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The Style Guide for America’s Highways
Driving across America, you will encounter a wide variety of cultures, landscapes, people and animals. But the one consistent thing that will stay the same from Maine to California are the signs you pass on the highway. That is because America’s roads and highways have a big, fat style guide.
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Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
At least, not with today's software.
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Text only news websites (2022)
There's no BBC News text-only site, even though everyone comes here looking for one – more info
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The Rocky Horror Coffin Clock
It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll…
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Tiffin Tom: Fish, chips and a side of identity theft
Apart from leaking everything, there's been "no breech". Avoid Tiffin Tom.
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Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval
We need to go beyond the review-and-approval paradigm
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ChatGPT is a bullshit generator but it can still be amazingly useful
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce
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AI will save the world?
By Marc Andreessen
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Reasons to fight cashless contagion
Total payments uberfication is a virus, and we need to build resistance to it
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Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks
Non-proliferation only benefits incumbents
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When did New York start building slowly?
(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects.
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The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership
How did the company that aspired to be so much more come to this?
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Who wants to be tracked?
“We value your privacy…”, the clichéd beginning of many a privacy notice. I legitimately do value my own online privacy, and whenever I read that phrase as part of a website consent banner it sounds like lip service at best. Consent banners ostensibly exist to give users control over their data & personal privacy. Far…
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Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal
Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal. This is hard to understand.
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My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
When I owned Piper N47943, a four seat single engine airplane, I thought it prudent not to fly myself to assignments. I did not want the…
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Ego Death
Social media aggravates the ego. Virtuous content drifts to the extremes and becomes counter productive at scale. Focusing on external validation is futile and robs the soul of a deeper meaning.
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It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do
This week brought another self-inflected wound for trust in journalism.
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Persuasion through status rather than argument
Intelligent individuals are better at understanding the reputational consequences of their beliefs
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Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent
Preface: I don’t use iCloud. I don’t use an Apple ID. I don’t use the Mac App Store. I don’t store photos in the macOS “Photos” application, even locally. I…
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The Curse of Dialup World
An acquisition gets weird.
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Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment
Imagine a world where computers are inherently old. Whatever you do with them is automatically seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition. Even though new discoveries do happen, they cannot dispel the aura of oldness.
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Reasons Not to Use Google (2015)
Google is forcing its bullshit generator, Gemini, on many users of Gmail without asking them, and not even offering the users a way to deactivate it.
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On-demand learning comes at the cost of conceptual understanding
Everyone has heard about the so-called “types of learning styles” auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and so on. And almost everything has been said about it. But what if there is a different categorization of learning? Maybe one that gives more inside? Well, I think there is. This time we split the act of learning just…
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Losing Taiwan Means Losing Japan (2020)
Image SourceThe United States could bounce back from the fall of Taiwan to Communist rule. It would have far more dire consequences for Japan. Consider this post a short, informal primer on why thi…