Society

Fifty years after Cooper skyjacked an airplane over Washington, attitudes toward the incident have changed.

It's now two years since the first time I published on this website. So it's roughly 24 months. I just counted; I managed to release 28 blog posts until today. Actually, it's an impress

We are releasing three papers on language models, Gopher, ethical considerations, and retrieval.

Howard Shultz, the founder of Starbucks, had a revelation that began his empire. He realized that people spent time in three different classes of spaces. They cocooned in private spaces, like their homes, and offices. And they spent time in public

We don’t know how severe Omicron is, but we do know it’s spreading very fast.

Manifest V3, Google Chrome’s soon-to-be definitive basket of changes to the world of web browser extensions, has been framed by its authors as “a step in the direction of privacy, security, and performance.” But we think these changes are a raw deal for users. We’ve said that since Manifest V3 was...

# The Core Team Is Toxic I didn't want to write this post, but I've started to see a lot of blame f

For two decades, the Curta was the best portable calculator in the world.

Season 5 of Mossback's Northwest surfaces new details on familiar stories and brings less-known PNW lore to life.

"We can do a lot better," said Laura Edelson, lead author of a new study on Facebook's ad program. "This is not the state of the art of content moderation, or detection of problematic content."

Each day truckloads of empty bottles, takeout containers, and discarded plastic packaging from around New York's five boroughs arrive at Sims Municipal Recycling in Brooklyn, located on a pier at the entrance to the Gowanus Canal. The facility processes over 2,000 tons of metal, glass and plastic daily, sorting and

How will the world decide when the pandemic is over? There’s no clear-cut definition for when a pandemic starts and ends, and how much of a threat a global outbreak is posing can vary by country.

Here is why it is so hard to imagine an optimistic future: God is a million times more difficult to imagine than the devil. We find horror, evil, chaos, destruction much easier to describe in detail than the details of

Keep this in mind as you type your little thoughts

More money on average means bigger houses, more expensive cars, and fancier restaurants. But what if you look at relative spending instead of total dollars?

Why, exactly, do savings seem to have stayed stable?

For Black Americans, Collier Heights became a suburban jewel in the postwar South spanning thousands of acres and packed with nature. Just as amazing as the expansive beauty is how this neighborhood came to be, especially given everything that stood in the way. Collier Heights was established in the early 1950s, when redlining and racial

How international standards enabled containers to be stacked and shipped.

If you are looking to improve your cloud native OpX, give Monokle a try. It will make you a happier YAML engineer.

Can’t we just call corporate crime – corporate crime? No we can’t. Apparently, major non corporate institutions are so beholden to the corporate powers that be that they can’t even speak – or write the phrase. Instead they prefer a word that means the opposite of crime.  That word? Compliance. The section of the Wall […]

A new report identifies 20 major corporate recidivists, with rap sheets that should be in the sights of the Justice Department’s new approach to white-collar crime.

My parental worries, ca. 2021.