Learn to not make mistakes the same way musicians do. Practise as slowly as you have to to not make mistakes. Then slowly speed up, while remaining intolerant of mistakes. Also as an exercise, one I heard about from my Mum when she was taught professionally, was playing music with a clear pulse, and typing in time with the music: either one correct key per beat, or zero. But not more, and no mistakes. But treat typing as a discipline akin to playing the piano or some other musical instrument.

For those learning touch typing, especially self taught, take the attitude that there is far more than just typing without looking, and using particular fingers to press particular keys.

The overall aim is to type: quickly, accurately, with minimal effort, and with good ergonomics.
As for what you type, for many tasks, it is useful to have your eyesight free to look at other things.
(It is similar with, say, the piano where if you want to read chords, lyrics, or sheet music while playing,
then you need to be able to play without looking at your hands.)
Having your eyesight free for other things is one of the reasons to touch type, consider reading
something out of a textbook, and how much harder it is to type what you see if you have to keep
looking back and forth between your hands, the source text and/or the screen.

Then, thinking old school, professional typists had to be able to type accurately. One single character
wrong, and they can probably get away with tipex and retyping it, but that takes a comparative age
compared to not making the mistake in the first place and going a little slower. (I write this as someone
who was self-taught, and wish I'd drilled accuracy into my technique way earlier.) Especially if
coding, not making typos is important. So learning not to make them is important. And as a suggestion,
consider how a pianist learns to press the right keys in the right order without making a mistake.
Treat accuracy in typing as just as important as accuracy when playing a musical instrument.
The trick is to go as slowly as you have to, to ensure correctness, and then only speed up when
you can do things correctly. If you go faster than that, you rush, you make errors, and then you learn
to make more errors, and to be tolerant of errors. Tolerance of errors is how errors creep in.

But going back to what I said: efficiency, accuracy, speed, effortlessness, and ergonomics.
Those are your real priorities, and they are often well-served by learning touch typing properly.

That kinda depends on the level of taxation applied to the corporates and those who chose to supplement their UBI by doing some additional work for extra income, which would therefore be taxable. If you have enough revenue from taxation to cover everything else with a surplus, then UBI can be raised above "subsistence level" (which the minimum it would need to be if it's supplanting most current forms of welfare) to something a bit more comfortable. OP is probably right on the "not everyone" front though; if it happens, UBI is going to replace some current unemployment benefits outright, and there are plenty of examples of people who don't manage that income wisely, so we shouldn't expect that to change just because it is - from their perspective - just given a different name?

However, on the face of it, and given UBI experiments have shown recipients still tend to seek out and undertake some work, that would still tend to indicate most of the taxes necesary to fund it are going to have to come from corporates and investment income. In otherwords, reducing the incomes (in the form of bonuses and dividends) of exactly the kind of people who, as TFS demonstrates, are the least likely to want to pay those taxes just so others don't have to work, even thought they've probably never actually done a hard day's work in their life either. So, while I think UBI could absolutely work in principle, I suspect it's going to be a real mixed bag as to how well, and how comfortable the lives on it without supplementary income is likely to be. Where capitalism is king, like the US, UBI would never, ever, get above a level that doesn't even qualify as "subsistence", but I think it would definitely have a realistic chance in places like Scandinavia where they've long since accepted high taxes are a necessity for a higher overall standard of life, and - strange as it may seem - the Middle East where personal taxes tend to be near zero anyway.

The article seems to agree with the guy on slashdot.

> “I’m an optimist, in the sense that I think we will build a sustainable future,” Wagner says. “But it’s going to take 30 or 40 years, and by then, it’s going to be too late for a lot of the creatures that I love.

Don't forget technical debt. Those excel spreadsheets and what not work fine for a while. When a version of excel makes some change, or deprecates part of the code used, or someone wants to put it in a proper system where the data isn't siloed, all hell breaks loose. And seeing as there are lots of these things around in an average enterprise, it can get to be a real headache.

You've pretty much just described a light form of RAD tools, giving that level of detail. And they've been translating logic to code since the '90s.

This bit amazes me:

a consultant rushed to warn clients to be "extra careful" sharing sensitive data "with ChatGPT or through OpenAI's API for now," warning, "your outputs could eventually be read by others, even if you opted out of training data sharing or used 'temporary chat'!"

I mean, seriously? This is one of a whole bunch of companies that have been blatently hoovering up any data they can get their hands on without any regard to copyright, constraints placed via things like robots.txt, or thought to the hosting costs that can be incurred by continual spidering of vast amounts of website data, and you *honestly* thought you could trust them with the data you *chose* to provide them with or that it might not backfire like this?

Zuckerberg was right all along; "Dumb Fucks" indeed.

you appear to be "just saying" that you believe the OP was referring to an actual, electrified edible fruit. You're welcome to your opinion, but I'm not buying it.

...and then there's this.

"This" is a cast iron example of why everyone involved in AI - the content producers, AI companies, VCs backing them, policitians, and users - need to deal with the elephant in the room; copyright law was not designed for the digital age, and certainly wasn't designed for the wholesale ingestation and regurgitation of AI engines. That the media companies, usually the first to cry "foul" and demand outrageous amounts of damages because copyright, are themselves playing fast and loose with other's content while complaining about their own being used as training data more than proves the point it's way past its sell by date.

While amended since, the Berne Convention dates from 1886. AI isn't a crisis for copyright; it's an opportunity to give it a thorough overall, make it fairer for all given it's now so easy to content shift and share data, and generally fit for purpose and fair for the 21st century and beyond. Fail to do so, and it's just a matter of time before the legal fallout (and damages) under the current system are going to give the lawyers on the winning sides of the inevitable disputes a whole new fleet of superyachts.

I can't think of a single other country that claims to be civilised that has a tax code so complicated you need vast amounts of software and a high-power computer just to file what is properly owed.

TLDR version: The system is engineered to be too complex for humans, which is the mark of a very very badly designed system that is suboptimal, inefficient, expensive, and useless.

Let's pretend for a moment that you've a tax system that taxes the nth dollar at the nth point along a particular curve. We can argue about which curve is approporiate some other time, my own opinion is that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay on what you earn. However, not everyone agrees with that, so let's keep it nice and generic and say that it's "some curve" (which Libertarians can define as a straight line if they absolutely want). You now don't have to adjust anything, ever. The employer notifies the IRS that $X was earned, the computer their end performs a definite integral between N (the top of the curve at the last point you paid tax) and N+X, and informs the employer that N+X is the money owed for that interval.

Nobody actually does it this way, at the moment, but that's beside the point. We need to be able to define what the minimum necessary level of complexity is before we can identify how far we are from it. The above amount has no exemptions, but honestly, trying to coerce people to spend money in particular ways isn't particuarly effective, especially if you then need a computer to work through the form because you can't understand what behaviours would actually influence the tax. If nobody (other than the very rich) have the time, energy, or motivation to find out how they're supposed to be being guided, then they're effectively unguided and you're better off with a simple system that simply taxes less in the early amounts.

This, then, is as simple as a tax system can get - one calculation per amount earned, with no forms and no tax software needed.

It does mean that, for middle-income and above, the paycheck will vary with time, but if you know how much you're going to earn in a year then you know what each paycheck will have in it. This requires a small Excel macro to calculate, not an expensive software package that mysteriously needs updating continuously, and if you're any good at money management, then it really really doesn't matter. If you aren't, then it still doesn't matter, because you'd still not cope with the existing system anyway.

In practice, it's not likely any country would actually implement a system this simple, because the rich would complain like anything and it's hard to win elections if the rich are paying your opponent and not you. But we now have a metric.

The UK system, which doesn't require the filling out of vast numbers of forms, is not quite this level of simple, but it's not horribly complicated. The difference between theoretical and actual is not great, but it's tolerable. If anyone wants to use the theoretical and derive an actual score for the UK system, they're welcome to do so. I'd be interested to see it.

The US, who left the UK for tax reasons (or was that Hotblack Desiato, I get them confused) has a much much more complex system. I'd say needlessly complicated, but it's fairly obvious it's complicated precisely to make those who are money-stressed and time-stressed pay more than they technically owe, and those who are rich and can afford accountants for other reasons pay less. Again, if anyone wants to produce a score, I'd be interested to see it.

TFA is vague as hell about what they actually did here since there are any number of ways of interpreting "Take some legacy code, like COBOL or Fortran, and covert it into a human-readable specification". Given what Morgan Stanley does, I'd assume when they say "specification" that they actually mean it, so I'm hoping it's not just converting legacy code on a line-by-line basis and actually producing a usable specification for entire functions that defines the expected input and outputs and leaves it up to a human to figure out how to make that happen efficiently in the desired target language(s).

Either way, leaving it up to a human to interpret that and write the more modern code based function (perhaps also with the aid of AI) seems like a much more practical use of current AI engines than trusting the AI to do the whole thing and then spending even more time than it would have taken a human to do the whole thing from scratch figuring out where the AI got something wrong. COBOL is one thing because it's pretty easy to parse given a little time, but my hunch is the big (and probably overstated) time saving here is more likely to come at least in part from not having younger coders who have never come across it before having to get to grips with something more cryptic like Fortran, or even some early "heavily optimised with obscure coding tricks" C for that matter.

Already done, years ago:

Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze
Electrical banana
Is bound to be the very next phase

-Mellow Yellow, Donovan (1966)

Somewhat old now (it's from 2008), but his might be one of the more honest exposes of life the DPRK, albeit mostly from a moving train. It's a lengthy travelogue by a big fan of rail travel who travels to Pyongyang from Vienna via Russia on a variety of trains over a number of weeks using an "unofficial" tourist crossing, so most of the photos inside the DPRK are not going to be the typical staged locations and setups official tours might take, just someone with no particular axe to grind I can see who got a bunch photos and interactions taken while unescorted between the border and Pyongyang.

It's a *very* long article across many pages and a fascinating read, but if you want to skip to the crossing from Russia into the DPRK start here.. My take is that it confirms a lot you might suspect or have been told about the DPRK, or any other regime that is highly authoritarian and regimented, but also dispels the notion that the country is some kind of dreary, charmless, technological throwback to the dark ages unless it serves the immediate purposes of the military and of the Kim family, but YMMV.

You don't need to simulate all that, at least initially. Scan in the brains of people who are at extremely high risk of stroke or other brain damage. If one of them suffers a lethal stroke, but their body is otherwise fine, you HAVE a full set of senses. You just need to install a way of multiplexing/demultiplexing the data from those senses and muscles, and have a radio feed - WiFi 7 should have adequate capacity.

Yes, this is very scifiish, but at this point, so is scanning in a whole brain. If you have the technology to do that, you've the technology to set up a radio feed.