Chris on Mastodon broke the news that Meta censors #Democrat, but not #Republican. Hacker News starts the discussion a few hours later. Finally, news outlets are covering it. Andreas on Mastodon announces a security backdoor in xz. Hacker News covers it. ...then the news outlets. I'd bet my SSL certs that this will be …

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I'll miss pens when they go. I like how they feel. I like that handwriting is almost impossible to fake. I like that when I receive a letter, I can tell who sent it just from how they write the address. But it all has to go. Pens have some advantages over computers. One can generally access a pen-record faster - just …

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I don't know how long until people cannot use pens, but it seems their days are numbered. Whatever time it might take, certain stages seem inevitable. Those currently in the government seem unlikely to change the education system to remove pens. I find it more likely that a group who broadly haven't used a pen more …

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I have doubts about self-driving cars. The entire argument rests on analogy with software translators. Software translators began as simple dictionaries. You type in 'cat', it returns 'le chat'. Next, programmers started to feed in simple rules, so 'black cats' could return 'les chats noire'. The rules became so …

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Printers never waged war on pens, they simply made pens redundant. I suspect that if robots ever take over, we'll go the way of the pen rather than the dodo. Once machines can bake bread, calculate the proper tax rate and generally take care of what needs done, and do so cheaply, humanity can take a breather. I'm not …

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