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Your Brain on ChatGPT
Check project's website: https://www.brainonllm.comWith today's wide adoption of LLM products like ChatGPT from OpenAI, humans and businesses engage and u…
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
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Evidence from the One Laptop per Child program in rural Peru
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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No Instagram, no privacy
This means that I am oblivious to all of my friends’ fun broadcasted on Instagram. I don’t feel pressured either to update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online, on where I am, what I am doing or who I am hanging out with.
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The Wrongs of Thomas More
A lengthy digression into the life of a saint
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Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
While the AI race is raging, we’ve been building an alternative. One that’s helpful, private, and optional — and designed for you, not for profit.
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Aging-related inflammation is not universal across human populations
Inflammation may not be a universal human experience, but a byproduct of industrialized lifestyles.
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The truth about soft plastic recycling points at supermarkets
🕵️ 40 bundles of soft plastic packaging waste were tracked through take-back schemes across England over 12 months.
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The dark side of account bans
I recently lost my Facebook account for two months, and was significantly cut off from certain aspects of society during that time. This is the dark side of account bans.
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America's reputation drops across the world
The proportion saying the United States will have a positive influence on world affairs has fallen in 26 out of 29 countries over the last six months. America’s reputation has fallen most markedly in Canada. For the first time in our decade-long survey series, China is placed ahead of the US when it comes to playing a…
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The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#Democrat, #VoteBlue, #Bernie, #JohnOliver, and 24 other hashtags Instagram censored on the day of Trump's inauguration.
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Basketball has evolved into a game of calculated decision-making
Basketball has evolved into a game of calculated decision-making. From a game of points, assists, and rebounds, it has progressed into using thousands of data points to optimize every element of the game.
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Instagram Addiction
i was addicted to instagram for about a month. it upended my life enough that i realized that i was living with something new-an undesirable habit. and once i realized this, it seemed like it would be wise to try to address it or at least think about it. easier said than done.
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Failure Mechanisms in Democratic Regimes – An Army's Role
The United States was born of a desire to leave behind monarchial government and instead live under a republic. Although the structure of the United States was explicitly crafted to have both …
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The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken
Something fundamental has shifted in how power works, and most of our institutions haven't noticed. We're living through what might be called "leverage arbitrage divergence"—a growing gap between...
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"Wait, not like that": Free and open access in the age of generative AI
The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free
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It Matters Who Owns Your Copylefted Copyrights (2021)
Throughout the history of Free and Open Source software (FOSS), copyright assignment has simultaneously been controversial and accepted as the norm in our FOSS communities. This paradox, I believe, stems entirely from some key misunderstandings that perpetuate. This issue requires urgent discussion, as two of the most…
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Are people's bosses making them use AI tools?
Andy Bell had heard companies were forcing employees to use AI tools so spoke to developers to determine if that was the case and learned some horrors in the process.
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“The Mind in the Wheel” lays out a new foundation for the science of mind
OR: the ideas your mother warned you about
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When random people give money to random other people (2017)
A post on Decision Science about a problem of Uri Wilensky’s has been making the rounds: Imagine a room full of 100 people with 100 dollars each. With every tick of the clock, every person wi…
832
Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)
This footage has gone viral online with the claim that it shows an 3 year old chimney sweep on the job: Millions of people saw the footage, shared it online an were upset by it, as they should be&#…
833
An election forecast that’s 50-50 is not “giving up”
tl;dr. In 2024, pre-election polls were off by about 2 percentage points. Election forecasters were aware of this and incorporated this into their uncertainties. But if you were not following the forecasts carefully, you might’ve not realized this. You might have mistakenly thought that, when predictions happened to…
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The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States
America's major high-tech manufacturing industries have not escaped the general decline in manufacturing employment.
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States and cities decimated SROs, Americans' lowest-cost housing option
Low-cost micro-units, often called single-room occupancies, or SROs, were once a reliable form of housing for the United States’ poorest residents of, and newcomers to, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other major U.S. cities.
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Dark patterns: Buying a Bahncard at Deutsche Bahn
How do two well liked companies, deutsche Bahn and adobe, advertise their subscriptions? Badly. Deutsche Bahn, the fully state-owned railway company, is a we
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Apple software update “bug” enables Apple Intelligence
Some people who had previously disabled Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.3 and iOS 18.3 saw it re-enabled after updating to macOS 15.3.1 and iOS 18.3.1 today. In fact I personally have two different Apple silicon Macs running macOS Sequoia, and after I updated both Macs to 15.3.1, Apple Intelligence was re-enabled on my…
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GPT might be an information virus (2023)
Obligatory: the views and opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not represent the views and opinions of my employer. In light of all the hype going around about ChatGPT, I wanted to offer my “hot take” on what the next 2-5 years
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Why some DVLA digital services don't work at night
Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future. It’s a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite…