The Shirky principle is the adage that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. More broadly, it can also be characterized as the adage that “every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving”.
This morning while perusing the settings of a bunch of apps on my iPhone, I discovered a new setting for Photos that was enabled by default: Enhanced Visual Search. (I manually disabled it before taking the screenshot below.)
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you probably have seen the same massive surge I’ve seen in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to pretty much every problem out there, in software testing, in software development, and in life in general.
The Map Happenings series on the hugely impactful events that forever changed our world. This week: the story of a little known company called ‘Etak’. I think you’ll find it a fas…
The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.
DEI statements are affirmations made when you’re applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of “diver…
Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incred…
On February 14, 2024, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued an order stating that Orange, a major French telecom provider, had infringed the copyight of Entr’Ouvert’s Lasso software and violate…
This blog is intended to be a place to share ideas and results that are too weird, incomplete, or off-topic to turn into an academic paper, but that I think may be important. Let me know what you think! Contact links to the left.
Here’s a little “fake stats in the wild” gem that I think you and your followers will find at the least somewhat amusing.
I grew up relatively poor. I was fortunate enough to have a roof over my head, clean water, electricity, a computer, internet, and cable tv. But food was often harder to come by. This may seem like a contradiction, but when your mom has left to marry her uncle and your dad has schizophrenia, you aren’t really in…
It can only be discarded
The Rodin Museum and the French Ministry of Culture threaten freedom of information and public access to cultural heritage
I’ve had Feeling Hard Or Hardly Feeling saved to my hard drive since 7-17-2005 without even knowing who made it. Just now bothered to find out.
An important announcement There Is No Antimemetics Division has been picked up for publication by Penguin Random House! Find out more here. Everything below is for the original self-published version of the story only. An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring p...
At first I thought it was from a reader.
From The World I Live In , by Helen Keller Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world....
This is a lightly edited transcript of my presentation today at the ACCSS/NCSC/Surf seminar ‘Cyber Security and Society’. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to their conference & giving me a great opportunity to talk about something I worry about a lot. Here are the original slides with notes, which may be…
On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google . The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I…
It feels like all the cool websites from the late 2000s are gone. But maybe we are looking at this the wrong way. Maybe it is us who vanished.
Although this article isn’t related to any of the 12 Challenges so far, it’s on a subject I’m developing for a potential future challenge.
[Update: Vote has been postponed to Thursday, keep up the pressure!] The Belgian EU Council presidency seems set to have bulk Chat Control searches of our private communications greenlighted by EU governments on Wednesday 19 Thursday 20 June. This confirms concerns that the proponents of Chat Con
JD Stillwater, Science Ambassador's blog.
Last week, someone leaked a spreadsheet of SoundThinking sensors to Wired . You are probably asking "What is SoundThinking," because the company rebranded last year. They used to be called ShotSpotter, and their outdoor acoustic gunfire detection system still goes by the ShotSpotter name.
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...
