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The Economics of Sex Robots
This is a lightly edited version of an article I wrote that first appeared in Jacobite. I had a great conversation about this article and evolutionary psychology more generally (link here) with Joh…
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
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The continued relevance of Weizenbaum’s warnings
“The computer has long been a solution looking for problems—the ultimate technological fix which insulates us from having to look at problems.” – Joseph Weizenbaum (1983) Trying to kee…
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Tor Project Statement on Jacob Appelbaum
Over the past several days, a number of people have made serious, public allegations of sexual...
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Signs you're a dangerous terrorist: using Signal, moving zines
The unusually long sentences criminalize being an anti-fascist activist, reading the wrong zines, and using the wrong communication apps. They're incredibly dangerous.
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Is it the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books”?
Measuring the extent of self-reviewing at the New York Review of Books from 1963-2022
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Apple fears the killer app
Ok, so were finally getting down to it. On at least two fronts, Apple has now essentially thrown out its draconian rules on what developers can and cannot do on its platform, and replaced them with essentially, no rules. The new “rules” appear to be, “its OK to do what you want in your app if we say so. And we’ll…
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Conservation should be allowed to pay its own way on public lands
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auction in February, 2016, for oil and gas drilling rights near Arches National Park was unremarkable. The high bidder, Tempest Exploration Co. LLC, paid $2,500 for the 1,120 acre lease by credit card and began paying annual rental fees. What soon did prove remarkable, though, was…
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Second Circuit allows government to search electronic devices at the border
NEW YORK—The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit today held that border agents may search travelers’ electronic devices without suspicion. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) submitted an amicus brief in the case, arguing that…
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The Other Internet
And how to break free from the grift.
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EFF and Eight Other Privacy Orgs Back Out of NTIA Face Recognition Talks
EFF, along with eight other consumer-focused privacy advocacy organizations, has backed out of the National Telecommunications Information Administration’s multi-stakeholder process to develop a privacy-protective code of conduct for companies using face recognition. After 16 months of active...
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Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement
Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and...
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Cutting their own throats
Back to: World building 201: Heuristics | Forward to: Upcoming reading in Edinburgh
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The Worst (2012)
I don’t really know who Dustin Curtis is, but he blogs a lot, and those blog entries often end up onHacker News. Not too long ago, he wrote a blog post titled “The Best,” in which he explains that he has nice stuff. That in fact, everything he owns is actually the very best of its kind.Dustin’s...
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The fifty shades of Latin
In the bird’s-eye view, one might have the comforting illusion that country borders are also language borders. Especially where the bor...
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US Government wants DNA and social media from visitors
Yesterday the Trump Administration announced a proposed change in policy for travellers to the U.S. It applies to the powers of data collection by the Customs and Border Police (CBP).
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What were the earliest laws like?
Hammurabi’s code doesn’t tell the whole story
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Dear Google, am I pregnant?
Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).
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Cyberpower crushes coup
Rewriting the rulebook on coups, time to add cyberpower
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Processed meats as bad as cigarettes: bad reporting on good science
Today, the WHO issued a report that says, in essence, processed meats and red meats are carcinogens. This has been reported in a variety of…
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Cake or death: AMP and the worrying power dynamics of the web
Web developer, standards and engineering nerd, cocktail enthusiast, maker.
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If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)
Blaise Pascal? John Locke? Benjamin Franklin? Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac? Abraham Lincoln ? Henry David Thoreau? Cicero? Mark Twain? Woodrow Wilson?
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Teaching Students How to Cheat During the Pandemic
Modification of Kobayahsi Maru for all-virtual classes
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How blind people use Instagram [video]
Tommy Edison shows how he uses Instagram on the iPhone. So we’ll just take a picture of the crew. Why I’m holding the thing up to my face like I can look throug
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Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
This is an old page, put up as part of a course I taught in 2012. The more recent draft is here . The final draft of this book has now been published and is available on Amazon as either a paperback or a kindle .