I don't see the complete eliminated of the need for human input to go away any time soon, so the best way to do that is to spread what labor is still needed amongst a larger pool.

Eventually work weeks may drop from 40 hours to 20 hours. Instead of working 40 years before retirement you might only need to work for 15 or 20 years.

Eventually if enough of it is automated it might be like the mandatory military service everyone puts in in some countries - after high school you have to put in your required 4 years of work and then you're done.

The alternative if you get too many people unemployed with no source of income and no job prospects is that they eventually get fed up, burn it all down, and go back to a system where they can participate in the economy again (ie, if they can't work because its automated, then they eliminate the automation).

I mean, its good, but the reality of tax filing software is that it needs consistent yearly updates to contend with policy changes. I'd wager that the maintenance work on such things probably outweighs the baseline source-code of getting something working in a general sense.

Plus most Americans also have to deal with filing state income tax too which I wouldn't guess this would handle, and will require much more effort to handle since you're dealing with 41 more different sets of laws that change annually (9 states don't do state income tax).

All in all though, Turbotax. Even as is they're too expensive. There are other companies out there that will do the same thing for cheaper. For a while I used TaxAct - recently I've switched to Tax Slayer instead.

Not really. Stupid hobbies and pursuits of the ultra-rich are a great way to get them to put their money back into the economy. It helps us all if rich people spend their money as much as possible.

That too is a matter of debate. Just HOW large the sun will expand to is still a bit up in the air. It will swallow Venus and Mercury almost certainly. Earth is in a "likey" zone but not assured. Even outside of that though, depending on the sun losing some mass as it expands the orbit of Earth could shift outwards a bit, so even if it encompasses Earth's current orbit, Earth might no longer be there.

But yes, Earth will indeed long be uninhabitable by then.

Humanity may or may not be extinct though. We've got close to a billion years to head elsewhere. Even at sub-light speeds that's plenty of time to travel to another star. It may be a feat that we never accomplish, but it should be technically feasible.

I've been around since the days of 8-bit computing but I admittedly didn't step into "IBM Compatibles" until getting a 486 - I was a Commodore guy before then. By that time VGA monitors using DB15 were the norm, all serials were DB9, and DB25 was pretty much always parallel.

Those companies are more than willing to make their "crap" work with the Apple eco-system - its just that in many cases Apple is actively preventing them from doing so.

They're basically saying that if you make an external device that can interface with the phone, then other people need to be able to make similar devices without you locking them out. Just because you buy an Apple phone you shouldn't be forced to buy every other accessory from Apple.

One of the major reasons behind the existence of USB was the "U" part - Universal. IE you just have a lot of plugs on the device and plug your device into a free port, without having to worry about finding the specific port dedicated to the device you were plugging in.

Without that, USB is even WORSE than the proprietary ports it replaced because with those you physically couldn't plug something into the wrong port. If you have purpose specific USB ports you can end up plugging a wire into a port that it very much fits into perfectly but in which the device doesn't function.

Manufacturer's are free to do whatever they want - but if they want to use Microsoft's "Windows 11 Certified" marketing and labeling, they will have to abide by the terms Microsoft sets for that.

Its up to the manufacturers to decide if that label is worth changing their designs to comply with. As with most cases in the past, most big manufacturers will do so. Most fly-by-night generic brands probably will not.

Absolutely. I've flown United quite a few times. I also have flown Spirit regularly. I have absolutely NO issues with Spirit.

You know you're not getting any snacks or beverages and they're strict on the luggage sizes - so verify your luggage size ahead of time. Don't go in expecting anything more than a seat and transportation and you won't be disappointed.

Spirit has never failed to transport me between the cities that I bought a ticket for. I didn't get "nickeled and dimed" because I didn't buy any extras.

No - of course he's going to claim that the less profitable model is terrible.

Realistically budget airlines always provide what they promise: a seat on an airplane that is going to transport you from one place to another. If that's what you're expecting then it works well - AND the competition helps keep the prices of the non-budget airlines reasonable too.

There are a whole lot of people who straight up would not be able to afford to fly at all without access to budget airlines.

Yep - that's been my thought on all of this. They can still assign homework - just don't collect or grade it.

The student can decide if they do it or not (because it serves no logical sense to use ChatGPT on an assignment that is never graded).

At given periods throughout the course give no-laptop or phone allowed quizzes and tests. If they can pass the tests and quizzes without chatgpt, then it doesn't matter if they've used it as a study guide or what-not - they still know the material.

Yeah I was kinda in on the last bit of that. I was born in 81 and my first computer was a used Commodore 128 in the early 1990's, after they were getting fairly obsolete. I spent some time on BBS systems and the like for a few years before they waned in favor of the internet.

It was a fun time when everything felt kinda experimental. It ended up fueling my desire to go into Computer Science as a major in college, but I kinda wish I'd have been a little older during that time. When I think about how much fun I could have had back then at my current skill level rather than a tinkering/bumbling kid its a bit disappointing.

I will say that for a while the 3d printer scene felt a lot like that. Lots of homebuilt systems and picking up random parts to build machines and flashing tweaked firmware. Its kinda coming out of that into maturity as well but for a while there it had the same feel.

While a balanced diet is good for health, its not strictly required. It also ignores that agricultural resources can be redirected if needed. As long as a country produced a sufficient amount of food to meet the *caloric* needs of its population (regardless of what groups those fall into), then I'd consider it self sufficient.

A "brown dwarf" isn't really a "star". Its just a class of object where we start considering it too big to be considered a planet. Jupiter would need about ~65 to 70x its current *mass* (not size) to become the smallest type of star (red dwarf).

Also in this class of object its very, very important to distinguish between mass and size, because they stop scaling anything close to linearly at that scale.

Jupiter and Saturn are very similar in size. Saturn is 84.3% of the *size* of Jupiter (as it relates to diameter). It is only 29.9% the mass of Jupiter. And if you increased Jupiter's mass by 50x you likely would only increase its size by less than 5x.

Plus there are multiple ways to look at "size". Are we considering a "doubling" of size to be doubling of the diameter (which would be impressive), or doubling of the volume (which would be far less impressive visually) ?

There's a little thing on a video you can click to say you're not interested in a video that's showing up in your feed.

You can also block the whole channel but I'd recommend using the "not interested" thing and training your algorithm a bit. Eventually it'll learn that you don't want the AI stuff.

Ironic that you're training an AI to keep you away from AI, but that's the situation we're in these days.

This is only a problem for take home assignments and at-school assignments for which they've woven computers into the turn in process.

If they stick to paper tests on the subject with no electronics allowed, they can gauge the student's proficiency in the material. Won't solve the homework problem but personally if the student can pass a test on the material I don't really care if they cheated on homework assignments - if they know the stuff they know it and that's the goal.