This has nothing at all to do with your trustworthiness as a borrower; this is entirely focused on controlling your choice of lenders. A "BNPL" loan is a zero interest loan which -- critically -- didn't come from the bank. Obviously, these loans directly competes with the banks' business model... they can't very well have that.

I entirely understand the psychology behind people trusting an AI answer enough to abandon any further digging -- but at the same time, I'm in that 1% of people who insists on following the citation links, because I just can't bring myself to trust that the AI search results aren't going to turn out to be a hallucination or a bad interpretation of the source material... or even just a poor choice of sources. There are just far too many stories out right now about bad AI answers at best misleading people or at worst giving troubled people the excuse they wanted to go and do horrible things.

I'd really love to see significantly more people probing those citations... because the more eyeballs there are on the AI, the more likely that we will catch it when it does misbehave.

Microsoft dogfoods their hardware for their own employees. The primary intended target audience is their own software engineers, who still need x86 development platforms. Those "customers" aren't paying any $400 premium, because the hardware required to do their job is simply provided to them by Microsoft.

I doubt very much that Microsoft would be all that concerned if not a single one of these new Surface products is sold outside of that audience.

The highly peculiar situation here is that in an antitrust action brought against Alphabet, they might end up being told by the court to find a less "anticompetitive" way of spending that $20 billion a year, rather than simply continuing to siphon it all towards Apple year after year. In such a scenario, Alphabet isn't really being punished per se... rather, this would be an unheard of opportunity to break contract with Apple without any significant adverse repercussions... because the default settings have already had their desired impact.

In contrast, Apple is undeniably being punished, going forward.

This statement is demonstrably false. I have no doubt that Apple would like it to be true -- but as it happens, both of the recent CarPlay implementations with which I've had personal experience only took over a portion of the screen when active, and enabled immediate on-screen access to the vehicle's "native" interface via a series of very obviously "non-CarPlay" buttons. (One OEM added their buttons along the bottom of the screen, whereas the other added theirs on the left.)

It seems extremely likely that the rest of Bensaid's questionable statements are equally easy to debunk.

Ignoring the obvious deficiencies in the current Russian economy which render any such plans highly unlikely to ever come to fruition... this bit seems interesting:

That sounds to me an awful lot like Russia is planning to abandon all pretense of treaty compliance, and install a space-based weapons platform on their station.

And this day went down in history as the day that a rudimentary implementation of Star Trek's "food replicator" was first revealed to the world.

Gene Roddenberry would be proud.

I haven't looked at this new build yet... but in the current production version of Windows 11, there's a built-in alternative menu option that is largely targeted at power users: If you right-click on the Start menu button instead of left-clicking it, you get a more utilitarian menu that offers quick access to a whole raft of administrative features -- but which also just happens to have quicker access to the Sign-out/Shutdown/Restart options. This menu is almost entirely identical to the corresponding feature in Windows 10 and has been my go-to-option for logging off of Windows for years now.

Not that I can fathom a reason that they would do so... but does anyone with access to the latest builds happen to know if Microsoft has also started obfuscating things in this power user menu, as well? If not, then it seems to me that this (lesser-known?) feature handily alleviates most of the original article's primary complaint.

Can someone please inform the Russians that we are perfectly capable of disparaging our politicians without their help?

EU: You're implementing features in ways that we don't like! If you don't do it our way, we'll fine you for being anti-competitive!

Apple: Got it. In that case, we won't be implementing our latest whiz-bang features in the EU. Other companies can just fill the void by competing against each other in that market, and we won't interfere.

EU: Your decision to not implement your version of those features in the EU is proof that you're anti-competitive! We're going to fine you!

Apple: (eyes bulging in exasperation...)

Morgan Freeman: The EU was always going to fine Apple... it was just a matter of deciding which excuse to use.

Seriously... nothing at all.

Certainly these things do indeed happen -- but I would quibble with your notion that it happens "for the bulk of jobs." It's obviously more likely to happen for entry level positions, wherein the total number of discreet bullets on a given applicant's resume is likely to be small and the pool of applicants large; therefore your English proficiency bullet and the college degree bullet are by necessity going to be relied upon as proxies for actual skills analysis -- but I believe I've already commented on that.

I'll start this little anecdote off with my own lackluster credentials: I only have an Associate's Degree from a community college. (That's the two-year degree that practically nobody cares about, in case you've forgotten.) I earned that degree over twenty years ago, and my reason for stopping there? Quite bluntly, it was nothing more than I had absolutely no interest in continuing my "higher" education beyond that. For the most part, it bored me, and I viewed it as a waste of my time.

Thing is, recruiters/human resource critters basically stopped asking me about my degree at least ten years ago. Oh, I still to this day see the occasional job listing that "requires" a higher degree... but in my field, (software engineering) years of experience usually trumps any lack of a degree. Experience and various other qualifications that you can pick up along the way while you're in the work force quickly become far more critical than whatever the heck you did during those few short years after high school.

All of that is to say: for most people and for most careers, college is little more than a single bullet point on a resume. It means that you (probably) know some things, and that you're (probably) capable of completing assigned tasks. Competent HR people are well aware of this, and really only accept that piece of paper as a proxy for experience for their low-level positions; higher level positions necessitate an interview from someone who definitely knows some things and who can (usually) sus out candidates who are just pretending to know some things.

I make a very decent living, these days... and I don't regret abandoning academia "prematurely" in the least. Could a Bachelor's degree have jump-started my career, better than what I managed without? Maybe... that's not at all certain. Would I be any better off today? Extremely unlikely.

But critically: would I still be paying off student loans? Almost certainly.

The title really says all I had in mind -- but I'm sure there are other industries which entirely deserve this treatment as well.

I have no opinion on this topic. Just thought the entire world needed to know that.