I don't think there's anything wrong with those sorts of general observations (I mean, who remembers dozens of phone numbers anymore now that we all have smartphones?), but that said this non-peer-reviewed study has an awful lot of problems. I mean, we can focus on the silly, embarassing mistakes (like how their methodology to suppress AI answers on Google was to append "-ai" into the search string, or how the author insisted to the press that AI summaries mentioning the model used were a hallucination, when the paper itself says what model was used). Or the style things, like how deeply unprofessional the paper is (such as the "how to read this paper"), how hyped up the language is, or the (nonfunctional) ploy to try to trick LLMs summarizing the paper. Or we can focus on the more serious stuff, like how the sample size of the critical Section 4 was a mere 9 people, all self-selected, so basically zero statistical significance; that there's so much EEG data that false positives are basically guaranteed and they talk almost nothing about their FDR correction to control for it; that essay writers were given far too little time for the task and put under time pressure, thus assuring that LLM users will be basically doing copy-paste rather than engaging with the material; that they misunderstand dDTF implications; the significant blinding failure with the teachers rating the essays being able to tell which essays were AI generated (combined with the known bias where content believed to be created by AI gets rated lower), with no normalization for what they believed to be AI, and so on.

But honestly, I'd say my biggest issue is with the general concept. They frame everything as "cognitive debt", that is, any decline in brain activity is treated as adverse. The alternative viewpoint - that this represents an increase in *cognitive efficiency* by removing extraneous load and allowing the brain to focus on core analysis - is not once considered.

To be fair, I've briefly talked with the lead author, and she took the critiques very well and was already familiar with some of them (for example, she knew her sample size was far too small), and was frustrated with some of the press coverage hyping it up like "LLMs cause brain damage!!!", which wasn't at all what she was trying to convey. Let's remember that preprints like this haven't yet gone through peer review, and - in this case - I'm sure she'll improve the work with time.

Yeah, I figured that. My point was just that "fixed" is just an accurate description of my income/budget (and probably yours) as it is of hers. I knew what you meant, I was just pointing out that the terminology we use doesn't make sense.

The price of a cryptocurrency reflects those things. It's value is zero. Period. There is nothing behind it.

No, fiat currencies are backed by debt, meaning that real people and companies have made enforceable legal commitments to do real work to generate the value backing the dollars or whatever. Without getting into the details, every time a dollar is created, that creation is balanced by the creation of a dollar of debt, the commitment of some productive entity to produce value to repay that debt (and thereby destroy that dollar). As a common example, when you borrow money to buy a house, the bank doesn't lend you money [*] that other people deposited, it creates that money out of thin air at the same instant you sign an enforceable contract to repay it, meaning you commit to do some sort of value-producing work to generate the value of those dollars.

Derivatives represent specific legal contracts to perform some action, e.g. buy a fixed amount of stock from the derivative seller on or by a specific date for a specific price, and those contracts get their value from the underlying security. That underlying security can also be some sort of contractual obligation rather than a hard asset, but if you keep digging down the layers you always get to something real. It's always possible, of course, that the layers of repackaging make the actual value hard enough to see that its price becomes divorced from that value (and stock pricing also gets divorced from underlying value to various degrees), but at bottom there must be something of actual substance. Further, if markets were perfectly efficient, it would not be possible for the price to move away from the value.

None of this is true with cryptoassets. Their true value is zero (arguably, negative, since proof of work is a pure sink that generates no utility), so any price above zero represents market inefficiency/insanity.

[*] It used to be that the bank created most of the money under the fractional reserve system, but for quite a while now most of the developed world has abandoned the reserve lending requirements, enabling banks to effectively create all of the money they lend. This might seem like a crazy system, but it's actually pure genius because it allows the money supply to expand and contract with the economy, which along with Keynsian fiscal policy massively reduces the boom and bust cycles we regularly experienced before we switched from metallic to fiat currency.

Aside: That phrase "fixed budget" and its twin "fixed income" always strike me as curious. I mean, short of changing jobs, most of us have a fixed income and therefore a fixed budget... and changing jobs isn't necessarily an option.

I guess maybe it's just a euphemism for "small income" or "small budget".

That would be very risky. It's more likely the court would order the administration to enforce it immediately. The administration would appeal that up to SCOTUS, but SCOTUS has already made its opinion very clear and would almost certainly uphold the order. At most they might slow walk it. Trump might simply refuse to obey the court order, but that's a very big step with a lot of risk for him, and while he might well take that step in some context he cares enough about, this isn't it. Not without a really big payoff, anyway.

No, the status quo is the best outcome for ByteDance. AFAICT, no one other than ByteDance and Congress has standing to sue over enforcement, and Congress isn't going to, so if ByteDance doesn't the courts can't intervene. ByteDance can just keep slipping cash to Trump and he can just keep extending. That's a win for ByteDance and a win for Trump. If you believe TikTok's influence over young Americans and the data it can collect is a national security risk, then it's a loss for the American people, but no one cares about that. Even if you don't believe that, it's a loss for Congress, whose authority is being flouted -- but the current Congress seems fine with that in a hundred other situations, so why not this one? ByteDance has no motive to rock this boat.

Very well put.

Crypto bros think what they'll get from regulation is respect and trust, and they're right. But that respect and trust will arise from transparency, and that transparency will also show that the emperor has no clothes. Proper regulation of cryptocurrencies will spell the eventual end of cryptocurrencies, at least as they exist today. It'll take a while, but it will happen.

Perhaps along the way someone will come up with a cryptocurrency design that actually works as a currency, providing convenient, fast, low-cost transactions that somehow manage to be cheaper than moving numbers in an audited bank database. But unless that happens, real scrutiny and regulation of cryptocurrencies will just end them.

With very critical difference that the stuff sold by the Wall St. bros is repackaged ownership of real stuff. Real enterprises that make real products for real people, real commodities that people need, real debts that people have made legal commitments to repay, etc. The Wall Street bros.' stuff has actual value behind it, even if that value is obscured through many layers of packaging.

What the crypto bros have to sell is nothing. Nothing at all. The early promise of cryptocurrencies was that they would make transactions more flexible and cheaper, but cryptocurrency transaction fees are sky high and transactions are super slow. Then came the idea of tying them to smart contracts, but that idea is foolish for reasons that I'm happy to explain if anyone wants to know.

This is completely, totally wrong.

When you buy a share of stock, you're buying part of a real enterprise that produces and sells some sort of good or service, and has some sort of real-world assets (offices, factories, equipment, etc.), structured and managed to (hopefully) generate real profits by delivering real value to real people who want to buy it.

Cryptocurrencies are nothing at all like that. With them, you're buying some bits that have value only because people think they have value.

Some people might think that "has value only because people think it has value" is also a description of fiat currency, but that's just as wrong as equating stocks with cryptocurrencies, though that's a more complicated topic for another post.

Transaction fees, paid by the merchant.

Of course, like any cost of doing business for the merchant, the cost is passed onto the customer. In the case of credit card transaction fees and the rewards they fund, what happens is that people who don't use cards with expensive transaction fees subsidize the rewards for those who do. In most cases that means poor people and people who manage money poorly actually pay for the perks of rich people and people who manage money well.

Personally, I shamelessly maximize the benefit I get from rewards cards. I never pay any credit card interest because I pay my bills every month, so I happily free-ride on the people who use cash and debit cards, who fund the very nice perks I get. The system is what it is, so I exploit it. But I think it actually sucks and would support legislation that eliminates rewards cards or -- even better -- allows merchants to explicitly pass along the card transaction fees, called out as a line item on the receipt. Merchants should also estimate a cost-of-cash fee and add that to cash transactions (accepting cash is not free for merchants; it's actually rather expensive).

I think explicitly charging consumers for the cost of the transaction is the best option. It would enable markets to push transaction costs down, benefiting consumers and merchants alike. Banks wouldn't like it because they love taking a cut of every purchase. My guess is that we would still end up primarily using credit and debit cards because bank-based purely electronic payment will be the cheapest, but the transaction fees would drop dramatically and rewards cards would obviously disappear.

Not even a Google Search. Literally just talking to it before giving the toy to their children to see if, asked to talk about something harmful, it does so or refuses. Are the parents in your mind too tired to literally speak?

A person who isn't interested in checking the facts is orders of magnitude better controlled than a person who can't.

If he's doing it from the White House, it's not personal business. Actually, it's really difficult to be sure that anything a sitting president does is purely personal. Proper presidents address this by avoiding anything that even looks like it might be a conflict of interest.

Because Bondi doesn't know what the Attorney General's job is. She -- and Trump -- think it's to be his lawyer and advocate. It's not. It's to be the American people's lawyer and advocate, which would include going after the president except the DoJ has a long-standing policy that due to the complicated conflicts it will not prosecute a sitting president.

Trump and Bondi affirmatively declaring that the Trumpcoin dinner was not official business may enable prosecution after he leaves office, though the incredible breadth of the Supreme Court ruling will make that hard. SCOTUS ruled that not only can a president not be prosecuted for any official acts, nothing that even looks like an official act can be used as evidence to substantiate personal criminal behavior. This effectively means that as long as Trump is talking to a government employee, even if it's about personal business, the judiciary has to consider it an official act which makes it inadmissible in trial.

Also, at the rate he's going downhill, by the time Trump leaves office he'll be incompetent to stand trial.

Of course, what really should happen when a president abuses his power for personal gain is not that the DoJ should prosecute him, but that Congress should impeach and remove him. Of course, there's no way the GOP is going to do that, no matter what Trump does.

In theory, Congress is supposed to be the check on this sort of thing, which is why it's generally fine that the DoJ is part of the executive branch. There's significant value in ensuring that the judiciary and the cops don't report to the same boss, because there needs to be a little tension between them.

So the way it's supposed to work is If the president is abusing his control of the DoJ for personal or political purposes, Congress should impeach and convict. This is perhaps the clearest and simplest form of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" (which is a phrase that doesn't refer to either crimes or misdemeanors in the usual sense). But this assumes that there is also tension between the legislative and executive branches, so they can check and balance one another. In the current situation, the GOP does whatever Trump says, no matter how corrupt, and the GOP controls both houses.

This isn't advice for slashdotters, all of you will have your own approaches, many quite sophisticated. But, if you have family or friends who use gmail and want a simple suggestion that they can easily understand and follow, and from which they'll get results that are about as good (and maybe better), tell them to click the "report spam" button instead of using the unsubscribe link. If Google believes the unsubscription flow to be legitimate, gmail will prompt with a popup that asks if they want to unsubscribe. If they click "unsubscribe", gmail will attempt to take care of the unsubscription.

If they click "report spam" on another email from that sender, gmail will consider it spam and ask if they'd also like to block the sender. They should, of course, click "yes".

Before Trump, indeed before Trump's second term, everyone understood that this would create nasty conflicts of interest which would undermine the integrity of the office. Because all previous presidents acted responsibly, trying to avoid not only actual corruption but even the appearance of corruption, it was never an issue that had to be legislated. Now we have a blatantly corrupt president who openly sells access to the White House, not for campaign contributions but for cold cash directly into his pocket. He's almost certainly selling pardons and other political favors, too. It's a very, very sad day.

Assuming we don't continue our descent into corruption and autocracy, and assuming we can get SCOTUS to eliminate the near-total immunity they've granted to presidents, I expect we will have legislation to specifically ban presidents from "doing business" while in office, requiring them to put all of their assets into a blind trust, over which they can have no control, and can't even know what investments it holds.