If you'd read the article (someone linked a non-paywalled archive of it below) you'd quickly learn that's not the case. Even if other states are falling, Mississippi has still seen improvements in the number of students reading at grade level. The problem is that their numbers are still really bad (only about one-third of students) unless adjusted for demographic factors. It's still depressing, but unless the results have only come about do to lowered standards, they're headed in the right direction. That the results are still rather pathetic does suggest that they're probably not fake as anyone who wanted to juke the stats to look good would have fudged them a hell of a lot harder.

Without the full results it may not be possible to draw this conclusion. If the bottom quartile falls out it will drag down the average even if the upper three quartiles made some small adjustments improvements. I think that this is the case. The top students today are either as good or better than the top students of previous generations, but the bottom of the class is just getting passed through the system because it's become unacceptable to hold anyone back or the system actively punishes schools and educators who don't just kick the can down the road. No Child Left Behind and other bad decisions over the past two decades have created a system where this is inevitable outcome and there are too many entrenched interests to change it.

Your kids are probably going to be just fine.

They actually made some great televisions back in the day and for a time were one of the top brands for quality consumer sets. I haven't owned anything of theirs since the CRT days, but they were a company that I often considered buying from. Shame to see them go and let some Chinese manufacturer wear their brand like a skin suit.

This is just a way to squander taxpayer money by funneling it through a bunch of useless bureaucrats who have no incentive to solve any problems because that would mean eliminating their own jobs. A committee of people discussing crypto can waste gobs of time without coming to anything resembling a final proposal to be implemented. This is as wasteful and pointless as all of the NGOs that were axed by Musk and DOGE a year ago.

No, it's what some psychopathic C-suite executives want. No one else likes the model which is why it's failing miserably. Those people need to be beaten with a hose until the mere thought of software as a service makes recoil in terror.

Sucks for Microsoft that the studios they spent all of that money on aren't making games that most people care about. Sony isn't faring much better with their own acquisitions either in that regard. It was even more pointless for MS to even try that when a lot of those titles come out on PC as well. If TES: VI doesn't turn out to be a complete turd I can get it for PC. They would have better spent their money funding dozens of small teams to develop entirely new IP for their console. Even if 80% of them flop, having half a dozen exclusives that aren't sequels would give people a reason to buy an Xbox.

Try engaging in economic activity that doesn't have an ROI and see how long you can go before starving. The best you can do without a positive ROI is stagnation. Do you personally use systems that require you to put more work into them than you can get out of them? Of course not, because that would be a waste of your time. Why you expect this to function any differently at a macro level is beyond me. A company that doesn't have an ROI is wasting the resources put into it. You can only personally squander what you've previously accumulated, but applying your "logic" on a societal level is suicidal.

They're clearly missing a golden opportunity to feed the other AIs a load of complete shit and make them even worse off. The idea of corrupting the Chinese LLMs to be anti-CCP agents is certainly amusing. Train your AI to detect and corrupt other AIs. I don't know if it proves their intelligence at all, but no one can dispute that AIs will definitely be more human-like when they start forming cults.

Diet isn't a one way street. People with food allergies will obviously put their body under a lot of stress from eating something that disagrees with them. I suspect refined carbs cause stress to a degree as well as they spike insulin and lacking necessary vitamins, mineral, or proteins in the diet will also place the body under undo stress if the insufficiency causes health problems. I also think there may be a psychological effect where people who are taking some kind of action to improve their health feel less stressed just through the mere act of taking control in some small way. I've generally found that when I'm stressed out from work that taking a day just to clean up and take care of a lot of small things has helped a great deal. Of course the problem is always that when I'm stressed I feel like I do t have time for that or let the little things pile up and become seemingly larger problems I have even less time for, but that's also a mental barrier more than anything.

This would explain one of my uncles who has done just about everything wrong from a health perspective and is still alive in his 80's even though he still smokes and drinks heavily. He's never given a shit about anything and never comes off as stressed in the slightest. This is obviously not medical advice, but it's funny to see someone like that outlive some of his siblings that haven't spend several decades poisoning themselves in every conceivable fashion.

A lot of consultants are little more than woo peddlers who happen to be old chums of some manager or VP at the company. An AI can hallucinate the same crap at a fraction of the cost. On the other end of the spectrum anyone you might hire through something like Fiverr is doing something simple enough that an AI can do with whatever prompt would have been given to a human and even if it's not quite as good the fact that it was being outsourced to Fiverr suggests it wasn't anything too important. Or at least it shouldn't be unless a manager listened to some stupid consultants advise about saving money on mission critical aspects of the company.

You're missing what the article is about. What you say is true, but it's also claiming that when people without problems are given an MRI the results make it appear as though they do have a problem. If a person did have a problem they'd need an MRI anyway to determine where the problem is and how to fix it. Unless the surgeons are going to replace the entire arm, how would they know what needs to be operated on without the MRI? This only prevents needless surgeries for those who had an MRI for some other reason but had their doctor point out something that looks like a shoulder problem.

This seems like a good start for a longitudinal study. Do these people develop shoulder problems later and the MRI is just catching in very early? Is there some other factor that can predict those who will later have shoulder problems vs. those who won't? This study may not tell us much by itself, but it tells us what questions we ought to be asking to explain the results. The first step is to replicate the results from this study to ensure it wasn't due to some fluke or other factor that wasn't controlled for and from there to develop other studies to help us understand what's happening better. I think that makes it a rather useful study.

LLMs don't "know" anything, but they're able to regurgitate whatever they've been trained on. If they seem to give agreeable answers over ones which are more grounded in facts or evidence then it's because we've trained them to behave that way. Is this any surprise at all to anyone here? Have you never seen someone rewarded for being a yes man while someone who delivered a bitter truth was ignored. It turns out people generally like being told what they already want to hear. Look at the endless wave of social media that influencers telling people they can follow some special nutritional plan and lose weight, or that they don't need to lose any weight at all because being fat is healthy, that political stance X is best and will fix the country, that political stance X is horrible and will destroy the country, etc. The influencers who aren't telling people what they want to hear aren't as successful and "die out" just like the AIs that don't produce the results we want are killed off and replaced with a different model.

They're just lying because they really are doing it for the first reason you pointed out. What they should do is recognize that some of their content works fine as an audio experience and start selling audio only ads to play when delivering content in that way. Even if the audio ads don't make them as much money, the savings from not having to delivery video streams to people who aren't watching the video should make up for it.

I don't think that's the problem at all. The problem only ones doing the consolidating are the dinosaurs scooping up other dinosaurs. It's big studios trading on past successes. The people who made the games you love and remember them for are likely long gone. The one big dev team will make one game that loses out to a smaller indie game that's actually fun to play. It's never been easier for anyone to publish their own games and the most talented developers are making their own games or forming small studios instead of joining the corporate giants. Why would any creative want to work for some company like EA or Activision to churn out the next yearly slop entry when they can do whatever they want, self-publish and sell through Steam, and reap the rewards if they make a hit game? Do all of that and make a good bit of money and if it isn't enough then you can always sellout to one dinosaurs trying to cling on and remain relevant for an even bigger bit of money.

Even without AI these companies would still be lying off a lot of employees. The big studios that used to be able to sell 10 million copies are now struggling to see half that number and cannot support the large teams that they amassed. It doesn't matter if they die because there are plenty of small studios or independent developers making better games. They may not have the flashiest graphics or the tie-in to some recognizable mainstream IP, but they're actually fun to play unlike Yearly Sportsball 2026, Awful Film Tie-In Action Game, Derivative Arena Shooter, or Milked Franchise Cash-cow XIV.

AI isn't going to fix anything for this studios either. Maybe they can get an LLM to crank out uninspired shit for less money than it would take for a human to do the same, but no one is going to buy that either.