In the first decades of the twenty-first century, everyone suspected that this world was being watched, sloppily and inattentively, by intelligences far inferior to humans: minds that are to our minds as those of paramecia; intellects narrow, mediocre and uncomprehending.| Greg Egan's Home Page
On large platforms, it's impossible to have policies on things like moderation, spam, fraud, and sexual content that people agree on. David Turner made a simple game to illustrate how difficult this is even in a trivial case, No Vehicles in the Park. If you haven't played it yet, I recommend playing it now before continuing to read this document.| danluu.com
This is a set of notes on the Quinn Emanuel report on Cruise's handling of the 2023-10-02 accident where a Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) hit a pedestrian, stopped, and then started moving again with the pedestrian stuck under the bottom of the AV, dragging the pedestrian 20 feet. After seeing some comments about this report, I read five stories on this report and then skimmed the report and my feeling is that the authors of four of the stories probably didn't read the report, and that people...| danluu.com
Creating fake signed commits| Smitop
A Canadian man who says he's been falsely charged with orchestrating a complex e-commerce scam is seeking to clear his name. His case appears to involve "triangulation fraud," which occurs when a consumer purchases something online -- from a seller…| krebsonsecurity.com
In The birth & death of search engine optimization, Xe suggests| danluu.com
Finished Pharmaceuticals/Unapproved New Drug/Misbranded| U.S. Food and Drug Administration
A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his comment on some future measurement projects I wanted to do (in the same vein as other projects like keyboard vs. mouse, keyboard, terminal and end-to-end latency measurements), delivered with a smug look and a bit contempt in the tone, was "so you just want to get to the top of Hacker News?"| danluu.com
Hacker News Guidelines| news.ycombinator.com
I’m a full-time instructor in Python and Pandas, teaching in-person courses at companies around the world (e.g., Apple and Cisco) and with a growing host of online products, including video courses and a paid newsletter with weekly Pandas exercises. Like many online entrepreneurs, I’ve experimented with a host of different products over the years, some […]| Reuven Lerner
Between July and October of this year, I did a lot of reading and writing about the role of Meta and Facebook—and the internet more broadly—in the| erinkissane.com
There's a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that's basically, "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive". We've previously discussed Marc Andreessen's quote that tech hiring can't be inefficient here and here:| danluu.com
An Interview with Mark Zuckerberg about the Metaverse| Stratechery by Ben Thompson
I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices I’ve run into in the past few months. Here are the results:| danluu.com
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into F...| danluu.com
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.| danluu.com