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Comment Re:Polls don't vote (Score 1) 196

The UK mostly doesn't do voter suppression. However, they did for the Referendum. Basically, anyone who might not be racist was not permitted to vote.

Even then, 48% still insisted on staying in the EU.

One of the reasons the UK doesn't do voter suppression the way the US does is because (until very recently) the House of Lords had a lot of people in it who owed no favours at all to the political elite but did have a huge responsibility to making sure that things functioned in the long term. This has since been corrupted, so the HoL is no longer anything like as independent and politically neutral as it once was. Rather, the two main parties have stuffed it full of sycophants, which makes it useless. Which, of course, was the intended effect.

Because those in the HoL were partly hereditary (and therefore not under anyone's thumb and impossible to manipulate) and partly chosen on actual merit (they'd done stuff that was actually impressive and good for the country), the HoL were the true guardians of the Constitution and the nation. The House of Commons has always been corrupt and degenerate, so a parallel system that politicians couldn't control meant their worst excesses would always be curbed. The HoL has defended the common person FAR FAR more often than anyone in the Commons ever has.

This didn't make the HoL perfect, or even advisable to retain in its historic form, but it made it immune to the corruption that we were seeing in the rest of the system. What we needed was a replacement system that retained that immunity and improved on it.

Comment Re:Like A Crypto Billionaire (Score 1) 298

Yeeees and no. It matters in terms of loans he can get from banks. A trillionaire gets an awful lot better deal than anyone else.

So although he cannot liquidate a trillion dollars, there's a decent chance he can borrow at exceptionally low interest rates enough to do pretty much whatever he wants because he has the moniker.

Comment Re:Even a trillion dollars can't buy self esteem (Score 1) 298

It's not hard to be morally superior to a childish self-righteous socipoath.

He's not bright, he's not clever, he IS abusive, and he is exceptionally rich. However, only an idiot equates "rich" with "better".

I would say more than half of Slashdot can match or exceed his intelligence. And that's despite the fact that Slashdot has attracted pet rocks as users in recent years. Actually, truth be told, it's because of that. Back in the younger days of Slashdot, I'd say 95% of the regulars were smarter than Musk.

All Musk has is money. And I can understand you envying that. But here's the thing. Smart people don't talk their company's value down. Smart people invest their money. Musk throws it around, such as buying Twitter and destroying the userbase.

Musk is not your friend.

Comment Re: Bill Gates is so happy! (Score 1) 155

If the problem was being genetically dead, then why do we have demand for sperm and egg donations? Both are a warrant for at least one of the parents not to have the genes procreated. Same with adoptions. Apparently, feeling to be a parent is not directly linked with actual genetics. And so I doubt any claim that childless people are inherently unhappy because their genes are not carried on.

Submission + - College Students Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Read (futurism.com)

schwit1 writes: In a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education , university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read "without complaint" as an undergraduate a decade ago.

One student confessed that the reason they didn't finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there's no doubt that they're not alone.

Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment's "basic" level in reading, meaning they likely "cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text." Younger children aren't better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can't read at a proficient level.

"What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes. "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires."

Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can't understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.

More flagrantly detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech's adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.

Comment Re:Disclaimer Isn't Shown (Score 5, Informative) 90

Here, we have to differentiate two things. First, what you can trust, and here i agree with you. And second, what you can claim. And just because I should not believe you in the first place, does not give you the right to claim false things about someone else.

You are still guilty of libel, and as the court decided, the false claims were not in the links, but hallucinated by the AI. And because Google coded the AI and operated the AI, its products are products of Google, and Google can not claim that they are just reporting about libelous claims as they could have argued with unredacted search results, they just linked to.

Comment Re:Users! (Score 1) 83

That is precisely why it is considered extremely bad practice to have developers test their own code beyond basic sanity-checking. Developers will inherently test with the very same assumptions they made when they coded, so will never capture the areas in which their work is most likely to be fragile.

Unfortunately, QA teams just aren't up to decent QA. They tend to miss all kinds of very obvious problems and flaws. In part because deadlines matter more than their jobs and they know it.

Comment Re:Why not let (Score 3, Interesting) 75

Apple has not the size to forego 400 million potential customers. And they can still sell iPhones without Siri in Europe. Hence, the shareholders will pressure Apple management to realize the revenue, even if that means not installing Siri on the devices.

Besides that, many companies operating in both North America and Europe want the same mobile devices on both sides of the pond, to streamline roll-out and control processes for the devices, and if they decided for Apple in the U.S., they will try to strong-arm Apple into selling law-compliant devices in Europe, by threatening to look for alternatives for North America too, so they can avoid doubling their IT structures.

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