We all saw the video. We all know what it meant. We all know Musk's background and upbringing. You can quit gaslighting us. We all saw it.

With all of GitHub's great new AI features, it writes all your code for you! It doesn't matter whether the site is up at any given moment; just download your newly completed app at some point then the site is online. You're free to kick back, relax and scroll your social feeds because you don't actually have to do anything anymore. This is truly a golden era!

I don't criticise the concept, but the concern is whether it has long-term adverse neurological effects, and a "quick study" doesn't sound like it'll tell us that.

It's essential we have more ways of dealing with treatment-resistant depression. We just need to make sure that they're less harmful than the depression itself. You willl, of course, recall that each and every single bad decision by medical boards to approve a treatment has been because they wanted to rush through a "medical cure" that turned into a medical hell.

I'm not stupid enough to say that mushrooms would cause long-term damage, but equally I'm not stupid enough to say that we should only look to see if it has short-term benefits.

The correct approach would seem to be to make sure there aren't any immediate hazards and, if there aren't, then to continue the study to check for consequences of long-term use whilst authorising short-term prescription use, on the understanding that the prescription use permission will be extended outwards to whatever the data cansafely tolerate. In other words, don't deprive people of necessary treatment but equally don't claim greater confidence than the data supports.

This tightrope has only got to be walked because nobody has been seriously studying depression for a very long time and now we've got a hunge backlog of cases that are refusing to shut up, making it hard to ignore. This research should have been done years ago, but politicians were far too ignorant and far too swayed by religious money. But that doesn't mean we should rush.

I'm sure the scientists know how to keep a level head, but the CEOs and the politicians clearly can't and they're the ones who will be making the demands.

Making it continuous avoids having strange behaviours near bracket limits (where a pay raise can result in an actual pay cut). This is something the rich fear as much as anyone, hence the anxiety around whether earning more will get you more. With an S-curve, you can provide that as a hard guarantee whilst also making the current notion of high-scoring (billion and trillion dollar pay packets) completely senseless economically -- without denying the rich the glory if that's the kink they're into.

It also means that you don't have an "upper bracket" where people well beyond it are essentially getting free cash. It's also more computer-friendly. It also becomes possible to make a much higher maximum tax.

But, yeah, you're correct in principle.

Personally, I would agree with you entirely.

Now, everyone has their own preference on what a "simplified" tax code would look like.

For myself, I'd use something similar to an S-curve. Maybe even use that family of curves directly. What you want is for those who earn very little to pay very little, for there to be a region where this increases substantially (because life ain't cheap, even when you can use scale efficiencies meaningfully), and for an asymptotic region for the mega-wealthy. You feed in the expected earnings for the year, you integrate over the curve, and you divide by 12. That's the tax per month for the financial year. If a person changes earnings, either due to a raise, unemployment, or whatever, you use a weighted average, recalculate, then subtract what has already been paid.

This is simple, quick, easy, and only requires that you have expected earnings reported to somewhere central, which needs to be true for taxes anyway.

No tax brackets, no deductions, just a straight calculation by a computer. And, as computers do the taxes anyway these days, that's not much of a hardship. You simply set the parameters for the curve to be such that nobody really needs anything to be deductable.

I'm sure there will be plenty of others who advocate flat taxes or other schemes, and some of those may even work out better than what I'm suggesting. I have no ego at stake here, so if others can do better, go for it. My point is not that my idea is somehow good, it's rather that we can indeed close the loopholes and simplify the tax code - enormously - without creating massive unfairness and without having to rely on naive assumptions about economies.

Except, a hundred years ago, they didn't. And the government knows this. As do many in the public. The taxes in the 1960s and 70s were around 90% for the rich, not 5%, and yet billionaires stayed in America.

You can hate taxes all you like, but even with posting, you're using services that were invented because those taxes existed and for no other reason. The commercial sector FAR preferred the X.25 technology they were using, because they could charge a fortune and get away with it. You have Internet today because of those taxes you loathe.

And I can sympathise with that stance, too. He was in a position of authority and misused that position, escalating rather than de-escalating the situation.

The problem a lot of us on the outside have is that we can't know all the details, we can't know all the ins and outs of the situation, so I'm trying to be fair to all sides whilst not approving or condoning any behaviours that were abusive by any side. It's a very delicate line to walk, with only one side presented. Hence all the hedging in my post regarding how honest or accurate the OP is.

Players I can understand being heated - their emotional investment is, after all, absolute and total. It has to be, at that level. But the players appear to be the calmest and most rational of all the sides. I'm impressed there.

This is why NASA always packs a tin of Bondo with the mission supplies.

Instead of dealing with the issue privately, calmly, and respectfully, the judges decided to push the issue, causing the winner and the defeated player to demand an explanation, and another judge to go nuclear. Going nuclear is rarely the best option, but is frequently the only meaningful option because the other side has made any kind of civil discourse impossible due to their conduct and attitude.

Whilst I cannot judge what happened at the tournament, as I wasn't there, I can judge that the complete breakdown in communication was the fault of the judges - as they are the ones responsible for managing that communication and the situation. "They're only human" is to ignore the fact that if you assume a position of responsibility, then you are the one responsible and if you're not up to the job then that is indeed your fault. If you're not capable of handling responsibility, then you're not capable of handling positions of authority. It really is that simple.

Rex may have overstepped bounds, in order to try and force the judges to actually have some sense, but that is when you CALM THE SITUATION DOWN. You do NOT inflame it further. Competent figures of authority have an obligation to de-escalate situations that are spiralling out of control in order to ensure that everyone gets heard and everyone is happy - or at least happier. The judges were clearly not competent.

Does that mean Rex was competent, or that he should be given a license to violate confidences? No. He was also in a position of authority, albeit in other respects, and that means that he needed to be competent too and to de-escalate. However, I am sympathetic to his stance and feel that his attitude was probably the more understandable and rational, to the extent that the information in the OP is correct.

The players concerned are the only ones I consider to be wholly innocent in this matter and the only ones who seem to be interested in handling it maturely. They got emotional, nerds and geeks do that. And, yes, the table should have been set up to cope. They have decided who morally won, regardless of who technically won, and I consider that their right.

Newbie.

Nobody "forces". Nobody "leeches". (Unless they're called Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Ubuntu...) But not because of any mystery - but because open source is about scratching itches. AND THERE IS NO OBLIGATION THAT THE ITCHES BE YOURS.

For f's sake, you're a bloody idiot if you honestly think that capitalist concepts of motivation are remotely interesting. Indeed, you should read the psychology paper on the FSF website and learn how people actually work.

I am perfectly happy to maintain the drivers, I don't NEED the hardware because I know that the drivers worked previously (and worked perfectly well). The only thing I need to do is to ensure that the connection to the kernel is working correctly and that the communication with the bus is working corrctly. Neither of which is exactly difficult. Any dweeb can do that. The device is an irrelevancy. If it's not under development, then the API can't change. That should be obvious, even to an idiot like you.

The drivers have, however, been removed from the kernel, so the issue is moot. However, that too is an irrelevancy. It is NOT HARD to maintain this stuff. The stuff I've done for work was hard. Developing the drivers in the first place would have been hard. But all the hard work has been done. This is simply logic to interface correctly to modern kernels and get the instructions over a modern bus. And that's trivial. There is no actual hard stuff left to do, that was all done.

You seem to think that us programmers care about money. Some might, and frankly I don't hold anything but contempt for them. I care about doing a good job. Yes, it's nice to have a roof over my head, but that's something a regular job can do. If there was universal income, I'd still be writing software and maintaining systems, same as I do today, but I'd be willing to do so for free because it's stuff I enjoy. Computers are actually worth talking you. You, not so much. Frankly, people like you could get run over by a bus tomorrow and it wouldn't bother me. I hold money grubbers like yourself somewhere between contempt and disgust.

Far as I'm concerned, I'm paid only because it's necessary in the current economic climate, because politicians are too stupid to cope with the idea that people ENJOY technical stuff.

Back when Freshmeat was running, I was managing 120 records for Open Source projects, ran 5 of my own, maintained 7 MUDs/MUSHes, an IPv6 node on the 6Bone, ran assorted mainling lists, and provided an open web cache and search engine for anyone in the north of England wanting to access the Internet faster than the transatlantic link provided at the time. I did this for free, because it was trivial, fun, and provided a service to others. I barely noticed the workload because it wasn't work.

I don't "force" others. Nor am I "forced". Such imagery is for the morons of this world, which you clearly identify yourself as being. I exist, therefore I do.

Now, I *DO* have the knowledge to write and maintain Linux drivers - and have done so professionally.

I am willing to write code under an open source license for free - and have done that as well.

Anyone who claims "proficiency" in a language has missed the entire point of programming. You design software around a paradigm, the syntactic sugar is an irrelevancy. Which is why I can use something in the order of 20-25 languages with effective fluency and around 17 operating systems. Because I simply don't care about the trivia, and care only about the mechanics.

Side mirrors almost always leave a large blind spot directly behind and close to the vehicle. There's a reason that when firefighters are reversing their appliances they always have at least one of the crew physically get out and watch the area behind the vehicle.

Even a rear window and rear view mirror almost always leave a significant blind spot low and close behind the vehicle, which is why reversing cameras became a thing. When they're done well, they really are significantly safer, as well as sometimes making it a lot more reliable for most people to park the vehicle in difficult spaces.

One of the modern innovations I really would like to have is full AR on my windscreen. I want unexpected hazards highlighted in real time, particularly those that are more easily detectable by non-visual sensors, like big potholes or animals obscured by vegetation near the side of a country road. I want the actual driving line I need to take to follow my planned route through complex junctions overlaid slightly on my view of the road ahead. I want light amplification for night driving, ideally combined with some other technology that can reduce the glare from oncoming headlights to prevent dazzle.

Although I only want all of this if (a) it's implemented well and (b) any additional data it uses is reliably up-to-date and (c) there's an emergency shut-off that instantly clears everything off the windscreen in case anything goes wrong.

Don't worry. You probably have funky modern door handles that don't work when the power goes out anyway. Not that the power in an EV is likely to go out if it's underwater or on fire or anything.