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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
My smartest friends have bananas arguments about LLM coding.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
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We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own
Refuting the common and flawed argument of
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What if we made advertising illegal?
What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy itself. A thought experiment worth considering.
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Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
Some time ago, we were contacted by a group fighting against online CSAM, demanding that AdGuard DNS blocks the Archive.today website. This was only the beginning of a much larger story…
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LLM Inevitabilism
Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks. You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing…
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Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple …
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Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Patty Smith.
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Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
EFF is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mark Klein, a bona fide hero who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of millions of Americans.Mark didn’t set out to change the world. For 22 years, he was a...
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But what if I want a faster horse?
But what if I really want a faster horse? | exotext
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What we talk about when we talk about sideloading
We recently published a blog post with our reaction to the new Google Developer Program and how it impacts your freedom to use the devices that you own in th...
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F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree
For the past 15 years, F-Droid has provided a safe and secure haven for Android users around the world to find and install free and open source apps. When co...
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The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
Trust me, I counted.
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Someone at YouTube needs glasses
Opened YouTube and was greeted with this abomination:
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It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds
The very short version: it is madness to continue transferring the running of European societies and governments to American clouds. Not only is it a terrible idea given the kind of things the “King of America” keeps saying, the legal sophistry used to justify such transfers, like the nonsense letter the Dutch cabinet…
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Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes
No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue
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Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.
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Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image
Make Search Great Again (or just kill it)
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I Went to SQL Injection Court
Chicago argued that answering a FOIA request with a database query means creating a new record. Matt Chapman sued, I wound up on the stand explaining SQL, and now there's a bill to fix it.
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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
Until a few years ago, any app you installed on an Android device could see all other apps on your phone without your permission.
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Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
A Christmas Eve journey. Deutsche Bahn. 35 kilometers.
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How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” -U.S. Constitution, First Amendment.
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Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit
offensive security & software engineering
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ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps
The EU is pushing legislation that would scan all our private messages, even in encrypted apps.
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Careless People
I never would have read Careless People , Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta's lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it:
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That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
It's just normal crime
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