No driver needed?

You're not understanding the incentive structure that led to this state of affairs in the first place. To use USB would mean that they would have to do a ton of driver work. They would have to implement these generic control surfaces and they would have to ensure that their hardware does what the USB specs say it should. You'd end up with a USB RGB controller chip.

If you haven't noticed, RGB controller chips are a lot more electronically simple than that. They are small-project simple I/O-programmed chips running on simple control buses clearly designed and implemented in a hardware world of Arduinos and Raspis, GPIO buses, I2C, the old stuff. If you were around in the 1990s, you would recognize this immediately for what it is: the way things were done before NT, when DOS and Windows software frequently shoved the OS aside and ran on bare metal. In the late 90s as NT crept toward the home PC world, the impending loss of direct hardware access was one of the obvious compatibility issues visible on the horizon with the NT world-to-come, and the begrudging acceptance that this stuff was all "legacy" and we'll all have to drive our hardware like grownups in the future began.

The issue with this is simply one of cost and complexity. Smaller hardware projects will not be able to afford such overhead. Implementing an RGB controller you're driving directly from your shitty gamer system tray app is a lot more straightforward than properly implementing every layer of a universal device stack. No one ever bothered to do things the "right way" because it was never a pressing issue.

Implementing this over USB is a lot more complicated than bit-banging SMBus with MMIO. That means you have to learn how modern PC hardware works and you have to think through a protocol design, think through access control semantics, God, maybe even design an API. The people writing these drivers are the people making these devices and they are not operating systems people. These devices were developed and prototyped as bit-banged gadgets built around standard simple microcontrollers running on standard electronically-simple I/O buses. This is how stuff was done on PCs too back in the MS-DOS/Windows days. This whole segment of the hardware industry got into a snag when Windows XP came out and the home PC world started moving to NT because that meant they had to start thinking about scary things like memory protection and stop treating the NT kernel like an Arduino. So, from the very beginning, they'd find these niche hacky drivers that let them bit-bang portsâ"yes, usually they just found something some small firm wrote to solve a specific problem and they shared them with each otherâ"and they'd continue writing their control apps to bit-bang the chip directly. And because this area of computing is adjacent in many ways to the world of niche industrial computing, which is where these hacky drivers usually came from, Microsoft signed the drivers supported it just enough that the show went on. The kernel team, being the most competent engineering team in all of Microsoft, likely knew that getting these people to learn kernel programming was a pipe dream and they've done a good enough job of blast-proofing the NT kernel around these hacky drivers, no one ever really had to point out that the 800 pound elephant in the middle of the room is still writing hacky VxDs for Windows 11.

No. https://www.highrez.co.uk/Down... This is the driver. Note that the original authors provided sample code in VB6. All of this vendor-proprietary motherboard whizbang shit no matter the OEM was always built on hacky bit-banging code usually running off of some Ring 0 God-driver hack like InpOut32 that let userspace programs bit-bang the hardware like an MS-DOS TSR. It has always been this way, from the janky drivers for the janky hardware monitoring facilities on my SOYO motherboard from 2003 to my ASUS motherboard from 2010 to every common gamershit RGB device out there. It works like this because it's always worked like this. In this area of niche OEM gadgets, they have used these janky folktale drivers to dodge learning how to write protected-mode drivers for Windows NT for 25 years. It's always been this way and it was always sitting there in the open just waiting for you start asking inconvenient and uncomfortable questions about the way people were doing things. Yes, that's why Asus's glitchy unstable drivers for the glitchy unstable proprietary fan-throttling controller on your glitchy unstable motherboard were glitchy and unstable. None of this shit was EVER "maintained" in the first place. It was a series of hacks written on top of the guy from Nebraska's hack long after the guy from Nebraska put away his keyboard and got into fly fishing.

It's 2026 and Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode. Beautiful.

And no, you can't blame this on MICROS~1 and Word's "smart quotes" feature. That was 25 years ago. I picked those code points intentionally.

No, they're setting YOU up for a catastrophic failure. When (not if) it fails, it won't hurt Microsoft at all, regardless of what happens to you. Since it's applied equally to all installs of Windows, there's no prejudice against any one group, company, faction so it must be equally fair to all.

âoeMustâ?

You've made a grave error in reasoning, mon ami. (First of all, your logic is faulty.) I'm not sure whether you've made an isâ"ought conflation or if you're actually that naÃve, but Iâ(TM)m sure itâ(TM)ll sting when you find out how the world really works.

What an odd gripe to bring up from out of absolutely nowhere.

You can tell this guy has never studied neuroscience or epistemology.

His level of understanding of the former is likely at the "levels of serotonin" level, nothing but fundamental misconceptions stemming from ignorance.

His understanding of epistemology and the tangled webs of understanding that have been teased out over thousands of years by restless minds is absent. He seems to be confident that he knows exactly what "knowledge" and "understanding" are and that no limits or paradoxes will ever arise in his application of this perfect understanding of knowledge and what it means to know that he and his blinding, thermonuclear-bomb-flash brilliant mind possess.

You too can be described by a big blob of floating-point weights.

No, you can't. I'm not sure how you even came to this conclusion other than by at some point making a vast leap of rational faith. You leapt off a cliff and to say you no longer have legs to stand on is an understatement.

AI LLMs are not made out of neurons.

If you had a genuine understanding about the nature, properties, qualities and functionality of neurons, glia, astrocytes, Schwann cells, all of the other gazillion types of specialized cells that support and make up the nervous system; if you had any idea just how many amazingly-intricate feedback loops upon feedback loops constituted even the most fundamental neurological circuits; if you understood how neurotransmitters and neurotransmitter systems and their associated proteins actually work, and how many signalling molecules are floating around up there, you'd cut your own tongue off for profaning against the glory of nature for abusing that word here.

If the photo of the author listed on the byline is anything to go on, Generation Z really is aging poorly versus us Millenials before them. Perhaps all of that emotional stress from social media use is getting to them. While it's fun to take potshots at this generation that only six years ago (pre-coronavirus) was the most shrill and superficial wave of young people to hit society in ages, I actually want to make a more unsettling point: that this hypothesis may soon show itself in health statistics. Soon, we may see what lifelong social media use does to your cardiovascular health. Watch this space.

(Although this is the ideological position of her entire organization, who I critique for being blind millenarians awaiting the second coming of Ray Kurzweil, it feels fitting to bully her for not listening to her crunchy friends. There's a reason that this technoutopianist ideology is associated primarily with Gen-Xers and millenials, and it's that they didn't grow up experiencing the consequences. Even coming from such a privileged background with access to better healthcare than almost everyone else ("Klein") she still displays prominent physical markers of premature aging from stress. She ought to log off.

Yes, my phone is like an extension of my brain. That point they make is one I agree with and one I will not argue. Gen Z understands this VERY well. (I go outside.) These WIRED nerds do not offer a persuasive argument for why what Gen Z is doing is Bad. At all. The only thing they can do is resort to class politics by telling them that they'll be creating a disadvantaged class, themselves, which is Bad. More people carrying around dumphones makes that hypothetical disadvantaged class STRONGER, which makes it a radical act of protest and activism. Given that these authors clearly are only familiar with these ideas of class and privilege by osmosis from culture since 2014, they failed to anticipate this obvious line of attack. That's the tell that they don't hold this framework of society themselves. These people are unquestioning, blindly-faithful technoutopians. They hold to the idea that smartphones will bring us closer to The Singularity and that is good, whether they want to say it explicitly or not. Don't let the focus on technology confuse you: this is a millenarian argument. Or, rather, since I don't even consider it an argument, a millenarian plea. These nerds wrote a screed to anti-smartphone Gen Z men and women in which they simultaneously 1. blame and shame them for and 2. beg and plead them to stop holding back the Second Coming of Christ. In their case, their version of the Rapture is "the Singularity." Their failure to recognize their technoutopian visions as a 21st century close analogue of Millerism is to our benefit. They won't understand this critique. Don't help them.

What was your breakthrough? Elaborate. This information has been available for you to read pretty much forever. Why didn't you do your homework?

While I think the practice of shadow-banning is despicable, I ask you this: don't you think you're overreacting a little? Have you considered that equating catching a ban with being pressured to take your own life is a tad histrionic? A ban means they don't want your input and your shadowban implies that 1. the mods are passive-aggressive assholes, and/or 2. you have been a persistent nuisance and they want you to go find another place to post instead. Your unmeasured and immature complaint here suggests that you don't know how to take criticism or conduct yourself with decorum and that it is hard to fault them for their patience with you running thin. You haven't been asked to kill yourself. There are about eight billion other people in the world, there are probably several million out of them that it would be appropriate for you to talk to. If these people you are hung up over don't want your participation in their community, fuck 'em. You have some emotional and social development to attend to, to say the least. Telling you that is actually a suggestion that you can do these things and gain some psychological discipline and become a well- mannered member of society and that your life is not worthless or lived in vain.

yet another 115 iq midwit autist who can't wrangle with polysemy