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Comment Re:Bitcoin - victim of its own success (Score 5, Insightful) 71

its advocates have already gotten so much of what they could have possibly hoped for

Except the one thing that actually matters: being able to really use it. I still (in 2026!) can't use Bitcoin to pay for things at my local grocery store, car mechanic, or even Amazon.

Bitcoin didn't take off. Unless it suddenly gets more popular by a few orders of magnitude, it remains a useless dead end.

Comment Re:Loss of contact with reality (Score 4, Insightful) 175

Blaming Wharton School of Business for what Trump tried to do with the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario is absurd. By all accounts, he didn't learn anything in his time there and his professors didn't think highly of him. There's no way his university had anything to do with that.

Besides, lots of people graduated from Wharton. Which others, who graduated from there, suffer from Trump's derangement syndrome and a need to rename geography?

Comment Re: "Eat the rich!" (Score 0) 119

The department of education and various retardations like implicit and systemic bias being enshrined in the education system in the 90's are the two ways in which our education system was dumped in the shitter. When you refuse to suspend or expel the students who constantly disrupt class and intimidate other students and make fun of them for wanting to learn, the learning by students goes waaaayyyy down. Then of course there was, and in some districts still is the complete idiocy the composes common core math and whole word learning, which has utterly tanked reading and math ability with second order effects impacting everything else.

Submission + - Smart Democracy (substack.com)

Submitted by dpplgngr
dpplgngr writes: The Future Dream: Can AI Help Democracy Think?

What might democracy look like if artificial intelligence were used to help people understand the consequences, context, history, and uncertainty surrounding complex public decisions?

The Future Dream — Smart Democracy is a new proposal exploring that question.

Rather than giving AI political authority, the proposal places human judgment at the center and imagines AI as an instrument for augmented judgment: assembling information, mapping relationships and consequences, maintaining civic memory, exploring possible futures, and explaining trade-offs.

The manuscript proposes several ideas, including Contextual Evaluation Engines, a Dual Transparency Doctrine, Recommendation Over Decree, a continuously developing civic memory, and a distinction between human moral authority and AI-assisted analytical capacity.

It also explores a possible economy of ideas, through an integration with the author's Smart Bank concept, in which contributions could accumulate contextual reputational credit.

The proposal is deliberately presented as a work in development rather than a finished political system. The author is interested in what happens when people can discuss the ideas with AI, challenge them, identify technical and ethical problems, and contribute new possibilities.

The complete manuscript: https://anthonypryor1.substack...

The central question is simple:

Can intelligent systems help people become better informed participants in their own collective decisions without taking those decisions away from them?

Comment Hollywood Accounting needs to be banned,prosecuted (Score 3, Interesting) 119

by Moryath (#66347202) Attached to: 'Coyote vs. Acme' Outgrosses All But 3 WB Movies This Year, Heads To Profit

With a break-even number of $120 million, according to the Hollywood Accounting where the WB shell companies are all paying themselves in a circle, compared to the actual production cost of $30 million as indicated by the tax writeoff stated value...

Comment Re: Nothing of value was added (Score 1) 162

I have 25 years of experience working in codebases good and bad. I have many techniques for handling truly brittle, miserable codebases. These are not bad, are small, and do not give me problems.

This kind of code would give me more problems, but "problems" just means it would take more time. I enjoy working with code that scares other programmers, because I enjoy using the skills I have developed.

Submission + - No Warrant, No Suspicion, No Problem (reason.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Part of the bedrock of American civil liberties is the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches. There is no right to privacy, and no due process in the justice system, without that. But immigration authorities, cops, and courts keep deciding that, for some reason, the Fourth Amendment just doesn't apply where new technology is concerned.

Submission + - Why Trump May Not Serve Out His Presidency (newrepublic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In 2024, a group of 225 mental health professionals said in a published open letter (bankrolled, granted, by an anti-Trump PAC created by George Conway) that Trump suffered from “malignant narcissism” and appeared “to be showing signs of cognitive decline,” including “a dramatic decline in verbal fluency, tangential thinking, diminished vocabulary, overuse of superlatives and filler words,” and to be “exhibiting deteriorating judgment, impulse control, and motor functioning (including a wide-based gait).”

Submission + - Students are suddenly losing interest in computer science as AI coding takes off (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: For years, students were told that learning to code was one of the safest paths into a lucrative technology career. New data suggests that message may be losing some of its pull. Nova Learning says the share of surveyed middle and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their primary academic interest fell from 42.3 percent in 2025 to 27.9 percent in 2026, while Engineering rose from 11.9 percent to 23 percent. The biggest gains came from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, while Software and Data Science saw a steep drop.

The survey is not nationally representative, but broader enrollment data points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported declines in Computer and Information Science enrollment at four year institutions, even as Engineering grew. AI coding tools are not proven to be the cause, but as software development changes and AI handles more coding tasks, students may be starting to rethink what a future in technology should look like.

Submission + - Students are suddenly losing interest in computer science as AI coding takes off (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: For years, students were told that learning to code was one of the safest paths into a lucrative technology career. New data suggests that message may be losing some of its pull. Nova Learning says the share of surveyed middle and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their primary academic interest fell from 42.3 percent in 2025 to 27.9 percent in 2026, while Engineering rose from 11.9 percent to 23 percent. The biggest gains came from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, while Software and Data Science saw a steep drop.

The survey is not nationally representative, but broader enrollment data points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported declines in Computer and Information Science enrollment at four year institutions, even as Engineering grew. AI coding tools are not proven to be the cause, but as software development changes and AI handles more coding tasks, students may be starting to rethink what a future in technology should look like.

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