I agree with Linus, the bad actors won't follow the rules.

I also tend to agree that it's best not to make this a political fight. The problem with AI slop isn't that it's AI-generated, it's that it's low-quality slop. Yes, the former is a strong indicator that it's also the latter, but rejecting code because it's low-quality slop rather than because it's AI-generated avoids a long-drawn-out argument that doesn't server any technical purpose. I do support an explicit provision allowing maintainers to blacklist contributors who consistently submit low-quality slop on the grounds that checking it wastes more of the maintainers time than the rare exception justifies. Let that extend to entire contributing organizations where the problem is endemic. If they improve, put the burden on them to convince other non-blacklisted contributors to vouch for them having changed and convince the maintainers to look at their submissions.

... stuff that matters... wait, why is this on Slashdot? I mean yeah, I eat pizza, but so does like, everyone else pretty much.

Exactly, code is either correct, standards complaint, efficent, understandable, and licensed appropriately or it fails at being one or more of those things. Linus and the other maintainers are not about to start accept patches they don't like, understand, or lack proper attribution / documentation.

So it really does not matter what the authoring process was, be how we normally think programmers work, the result of long conversations with inanimate plastic ducks, debates with the resident house cat, or the rust of some prompting with chat-gpt.

While I'm generally a fiscal conservative, you can't *always* balance the budget. The average person thinks that when the government spends more than it takes in, it's just like a household spending more than it has in income, and that's simply not true. When the government spends more, yes it has to borrow, but it's crucial to understand what the money is being spent on. If a homeowner borrows money on a credit card to buy a television, that's bad debt. But if a business borrows a million dollars to buy a new piece of equipment with a 3-year payback, or even a 12-year payback, that might be a good financial decision. In government, if you spend money on infrastructure like a bridge or a railway line, that can definitely be a good investment, and if you spend money on handing out cheques to the poor, that *can* be a good investment (i.e. if you're in the spiral of a demand-side recession) but it can also be a terrible investment (i.e. if demand is outstripping supply and we're at risk of pushing up inflation). So borrowing because you expect a return on your spending in the future can be a good idea for government, just like it can be a good idea for businesses. And then you have to take into account that the government can *always* pay back its debt by simply printing money. You don't want to do this too much, because it's essentially a tax on all assets and spikes inflation, but it's an option that the typical household, or even business, doesn't have.

Not a bad plan but we could get the same impact just showing tax pays what portion of federal revenue was used to pay interest on debt. I guess that is not entirely accurate as there are federal revenues that we don't nominally consider taxes, but that is pretty small portion.

It might not matter much either as its all fungible. It looks for FY2025 (ended in October) about 19 cents of every federal dollar went to interest. So you could reasonably claim that 19% of everyone individual liability goes to interest. It would be very interesting in deed if part of filing your annual tax return was signing a statement recognizing you paid $$$$ of the interest on the federal debt in the prior year...

Kinda like how a lot of people say we really should do away with withholding. Make EVERYONE estimate their income tax and pay monthly. I have little doubt it would WILDLY change the entire conversation. Not always in ways even conservatives predict. For folks that get refundable credits and don't have enough offsetting income receiving the tax refund in installments through the year might be enjoyed. These are often the folks with the least ability to manage cash flow after all.

Sorry can't get behind using interest in a measure of indebtedness because its already the mix implicitly.

More debt generally should be more GDP in almost all cases, other then perhaps paying tribute to another nation or something, and more debt is generally always going to mean more interest unless people are lending for free. So the two are really coupled in exactly the same way the more traditional measure debt-to-GDP are.

but...

Interest is affected by the demand for government debt which is of course tied to all kinds of other political events and international capital flow trends. Additionally using widely would invite all kinds of trap setting. Suppose for a moment an emboldened Russia enjoying some economic and industrial recovery a few years following finally securing control of Eastern Ukraine decides, yes it will move into other former Soviet sphere now EU member states. Suddenly the risk of hugely destructive warfare on the continent gives us a sharply discounted EU bond market. Suddenly Uncle Sam looks like the historic safety play it historically has been again. The sitting administration decides, sure lets issue a bunch of short term debt because we can do so at favorable rates while not selling more long term instruments, shifting the short to long term ratio significantly. This allows them to sell a grate fiscal picture to the voters in terms of intrest-to-GDP; but... what happens when things settle down and all that short term paper has to roll without the favorable rates being available any longer. The next admin (even if its the same one re-elected) finds itself bag holding...

TL:DR fiscal health should not be about being healthy relative to your peers (global debt markets a.k.a interest rates) it should be about absolute terms.

It will be fun to watch Altman get fired by the directors a second time, when all the details come out.

Have your popcorn ready.

Well, it shouldn't, anyway. I'm not convinced that the current SCOTUS is anywhere near as non-partisan as we historically expect. As in, I think we might get very different rulings on issues of presidential power depending on who the president in question is. I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that. If I'm not, and if an energetic and unconstrained Democrat gets elected to the White House we're going to have a civil war when that Democrat begins swinging the power of the presidency for progressive ends just as hard as Trump has been doing for, er, well, whatever Trump's ends are (they aren't conservative, certainly, nor really even populist).

I agree with this in general. Democrats tend to push the boundaries more, particularly with respect to redistribution of wealth. Again, though, the current administration is an extreme outlier; even more extreme than FDR. So much so that even though SCOTUS is bending over backwards for him, I think even they are going to reject a lot of what he's trying to do. They've been very willing to halt that extraordinary number of stays that lower courts have issued, temporarily blocking the administration's mind bogglingly-unconstitutional actions, but I remain hopeful that when it comes time to rule on the actual merits -- and to write logically-coherent opinions justifying their decisions -- they'll ultimately follow the law, at least most of the time.

OTOH, I never thought they'd declare the president to be above the law.

You are misinformed about how LLMs work if you think that LLM-generated answers on Google are accurate or trustworthy.

300mi is absolutely fine for the vast majority of Texans. There is a small minority who live in areas where highway charging infrastructure is still deficient and who also regularly need to drive longer distances than that, but not very many.

Actually, this might be an interesting exercise. What route do you regularly drive that wouldn't be feasible with a 300-mile range? I'll check and see if it actually wouldn't work.

I'm a film producer who makes low quality garbage for audiences, and the income from channels dedicated to kids under 13 is magnificent.

It's garbage vertical story "art" but it's a constant stream of income.

She is a sole proprietor with a single laptop, dummy.

My wife is a professional and requires backups of her electronic documents, and health regulations require that if you use a cloud backup that it be stored only in the same country, so rather than use cloud backups we opted for backing up to a local server and swapping drives offsite. Discovered almost immediately that we weren't backing up her actual work files because OneDrive had helpfully turned itself on and stored them in the cloud anyway, and then moved them out of the real My Documents folder and put them in another area of the drive that was impossible to decipher, and you wouldn't normally backup if you were just backing up documents. I absolutely hate OneDrive now.

A better solution is to do the same thing that should be done with stock trading: Require government officials (and their family members) who might have access to insider information to publish their trades in advance. The advance notice wouldn't even have to be large if the information was published electronically in a feed that could easily be monitored by other investors and the press. A couple of business days, maybe less. This should apply to all securities, real-estate purchases, predictions, etc., anything people speculate on. Not only would this highlight possible insider trading, it would erase most of the potential benefit of trading on inside information. It wouldn't harm government officials' legitimate investment opportunities.

It would still be possible for officials to pass tips to friends who are outside the group required to disclose their trades in advance, of course. It's ultimately very hard to stop that sort of thing, assuming the friends stay loyal, but that's a risky bet. Especially since the sort of friend who would engage in such illicit trading is probably the sort who might end up in some other sort of trouble with the law, and might find it convenient to flip on their buddy.

I ran a server, paid for it, also banned for TOS. Senseless garbage.