But has it been your job to do this every minute *all day long*? I doubt it. News shows waste so much time repeating themselves and showing nice visuals that few people actually concentrate on what they say, treating it more as a background noise generator with occasional cute pet videos or hurricanes pounding a marina. If you're reading a book, say on the financials of the Nazi economy, you are skeptical on the broad overall level, not every single detail reported; you don't worry that it's made up a complete production category from scratch, including the government ministry and minister responsible. Even if you're reading reports on the financials of a corporate division, the skepticism is nowhere near as pervasive as necessary with AI, which can hallucinate in the most unexpected places, and when you extend that to code, where literally every character can be hallucinated, that is the true full time skepticism at issue.

The last thing bureaucrats want is to solve the problems that created and sustain their jobs. Independent thinking workers scare the daylights out of them. And since the only measure of their success is counting subordinates, measuring budgets, and issuing new regulations, memos must continue to pour forth lest the outside world think they have solved their problems and are no longer necessary.

And dealing with bureaucratic paperwork is always a decent distraction. The more nonsensical paperwork lets you vent some of your frustration too. Taking that away doesn't help.

Intelligent people also didn't used to do it all day long, and humans provide clues that AIs are incapable of.

Make sure you wear them on the correct location on your belt.

To an extent. X has two clipboards, although I don't know what they are called. Highlight some terminal text, use CTRL-SHIFT-C to copy it to one clipboard. Highlight some other terminal text, leave the terminal, go to the browser. CTRL-C pastes the first clipboard, MIDDLE-BUTTON pastes the second clipboard. It's incredibly handy.

I despise this trend away from the UNIX philosophy of simple tools combined by users to do things. I despise systemd taking on more and more roles. I despise demonizing X11's client-server model in favor of Wayland's one monolithic bastard. I despise getting rid of middle click copy-paste. I recently tried to install Ubuntu 25 and discovered they've eliminated middle button emulation.

Ever since I was a kid and read Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, one chapter in particular has stuck with me -- some planet has a nuclear power plant blow up, and the Galactic Empire's solution was to shut down all nuclear power plants. That's how I feel about all this UNIX backsliding. "We don't understand it. Get rid of it."

Bah.

Instead of trying to fix X11's security problems, the powers that be want to get rid of it. I have many times used its client-server model on remote servers. Sure, it's not necessary, just as fire is not necessary, since we could all eat raw food, even meat. But it sure made problems easier to diagnose.

I'd be impressed with her initiative and imagination. That's far more valuable than a four year degree.

Alas, they've already abused that for gun confiscation laws. Shame, it would have matched requiring cars to follow a man waving a flag.

I have exactly the same problem copying code I have found on the web and now AI. Typing it in instead of copy pasting is a huge help, especially if I change variable and function names and reformat on the fly.

I came across some Emacs elisp code I'd written about 25 years ago, and it looked pretty useful. Emacs didn't like it. I researched the functions and variables and they apparently had been rejiggered about 5 years later. I said to myself, Self, sez I, this could be an interesting AI test. I could probably make this do what I want in a few minutes now if I did it from scratch, but that wouldn't help me understand why it was written that way 25 years ago.

So I asked Grok. I was pleasantly surprised to find it understood 25 year old elisp code just fine, explained when and how they had been rejiggered, and rewrite it for the current standards. That was more than I had expected and well worth the time invested.

One other time Grok surprised me was asking how much of FDR's New Deal legislation would have passed if it had required 2/3 passage instead of just 1/2. Not only did it name the legislation which would not have passed, it also named all the legislation which had passed by voice vote and there was no way to know if 2/3 had voted for it. The couple of bills I checked did match and were not hallucinations. The voice vote business was a nice surprise.

I program now for fun, not professionally. The idea of "offshoring" the fun to AI doesn't interest me. But trying to find 25-year-old documentation and when it changed doesn't sound like fun, and I'm glad to know I can offshore at least some of the dreary parts.

Not the encore dump? Shame, shame!

Thanks for that link. Interesting that he never mentions home security cameras, doorbell cameras, etc, except possibly covered by some of the exceptions. Also interesting that "journalists" have an explicit exception; I wonder how they define "journalist" today, where everyone can be a journalist of some sort.

He had permission from the building manager. Think about it: if it was illegal, how could any businesses or homes have any security camera?

I don't fall for clickbait. But it's impossible to ignore the headlines, and sometimes it's fun to read how silly they get, like the UN chief claiming the Earth is boiling.

I apologize for assuming you meant personal criticisms. There's too much of it everywhere, not just slashdot, and I shouldn't assume everyone is doing it.

When slashdot started requiring logins to avoid most of the spambots, it annoyed me, and when I did finally sign up, my handle was my protest. It was amazing back then how many others accused me of hiding behind the anonymous handle.