through the trees… Long Island’s only nuclear power plant, closed and shuttered since it was decommissioned in 1994. Today, it sits…
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Pseudpocalypse
Here’s a conjecture: If you put any significant amount of text on the internet under different names, those identities can be linked using only the text itself.
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Technofascism
In July 2016, Peter Thiel walked onto the stage at the Republican National Convention and told the crowd three things. First: “I build things.” Second: “I’m proud to be gay.” Third: “I’m proud to be a Republican.” What he did not say was that he had spent years funding a blogger named Curtis Yarvin, who wrote under…
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America, and probably the world, stands on a precipice
Call you Congresspeople, right now.
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Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed
A barbarian heretic kept the Roman state running for thirty-three years
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To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI. I do not believe any positive out...
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Meta Deployed AI and It Is Killing Our Agency
Managing millions in Meta ad spend, yet treated like we don't exist. An inside look at how Meta's AI-driven changes are disrupting agencies and advertiser performance.
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Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap
I wanted Book Corners to contribute newly submitted public bookcases back to OpenStreetMap. After researching the operational and community requirements, I decided not to implement it.
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I hate you Microsoft
The rare moment when I need to open a powerpoint document is here. As usual, I have my institutional account logged into their “services”, because my university pays microslop something in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of euros in contracts with this large software provider.
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We moved our Bluesky data to Eurosky
Our presence in the ATmosphere – Bluesky’s protocol – is no longer dependent on the platform’s standard infrastructure. Instead, our data now runs on Eurosky’s Personal Data Server (PDS).
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Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings
What exists is a matter of public opinion
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A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
Ursula K. Le Guin on the presence of technology in her work
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Telescope Ranchers
Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business, Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditio
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AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC
Over the past two years I’ve quietly rebuilt major parts of the OldNYC photo viewer . The result: 10,000 additional historic photos on the map , more accurate locations, and a site that’s cheaper and easier to run—thanks to modern AI tools and the OpenStreetMap ecosystem.
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How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
Investigating the use of LLMs in the Android FOSS community