Society

In 1952, an experimental nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ont., about 180 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, partially melted down, becoming the world's first nuclear reactor incident. Disaster was averted, in part, with help from future U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

The Pentagon admits to running the propaganda operation, which sowed distrust in Chinese vaccines.

In an age when AI regurgitates the blather of meaningless content, seeking its audience in the attention marketplace, it's a small wonder that it is hard to tell what is really real anymore.

Share More. Live Better.

Building a tech industry that's better for its workers and customers through co-operation, democracy and worker ownership.

SAN MATEO, CA—After spending the past three decades of his life being totally unable and unwilling to engage in any meaningful way with the world around him, James Parker, a local guy who sucks at being a person, told reporters Thursday that he saw huge potential in AI. “While it’s still in its early phase, artificial…

Like this newsletter? Subscribe to my podcast Better Offline - this week we've got a two parter digging into Sam Altman, with a deeper dive featuring Tom Dotan of the Wall Street Journal (Part 1) and Ellen Huet (Part 2, airing Friday.) I think you'll love the back-catalog too! The

A chat with friends recently reminded me about pangrams, and what a cute little language curiosity they are. I also remembered that i never got a self-enumerating pangram generator to work. I should give that another try! I thought it would be fun play with ChatGPT and see if it could generate some good ones, expecting it to do quite well on this task. After all, LLMs should be excellent wordcels, right? That is, is there’s one thing they should be very good at, that is verbal intelligence. Yeah, i know this meme of “shape rotators vs. wordcels” can be a bit cringy, but i honestly find these terms ironically endearing. Well, it doesn’t seem so.

Last week, cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier published an interesting blog post in which he (together with co-author Barath Raghavan) argues that online privacy is continuing to decline for the same reason overfishing occurred in the last century – due to the “Shifting Baseline Syndrome.” The presented analogy is a very powerful one, but we still feel that it falls flat in some regards, and in reality, online privacy might even be worse off than suggested.

Plastic has become embedded in everyday life. That’s because for the last 70 years, the plastics industry convinced consumers to embrace the material for its low cost and disposability.

Questioning the design and dev progress was apparently "against company policy."

Under the motto “Who Cares” Re:Publica gathered a few thousand people in Berlin and I got to give a talk continuing the path I started out on with my last two talks in 2022 and 2023. Titled “Empty Innovation” I tried outlining my understanding of the patterns of the weird technological hypes we’ve gone through […]

Hungary used to host one of the world’s most powerful empires—the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, it’s not even in the top 10 EU countries by GDP and is among the bottom countries in GDP per capita. What happened? Why are Hungarians so bitter about their present-day borders?

On Lever Time, we look at TurboTax's decades-long campaign to prevent the government from letting taxpayers file directly with them for free.

Rob Leathern says regulators could empower third parties to compare platforms’ progress on ad transparency against clear baselines.

A Facebook post claiming Einstein warned in 1949 that the rich control communication and damage democracy is true.

In a digital landscape overrun by algorithms and A.I., we need human guides to help us decide what’s worth paying attention to.

The real threat with super intelligence is falling prey to the hype

Tokyo says the trend will become virtually irreversible by the 2030s.

Thousands of electronic components, which should improve life and serve development, are turned by aggressors into instruments of murder. Their weapons depend on foreign components. Without them, they cannot continue to fight, occupy and kill.

What is the future of the canon?

I was recently invited to participate in the Trends with Friends podcast, co-hosted by long time friend Howard Lindzon. The podcast primarily focuses on “markets” and less on “technology,” as…

"I believe that our greatest strength lies always in the protection of our smallest minorities," wrote the 'Peanuts' creator in 1970.

For the next few posts, I want to take a look at how some ‘tribal’ peoples raised armies, in contrast to the way that ancient (or later) states raised armies. As moderns, we are so fami…

Image via Wikimedia Commons Most of the twentieth century's notable men of letters — i.e., writers of books, of essays, of reportage — seem also to have, literally, written a great deal of letters.