This startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting

““We are not trying to make human beings. That is not what we are trying to do.” says Hanna. “To call a day-40 embryo a mini-me is just not true.””  #Technology [Link]

Orbán gets warm CPAC reception after 'mixed race' speech blowback

“The reaction to Orbán’s “mixed-race” remarks was “a little bit overblown,” Ede Vessey said, maintaining that the prime minister was referring to a stark clash of cultures that has taken place in some Western European countries that have accepted refugees from predominantly Muslim countries.”  #Democracy [Link]

The Metaverse Is Not a Place

“But what if, instead of thinking of the metaverse as a set of interconnected virtual places, we think of it as a communications medium? Using this metaphor, we see the metaverse as a continuation of a line that passes through messaging and email to “rendezvous”-type social apps like Zoom,

Federal Judge Places County Jail Into Receivership After County Fails To Comply With Consent Decree

Mind-blowing: “A-Pod is one of four “pods” the prison is divided into. […] Because the inmates have free run of the pod, they can access the roof and escape. For whatever reason, they rarely actually escape. Instead, they leave the prison and return with contraband. No one is assigned to work

Senate Judiciary holds hearing on threats to election workers

“Election officials from both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as nonpartisan officials, testified at the hearing on election workers, a workforce that has received more attention after former President Donald Trump lied about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. As Trump considers another run for office in

The corpus bride

I got my beta invitation to DALL-E 2, which creates art based on text prompts. You’ve probably seen them floating around the internet by now: surrealist, AI-drawn illustrations in a variety of styles. Another tool, Craiyon (formerly DALL-E Mini), had been doing the rounds as a freely-available toy. It’

Joel Kaplan’s Policy Team Sways Big Facebook Decisions Like Alex Jones Ban

“The company could have acted much earlier, one Facebook researcher wrote on the internal message board when they quit in August. The note came with a warning: “Integrity teams are facing increasing barriers to building safeguards.” They wrote of how proposed platform improvements that were backed by strong research and

Pearson Sees NFT, Blockchain Helping Making Money From E-Books Sales

“The chief executive officer of Pearson Plc, one of the world’s largest textbook publishers, said he hopes technology like non-fungible tokens and the blockchain could help the company take a cut from secondhand sales of its materials as more books go online.”  #Crypto [Link]

Justice Department sues Idaho over abortion ban, citing ‘medical emergency’ violation

““The law thus places medical professionals in an impossible situation,” Gupta said. “They must either withhold stabilizing treatment required by EMTALA or risk felony prosecution and license revocation. In so doing, the law will chill providers’ willingness to perform abortions in emergency situations and will hurt patients.””  #Democracy [Link]

Comments are hard

Building a comments system is really hard. I tried to build one for Known, which powers my website, but found that spammers circumvented it surprisingly easily. You can flag spam using Akismet (which was built for WordPress but works across platforms), but this process tends to require you to pre-screen

Interview: Jake Novak on His Infamous SNL TikTok Video

“Honestly, as horrible as the internet has been to me in the past six weeks, I have really enjoyed this hiatus. I’m getting to see my friends more and just have more meaningful experiences in real life.”  #Culture [Link]

Do we really need private schools?

One of my most controversial opinions is that private schools should not be allowed. Quite how controversial is always a surprise to me: from my perspective it feels very straightforward. In a nutshell, my argument comes down to the following complementary ideas: 1. Every child deserves to have an equal