The big tax preparation software companies lobbied strongly against the Direct File system, for obvious reasons.

They are just as obviously operating as a cartel, keeping their prices "in the same ballpark" without exactly matching. I remember a day when TaxAct was still a new entrant into the market, and it had excellent features and support at a price that significantly undercut TurboTax and H&R Block. Once it achieved popularity, its price suddenly jumped (a bit more than double) to match that of H&R block. Its features and support didn't improve at all; the price hiked and that was it.

TurboTax still charges more than the other two, creating an illusion of price competition. The truth is that TurboTax is significantly more popular, so it charges more, even though its features and service level are merely equivalent (at best).

So they all three ride on the same gravy train, and the last thing they want is a taxpayer-funded entity to provide a high quality option for free. They might have to actually EARN their income then! So they applied their considerable wealth to the political action of killing this offering, and succeeded.

This new feature has not changed my opinion of Windows 11.

I still won't use it.

The Matrix
The Colony
Aeon Flux
Highlander 2

they haven't proven or disproven anything at all. They make reference to popular theories and what those theories suggest. This is not proof, it's speculation. They go on to talk about some interesting limitations of the theory. That proves absolutely nothing, but points out that our current theories don't cover all the bases. Then they go on to assume that the limits in our theory are somehow limits to reality itself (utterly unfounded assumption) and therefore simulations are impossible.

The philosophical sloppiness here is remarkable. I suspect that something significant has been lost in translation between the researchers and the article's author. But even then, it sounds like someone is just seeking attention by claiming a proof where there is nothing but wild speculation.

Of course, the notion that our experience of reality is itself a simulation is equally wild speculation, to begin with.

Where the evidence is lacking, the word "proof" generally doesn't apply. The honest scientific answer is "we don't have enough data to draw any conclusions about whether or not the universe is a simulation." And that's that.

Our ancient ancestors had a means of building cars without computer chips. I wonder if this lost technology can be re-discovered, and greatly alleviate these economic woes.

No, hypocrisy is when you claim one set of values but act on another. Like lying while telling others they shouldn't lie. Mocking one religion, but not another, doesn't qualify under the definition. If one mocked religion while telling others it is wrong to mock religion, THAT would be hypocritical. Mocking one religion but ignoring another is just being selective.

And the simple act of avoiding danger isn't cowardice, either. Usually that is just simple practicality. One is not a coward for avoiding walking on the freeway, for example. To qualify as a coward, one must fearfully avoid things that are not very risky, or things that might qualify as a duty. Neither applies here.

I, for one, think that Christianity and Islam are both equally founded on unprovable claims about reality that include admonitions to give lots of money to the religion's ringleaders, making them both scams. And worse than that, the religious leaders abuse their influential power to cause harm (such as oppression of homosexuals and sending people off to holy wars), making them both equally evil.

According to Christian belief, Christ's return heralds the end of the world.

So, that means that Gelsinger is trying to use AI to hasten the end of the world.

I guess that checks out.

I can see the appeal. It we really do have a serious problem of "Dunning-Krugers" spouting utter nonsense online with confidence and presentation that reaches a significant audience of similarly ill-educated people, convincing them to take action that is wrong and harmful. They don't think "huh, maybe I should seek out the opinions of professionals on this matter" and instead just fall back on ego-soothing anti-intellectualism and conspiracy theory nuttery. There are a lot of these people, and their ill-guided actions cause real damage.

On the other hand, the proposal here is just another form of censorship, as you pointed out. It's a little bit tamer since the messages can still be presented by those with degrees, but the option to control who gets those degrees and what they must learn to get those degrees puts it right back in the domain of censorship.

As much as I dislike it when the ill-educated spout nonsense on a popular platform, I have to support their option to do so because censorship is even worse.

I just wish there was some way to turn more people on to actual critical thinking (not just thoughtless contrarianism) so they would pay less heed to the "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge" crowd.

Many of us are reading this while at work or school, and don't actually have time to both:

1. read the article
2. post snark.

Obviously, number 2 is the higher priority, so most of us will ignore your admonitions to read the article and possibly mod you down for being so audacious.

Part of the government's job is to protect the health of the economy by breaking up monopolies and enforcing anti trust law. This is necessary in order to ensure that there remains opportunity for competition.

It isn't an easy thing to do, of course, especially when those with the most political power are the very monopolies and cartel bosses being regulated, but it is a necessary element of a healthy capitalistic economy.

Our current government isn't doing a very good job of that. And so, predictably, here we are.

The correct answer is for colleges to stop giving grades at all. Grades should be given by separate testing institutions whose only job is to assess and rate competence in various domains. The purpose of the college is to give you the knowledge and skills you need to do well on the test, but not to administer the test.

That matters because colleges are judged by how many As they give out. If they give out too few, students don't want to go there. Why would the? They know darn well that THEY will be judged by whether or not they got an A. So, colleges experience grade inflation because it draws students and money to the college.

Correct behavior is a product of correct incentives. With colleges providing both the education and the grade, they have every incentive to inflate. No amount of "honor" will fix that. Separate that out so that the college's only incentive is to educate well, and the testing institution's only incitive is to provide accurate assessments against objective standards, and the correct behavior follows naturally.

Your position assumes a specific purpose of the grade, which many disagree with.

Is the purpose to show how well the material is mastered? If that is the case, then a high set of A grades is no reason at all to adjust the material's difficulty level. The nature of the knowledge itself is the only determinant. Like, say, algebra. If the goal of the A grade is to show how well you have mastered algebra, and a lot of people are getting As, that does not mean that your course content is bad. It just means that algebra isn't very hard and the people taking the course are good enough to master it. People who want more of a challenge can go take calculus.

But if the purpose of an A is to show how much better you are than everyone else who took the same class, THEN too many As is a problem. But that raises a very important question about what the purpose of the grade should be.

There are people who are interested in using grades as an objective assessment of your capacities, and there are other people who are interested in using it to find "the best of the best" in any given domain. These are two different purposes and they are clearly in conflict with each other.

AI isn't at that level. This is by far the most common misconception about AI, and you have fallen for it as well.

AI cannot reliably solve novel problems, nor can it reliably produce high quality work like a design for a bridge. We still need humans to do that. And, the evidence is right before our eyes: bridge architects still have jobs. If AI could do this, all the bridge architects in the world would immediately be fired, since they cost so much more than AI.

I must belabor this point: yes, we have seen AI do really complex things like generate really sophisticated code that was hard and that worked. But that does not mean that these AI can now do all the much simpler things that need doing in a software developer position. It seems like simple reasoning "wow, if AI can do something that hard, then surely it can do something this simple" but that is false. The pattern-matching that AI algorithms use is not the same as thinking a problem through (despite the much publicized efforts at accomplishing precisely this), and AIs still routinely get tripped up over simple things. Everyone who works with AI, including me, knows this, because it happens a lot.

And we have read articles right here on slashdot where harm has come from relying on an AIs work. In particular in legal filings. People keep thinking that AI's work is good enough precisely because it is designed to appear good enough. But it is not good enough once scrutinized.

So, we still need people with the mental skills to do the job. They have to be able to do it without the aid of AI in order to have sufficient competence to, at the very least, review and certify work that comes out of AI.

If we have a generation of students that had AI do their homework for them, and this was acceptable to the teachers who used AI to grade it, then we will have a workforce that is entirely bereft of competence. That will cause serious economic problems with real harmful impact to our lives. And it gets worse. We know that AIs hallucinate. They give false facts when asked direct questions, even if the true facts are available to them. You want those educating our kids?

Well, apparently colleges do, since AI is so much cheaper than teachers.

It appears we are going to have to keep learning this lesson, the hard way, for a while now.

Spoilers ahead for people who haven't played the final games in the series.

From my perspective, the way they wrapped up the plot means that the story is essentially going to be a reboot either way. The original storyline involved relationships between several key characters and factions, including and especially Cortana, the Covenant, the Flood, and earth's government. And those plot lines are now all finished. Covenant gone. Cortana gone. The mysteries about the rings and such, solved. There is of course a new enemy that arose like a phoenix. It's an open-ended story that could go anywhere, but it's also essentially a new story with mostly new characters, so, a reboot in its own way.

The next game in this cannon will need to give us a reason to care about the new characters and factions, because the ones we have cared about so far are done and gone. So, what's it going to be? Roll the dice on making something that people will get interested in that won't feel like a re-hash of what we have already seen, or just give the old-but-proven story to a new generation of kids, with shinier graphics?

The second bet is clearly the safer one.

There will never be a shortage of stupid people.

Generally speaking, a con artist's easiest mark is someone who thinks he is scamming the con artist. The same principle applies here: a criminal's easiest target is someone who thinks they are about profit by breaking the law.