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Avoid buying in HOA neighborhoods (2014)
Let's focus on a factor that puts even more extreme limits on home ownership - HOAs. And more specifically why you should avoid buying in HOA neighborhoods.
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More than you want to know about gift cards
Gift cards are a loosely-regulated quasi-financial product and frequently misunderstood. Here's how they operate under the hood.
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The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science
Much of climate research is focused on implausible scenarios of the future, but implementing a course correction will be difficult
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One Tenth of a Second
Notes on Jimena Canales book
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The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior
“Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.”
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How The Expanse went from game concept to blockbuster TV series
The story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to blockbuster TV series
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Remote Culture War Has Begun, Executives Pumping Out "Back to Work" Propaganda
DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at. Click to read DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at, by Ed Zitron, a Substack publication.
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Making is show business now (2020)
Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year. It’s admittedly a nerdy topic: …
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Is Web3 Bullshit?
And is that even the right question?
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Machine learning’s crumbling foundations
Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that's unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that's insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.
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Science fiction hasn’t prepared us to imagine machine learning
It resembles the Library of Babel more than HAL.
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The Single-Page-App Morality Play
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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European Parliament Voted to Ban Remote Biometric Surveillance
It’s not actually banned in the EU yet—the legislative process is much more complicated than that—but it’s a step: a total ban on biometric mass surveillance. To respect “privacy and human dignity,” MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces…
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Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. The latest target: live content
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Apple is building the metaverse substrate
I thought it might be fun to take a semi-serious look at technology from the Apples WWDC21 keynote, and how it might help building the metaverse. I may have spent way too much time watching sessions at 1.5x, and it may have broken my brain a little.
317
What happens when the CCP decides that you need to die
The manner in which a state kills people has major implications for that state's structure
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Noted study in psychology fails to replicate, crumbles with evidence of fraud
About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some of the data in that paper were faked; see for example here:
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Culturally transmitted skills and values
Three major tools that companies have to influence behavior are incentives, process, and culture. People often mean different things when talking about these, so I'll provide an example of each so we're on the same page (if you think that I should be using a different word for the concept, feel free to mentally…
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On Depression and Founders
Depression is real in founders. Please be careful.
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Greenwald: Yesterday Journalists Spread a Significant Lie All over Twitter
Eager to obtain vindication for the pre-election falsehood they spread about the Hunter Biden story, journalists falsely claim that the CIA blamed Russia for it.
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The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
323
Engineer demos how SpaceX is building fracked well gas plant
And your precious first principles math proves it
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3D Printing Sex Toys
Ok so, sex toys! Admit it. You've thought about it. 😉But it seems so complex! You can't use a sex toy straight from the printer because the materials and nozzles aren't body safe, and even if they were, the layer lines are a breeding ground for bacteria. So traditionally you'd have to print a blank and smooth it (with…
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Web3 Is Not Decentralization
It's just not. Here's a deep dive into why, exactly, I think that.
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When Orcs Were Real
The Ancient Struggle for Homo Sapiens to Rule the Earth
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The New York Times uses the dark patterns it derides
New York Times op-ed recently decried tricks websites use to manipulate users… but have you ever tried to cancel your NY Times subscription?
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On Solitude
Over 15 years ago, I took my first device-free, silent, solitude experience.
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The end of the pandemic is near
All epidemics end, even the Black Death and Spanish Flu. But it won’t be abrupt, and mine may end before yours does.