So what do you get from using a credit card if you always pay it off? Are you magically always one month behind being able to afford anything?

I'm guessing it's not that. Do you get points? Services? Goodies? I wonder how credit card companies pay for those? Oh yeah, you pay for them - and that's even if you use the stuff that comes "with" credit cards. Truly the ultimate middleman/redistribution scheme.

Yes, I'm sure Nintendo's lawyers have not considered the legality of their business practices in their largest market. *rolls eyes*

Have you taken apart everything in your home to ensure there are no recording devices embedded inside them? Get a grip, bro.

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.

Enjoyable and appropriate reference.

/r/duck

Reddit's use of AI for handing out bans is getting concerning.

What really killed it is pointy headed morons replying "JuSt GoOgLe It" to every damned question. As a result, any attempt to google it just returned a few pages of said morons and no useful answer. If there was an actual answer on stack overflow, it was a needle in a haystack.

The show fell off a cliff with Jodie Whittaker and not at all because of her. The first three or so episodes I watched she put on a reasonably good performance. But the material they gave her to work with was just atrocious. Utter crap. Stuff they must've dug out of the very bottom of the "rejected ideas" bin.

The ensemble cast didn't work, like at all. I never cared for any of them even the tiniest bit. The Doctor, the most feared creature in the universe, a being able to rip reality apart and put it back together, someone who can start or end wars with a few words. The Doctor who literally said to the Aliens of the universe assembled above Earth as he announced he'll stand in their way and he has neither a plan nor any weapons, to "do the smart thing. Let somebody else try first." - and they all decided to fuck off instead.

So THAT Doctor suddenly became a bumbling idiot who succeeded only through luck and plot convenience.

So maybe going back to Rose is a chance of a restart. After all, she _was_ Bad Wolf. Though I fear they'll just cheap out with some "oh, I just picked a familiar face at random" bullshit.

I wish, but nah, this is pure SciFi.

Why? Because it's not all in the brain. The brain is connected to the entire nervous system. The "mind-body duality" doesn't exist. You're not a mind that has a body, you're a body that has a mind. We know that the body can survive without the mind (coma patients, some extreme cases of mental or debilitating illness, etc.) - but there isn't one case of a mind without a body.

Even if you could upload yourself to a supercomputer with the same processing power as your brain, I'm pretty sure the first dozens or hundreds of such experiments will go the SpaceX Starship way - lots of fireworks for every tiny bit of ground gained.

I personally think that we should do work on replicating less complex parts of the nervous system first. One, we'll need it if we want to do full mind digitalisation. Two, it can help people today (amputees, etc.). Three, there is already some work with great progress going on.

I double-checked and it's not April 1st.

WTF?

Capitalism is now packaging wage-slavery as a product and SELLING it to us?

I hope the AIs evolve quickly to take over. My hope for humanity is melting faster than the ice caps.

Yeah. Never, ever, do that. I've run a few online communities. Back when your own forum was still a thing and you could survive without being a group on Facebook, a subreddit or a Stackoverflow.

Your most active users aren't always your best users, and they almost always are NOT the ones you want to have as moderators.

If I could do all that again, I would give mod rights to the people who contribute just a bit, but consistently over a long time, and who read more than they write.

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.

It doesn't have to. At the end of the fiscal year, cash in the bond for a cool 3 billion in revenue on the books.

Meanwhile, new analysis and techniques come along (often in areas related to security and resilience to hacks) from time to time that no AI is going to manage.

Vibe coding is essentially cargo cult programming if you peek behind the curtain.

AI isn't actually intelligent in the general sense and doesn't actually understand the problem. Vibe programming is when you request something from the LLM and it essentally "says to itself" when programmers are asked for something like that they usually write something like this.

At best, LLMs can be the new code monkey. They will not consider maintainability or expandability. They have no ability to anticipate that XYZ feature will probably be requested sooner or later, so the design needs to at least be able to accommodate that to avoid a complete re-write.

Give it a few years and watch as some poor schlep has to try to do something with the steaming pile to get it to do XYZ without requiring a whole new system with data loaded from scratch. You'll have to pay those people handsomely because it will be nasty work nobody wants to do. The AI won't likely be able to help you. We know that when you feed the output of AI into the input, it tends to go crazy and start babbling about quantum fluctuations and giving people 6 fingers.