Active "discussion", but no funny? Okay, I admit that all the jokes I can think of sound cheesy.

"Buy more cheese!" said the refrigerator. "I'm really good at storing cheese."

It's not funny because the big-cheese companies will just pay/bribe Samsung to send those messages.

When humor is outlawed, only outlaws will laugh?

Yes, I have tried to encourage the genAIs to ask questions a number of times in various ways, but with no significant success that I can recall.

I can definitely recall the results of my last paired experiments. I prepared a short software specification and gave that text to DeepSeek and ChatGPT.

The DeepSeek result was better in terms of how I described the desired appearance, but one of the four results was wrong. DeepSeek had clearly misunderstood that part of the problem and did NOT ask for clarification. But I admit that I didn't notice the error until I compared it with the results from ChatGPT's second attempt.

ChatGPT failed completely in its first attempt, but its second attempt apparently threw out the appearance parts and produced the right numbers. When I asked ChatGPT about the failure of the first version, its first (verbose) response was useless, but a later response sounded like it was trying to do the right thing--but I still have no idea why it failed so badly. The second version from ChatGPT only required about 70 lines of code, which I then annotated extensively for an acceptable result.

My main problem with the verbosity is that I wind up skimming thought lots of irrelevant stuff hoping to find something that is significant...

Well I can report that just telling the genAIs to be less verbose doesn't help, though I recall DeepSeek promising to try.

I guess I should clarify. In addition to "just the W2" there's also a monthly, quarterly, or yearly payroll tax report that goes to the IRS, along with a whopping large check for the withholding, as part of normal payroll processing. Different companies do different reporting standards, of course. But they're getting the data a lot more often than you think, just from the money paid in *during* the year, before the return is filed for.

Concurrence in general but I think the underlying problem is that it doesn't ask for clarification when it should. Even worse than the verbosity thing.

Unless the government insists loudly enough that they believe something else? I used to think it was a case of "Sorry, 'but that trick never works'" until the surreality made-for-TV YOB show took over and converted America into a giant glass house of lies... "Truth will out"? Perhaps, but it scarcely matters if the "bad man" has already died with the most toys. It appears to be already too late to clean up most of the messes.

I also suffered from the delusion that the truth mattered?

(And if you have to feed the cheap sock puppet, can't you at least look for a meaningful, non-vacuous Subject?)

It's also a matter of needing less training. The skilled actors were so valuable because they could pretend to be constructed characters. In the context of a novel or other source, the whole story makes sense and there aren't extraneous elements and needless distractions. The characters do just what is needed to illustrate their characters and to advance the plot.

Real life is different. Most of the events that happen are just random noise and there is no plot. We (often referring to 'historians') interpret the meaning after the fact. Or more accurately, we select a few interesting bits and then try to find causal chains that led to those "significant" outcomes. Constant flux of which bits of real life count as worth describing and huge room for creative imagination in creating causal chains--and the results from real life are often boring.

Which is where surreality TV came into the picture. All they need is some people with "memorable" or "interesting" or "engaging" characters and then they can construct a fake-reality around those characters and film what happens. With enough cameras and enough constructions, they are basically sure to get some highly "entertaining" videos. And thereby sell the ads.

But now the cat has escaped from the bag. With advanced computer graphics it had already become possible to create movies like Star Wars that are barely limited by the director's imagination. And now with apparently cheap generative AI, we are giving those capabilities to the masses... Fortunately most of "the masses" could not care less, but we are at significant risk of a flood of AI slop that will make the Biblical Deluge look like a spring shower. At least that's how it's looking to me these weeks.

#2 is already happening, that's what the Internal Revenue Service *does*.

50% revision from a survey is not consistent or predictable.

But we do know the answers- just use the information reported to the IRS from every employer doing business in the United States instead.