When you say "STEM vs pretend degrees", you clearly don't know what you're talking about. There is a near continuum of "hardness" of subject, and even that's not well defined, and the quesiton of whether EE is harder than pure math doesn't have a clear answer, but which way you answer definitely affects what the opposite is.

E.g., "German" is not a STEM major, but it's also not a pretend degree. OTOH, Philosophy is often a fluff major, but some of them attempt to be as rigorous as any experimental physicist. (Most don't succeed, because it's a really difficult thing to do.)

Outlawing home schooling is too dangerous. Also MOST homeschooling is destructive, but some is the exact opposite.

I'll agree that home schooling is destructive to society, even when making accommodation to geniuses and other "special needs" students, but it's destructiveness isn't even the same order of magnitude as that of "social media". (I'll agree that social media needn't be destructive, but just about all of it is.)

Was that from "Blazing Saddles"?

That's not going to apply to factories that are built for full automation. And it's reported that that's the way the Chinese build auto manufacturing plants.

Full automation is probably an overstatement, but nearly full automation will still mean that health insurance isn't a major part of the expense.

This will be great for Haiku, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD installs, there's not the remotest possibility there'll be binaries for these. Not because the software couldn't be ported, but because the sorts of people politicians hire to write software would never be able to figure out the installer.

I suspect that if you buy the token, you don't own the stock.

Others have claimed that this is just using blockchain as the accounting log, but I'm dubious.

I don't think this counts as a marketing release, at least not one directed at people rather than corporations.. It's "interesting tech news".

Actually, I think every president at least since Eisenhower has gone beyond the written job description. I.e. used the executive branch to push things that Congress didn't authorize. It could quite plausibly be true even further back, perhaps back as far as G. Washington. Lincoln definitely did so, and so did FDR, but I don't know enough history to say that they all did.

I'll assume you are being serious.
1. Not all AIs are equivalent to ChatGPT.
2, Mistaking something that isn't a vulnerability for a vulnerability is relatively low cost.
3. Finding one vulnerability that's real can be extremely important.

NOTE: It doesn't NEED to be perfect. If it's "good enough" then it's good enough to be useful. Things that aren't vulnerabilities are relatively cheap to check.

P.S.: You shouldn't have needed this explanation.

I still can't get ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to write a decent story or do an engineering design beyond basic complexity. They're all improving, but they're best thought of as brain-storming aids rather than actual development tools.

If you're hired specifically to develop a good AI, then you *should* push back against folks that want you do act in ways that would cause you to create an inferior one.

OTOH, for Meta to fail at this is devoutly to be wished for. I'd prefer almost anyone else.

A lot depends on how much you believe their explanation. I don't. In fact, I suspect the person making the explanation didn't know the reason, and either invented what they thought would sound good, or just read something someone else handed them.

Corporations don't have a "central mind" that knows all the things they are doing and why they do them. To get a reasoned answer takes a long time, and usually isn't what they want to deliver anyway.

Since China was already trying to get local chips used rather than NVIDIA, they'll probably be in favor of this move.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.