Society

A reader recently sent me ​a Substack post​ they thought I might like. “I bought my kids an old-school phone to keep smartphones out of ... Read more

Roxanne Shirazi, a librarian at CUNY, recently commented on the AI hype in her field: I attended a library vendor AI demo/upsell today and I wish I could explain to them that everything they are selling could be achieved by hiring like two more people in our library. And yet this entire team was dedicated...

Drinking Sunday coffee in the hyper-normal

But Today Doesn't Feel Like Yesterday

An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

Cosmos is — or was — a popular science magazine published by the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. David Ho is an oceanographer at the University of Hawai’i. Cosmos posted an articl…

I very rarely talk about payments on this blog, but every once in a while I get to talk about something I think might be interesting: network tokens! Who has my card number? Many years ago, merchants selling products online and in person were handling your card details directly. That

A manifesto for funding AI-native nonprofits

Trying to ‘let it rip’ in early 2020 was a disaster.

Why False Equivalence Is One of Democracy’s Most Dangerous Lies

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Weeknotes 350 - Can AI truly perform critical thinking as it does not have a clue? How to bring in humbleness through our own interactions? This and more from last week's news on human-AI-thing collabs.

Valve Corporation recently came under pressure from payment processors to purge Steam, the popular PC gaming storefront, of “certain kinds of adult-only content.” The news rippled across tech …

In her new book “Bad Company,” journalist Megan Greenwell chronicles how private equity upended industries from health care to local news—and the ways workers are fighting back.

On December 30, 2024, a stunning event captured the attention of both locals and space experts when a massive metal ring crashed from the sky into a Kenyan village southeast of Nairobi. The 2.5-meter diameter object, weighing approximately 500 kilograms, landed in a field without causing injuries but immediately sparked…

Pentagon press releases say 20,000 federal troops have deployed to support ICE across the country. The real number may be markedly higher.

One staffer at an agency where the deregulation tool was tested said that it made several errors.

Megan Brenan writing for Gallup: Independents Drive Trump's Approval to 37% Second-Term Low Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has dipped to 37%, the lowest of this term and just slightly higher than his all-time worst rating of 34% at the end of

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees this morning. As we begin a new fiscal year, I’ve been reflecting on the road we’ve traveled together and the path ahead. Before anything else, I want to speak to what’s been weighing heavily on me, and what I know many of you...

Or did it?

Though we're pretty sure that time travelers don't exist, people were working on hypertext -- used by web browsers to retrieve connected information -- long before computers. It even predates the ideas of a certain Vannevar Bush, the man generally acknowledged as having laid the groundwork for hypertext by microfiche in a seminal 1945 article. Nope, according to the Atlantic, some people were pondering ways of storing and retrieving information prior even to the 20th century. A Belgian genius called Paul Otlet posited an idea in 1895 about "universal libraries" to give anyone access to a vast number of books. By 1934 he had refined it to "electronic telescopes" that would connect people instantly to books, films, audio recordings and photos.