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 point is more like that the people who hold power will not leave most other people alone because nothing so needs regulation as other people's habits. Take for example the US Republican Party, a group of people who for as long as I have observed US politics have professed to be in favour of limited government while at the same time using the power of government to create for themselves safe seats in Congress. Now, just in case you think I'm unfairly victimising the Republicans, I'll freely admit that the Democrats did this too. That's why the US has a bipartisan gerrymandering problem but for a long time there was still a certain equilibrium between the Reps and Dems because they both (foolishly in Maciavelli's eyes if he were here to observe US politics) had a certain respect for the institutions of American democracy. The tipping point came when the Republicans got an utterly amoral leader in Donald Trump who does not care about norms, does not care about democracy, does not care about the House of Representatives, does not care abut the nuances of Senate rules and traditions, a man who is completely willing to ignore court rulings unless they are in his favour and to use the full weight of the administrative state to crush any and all opposition to the point that he is now purging the US armed forces with a view to fill their leadership with yes men who he thinks will enable him to use the US armed forces to enforce his will (Machiavelli would have liked this man). So, what happened to the US Republican fondness for limited government? It was flushed down the toilet when those professing to favour limited government discovered how useful big government power can be to both enrich themselves and to regulate other people's habits.

Nobody is really in favour of limited government because when push comes to shove those who profess being in favour of limited government remain so only until they get into power. When they gain power and discover how useful government's power to intimidate and coerce people is when you want to silence all dissenting voices and insure you stay in power because, obviously, you are the only ones who really know what's best for the nation and because without your infallible guiding hand the nation would surely be doomed.

They got to collect 30% of developers money for 20 years and will likely only be required to refund a tiny fraction. This isn't a mistake its weaponized disregard for what's right. Apple is only starting to follow the rules now after they were threatened with criminal contempt, that's how little their cost is of flaunting the law.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

an LLM is not anywhere near human enough to be granted anything resembling human rights or constitutional protections.

I look at it from the other direction: the union of an LLM and its human owner isn't inhuman enough to be spared the usual consequences of their speech.

You don't need to write a bot to follow me around and spam me; you could do it yourself. And you'd get in trouble. When you told the judge "freeze peach," the judge and I would agree with you that, yes, you did have the right to accrue the civil liability that we're discussing here in court.

And If Congress had passed a law that you didn't have that right anymore, you and I would be standing right next to each other, firing our muskets at those Congresscritters. Your right to free speech shall not be infringed, whether we're talking about just you, or you with the aid of software agents working at your direction on your behalf.

But be careful what you do with that. You might rack up quite a bill!

And this is supposed to replace all software developers and engineers by 2027 and end all human labour by 2030? ... LOL ... I'm sure these LLMs will have their uses but they are't even close to living up to the hype.

That would be 2028. Eight is an auspicious number to the Chinese, and it'll take advantage of the US presidential elections and the inevitable chaos around Trump refusing to leave office plus, of course, the aftermath from the shit that went down in 2026.

I'd say more, but I've got some sticks that need sharpening.

Only if the states get together and suitably 'compensate' the guy behind the resolute desk.

Why? Oh right, because a corporation being made to compensate you for the damage they caused when they pumped a truckload of toxic waste into your living room is Sooooo UNFAIR!!

to climb on one of the death tubes

Well, there's part of your problem. The rest of us get in the death tube.

It used to be almost every tech magazine had a CD or DVD stuck to the front of it every month, but I don't think I've seen one on the newsagent's shelf doing that for several years now, so that's not likely to be the reason for the magazine's shutdown. Modern cases not actually including a drive bay where you can install the necessary drive might have something to do with that lack of bundled disks of mostly crap software demos though. That said, back in the day when it cover disks were still a thing, Linux Format did include the latest release of many of the main distros, and a lot of niche/specialist ones, at some point each year for those who were still limping along on DSL or even dial-up, making it one of the more useful bundled disks offered each month..