That's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), not addiction. It's the same thing that makes casinos profitable. Addiction involves chemically moving your homeostasis to the point where your "optimal state," your ability to function, requires the thing you're addicted to. You go through physical withdrawal if you stop. Like, you'll need direct hospital care for withdrawal, sometimes. There are even legal medications that you have to taper off of or you're in the hospital.

There are so many things that get called addiction, but it's all OCD. As with any genetic condition, some have it worse than others.

And don't tell me about endorphins. That's part of your natural brain chemistry. As is adrenaline, cortisol, and neurotransmitter imbalances. With OCD, you have a chemical imbalance, but they're not foreign substances. Your genes are predisposed to something that could be good, but could also cause you harm. It's something that can be leveraged by bad actors, but it's already there, waiting to go. It is part of your homeostatic condition already. You'll have to put yourself out of homeostasis to deal with it, which is why in severe cases it's medicated.

When Zuck manages your dopamine hits, he's using psychologists to figure out how to optimize the brain chemistry of people who are predisposed to obsessive behavior for his own ends. He's not a drug dealer using chemists to amp up the speed and intensity of dependency.

Just put away the fucking phone. There will be no significant withdrawal other than an eerie amount of silence. It'll be like turning on a light once you realize how benighted your life has become. If you need an obsession, get obsessed with exercise or something else of actual value to your life. If you have severe OCD and can't do that, get psychiatric care. There are plenty of medications to relieve the imbalance.

For some reason I have the sudden urge to mail them my white beard clippings.

For a while there the UIDs were literally counting down. I was wondering if we were going to get user #10 in the thread or something.

Pretty simple really. You integrate it irrevocably into the commit process. Make a pull request? Copilot is going to have a look at it. Maybe even modify it. Put it in the toolchain anywhere you like, give no one an option to opt out. Done.

Which, you know, is just another way to steal training data to put coders out of work (it won't) and a way to fuck up someone's pull request if it actually does anything other than store it and analyze it. LLMs are all about theft of labor and then not even crediting it, because then someone can track down their own work and demand payment or compliance with GPL or whatever license. Tech bros are forcing it on us because they need free training data. They're not willing to pay for it because that might affect their bottom line. Anytime you use one of these LLMs, you should be getting paid for it. You're providing it prompt data that has a labor cost.

Right on, Gentoo. They can go pound sand.

The hell are you talking about? Do you even know what natural language processing is? It's a specific way of parsing a prompt that allows for unstructured language use. i.e.: No keywords, no formal syntax, enormous general dictionary. You don't use booleans. You don't use other logic operands. You just say it as you would to a person and it "understands" (spoiler alert: LLMs don't). Natural language prompting has been a unicorn/white whale/Holy Grail for decades, just like AGI.

Now that we've had our CS 101 lesson, in practice they're talking about saying "Write me [x] program" and AI spits out some boilerplate garbage like a bad coder grabbing libraries incoherently from everywhere and adding no cohesive structure of its own. AI will just do randomly seeded, but algorithmically organized, copy/paste. If we start committing libraries of that shit to a code base, eventually the predictive language soup will collapse under its own weight, because it is randomly seeded. There's not going to be a through line. No intent behind it. No Linus bitching anyone out for the garbage code it's writing.

  It'll look like what Windows has wound up with with sxs, except there will be no way to figure out how to organize side-by-side in the first place.

You think uncommented code is bad? Wait until you see that shitshow. Gentoo is dead on here. This is a code stability and structure issue. You use AI enough, and you will have neither.

...go right?

Pffft.

One thing I've learned from the past 10 years of supporting Windows 10/11 is it's almost always software. I had a problem with a keyboard doing runaway repeats on the Windows Hello PIN entry screen, and I swapped keyboards till I was blue in the face until I realized that it was the supplemental support software (SetPoint) which was causing the fault. Yes. Software is even screwing basic I/O devices now. It's a solved problem and software developers still manage to out-clever themselves into system instability.

It is sometimes hardware. I had some kernel panics on my new machine that black screened it. I ran MemTest86 and found out that the RAM was clocked down to 3800MT instead of the 5200MT it was supposed to be getting. It was failing on the first pass. Isolated it to the second channel pair. Blew out the slots. 90% Isopropyl on the sticks. Reinstall RAM. Done. Passes MemTest86 without a hitch, through multiple passes. Last time I checked, I did 4.

And I'm still getting black screens from memory exceptions. Just less often. The RAM is now fine. I had the problem because Windows is screwed up. The hardware fault made it worse, but the software is also fucked. (Last time it faulted was during a compile. I heard the POST beeper go off and thought "Oh no. Not again.")

Software people, ie: Linus, think it's hardware. Hardware people think it's software. Generally, these days, the hardware people are right. Hardware is very reliable, and I've rarely had a recent memory stick actually go bad.

I don't know what the definition of "accountability" is in climate research, but a threefold error is terrible science, it should have been caught in peer review, and everyone involved owes the scientific world an apology.

"We're still right, it's a terrible problem," only shows clear bias towards demonstrating there is a terrible problem, and that's how they missed this. All of them, peer review, everything. It's a massive methodology screw up that can easily be accounted for in STATA or whatever they're using. It is a solved problem to identify statistical outliers and compensate for or eliminate them.

What's "terrible" is this is more fodder for climate deniers and people with general scientific trust issues.

The only appropriate answer is, "We all made an egregious mistake." Don't tell us you're right, because that tells us that you went into statistical analysis with a foregone conclusion. Even if it's the correct conclusion, and it is, it reflects badly on the entire scientific community if you fuck up the evidence. Worse, some will assume you fucked with the evidence.

Mea culpa and STFU. Let the adults cover your butts and your reputations.

Download Microsoft Powertoys (not to be confused with Sysinternals). Universal, unformatted text paste available. No more shuffling it through Notepad.

There are a lot of quality of life features in it. All I do now is hit CTRL+ALT+V and plaintext, universally for the most part.

No. That's what Regedit (I use Registry Workshop) is for. There haven't been flat-file text configs since, I dunno, Windows 3.0? Everything beyond that, Windows 95+, it's just legacy jank. I like that 3rd parties refuse to use the registry, especially if it's a portable app, but I wish they'd let you know when they do. And then there's the whole AppData kerfuffle. Is it in Local? Local Low? Where the hell did you put your text config file?!

Many Win32 and AMD64 programs have plaintext configs, as do games. You still need a text editor. But for Microsoft stuff, I highly recommend Registry Workshop. Faster search. Undo. Multiple search windows. Really good stuff.

You can literally tell Notepad to shut it all down. All of it.

Figure it out. It's in settings. The settings keep changing, but you can dock it all down to no-AI, no tab memory, does "exactly what it used to, and no more."

And if that's not good enough for you, get Notepad++ already. It's a much better text editor and can do markup and automatic indentation of code with a closeable tree. Most of what I used Notepad for was editing .cfg, .ini files, and scripts, and I expect that's what many of us do here.

Only people who don't understand computers will need to swallow this. Nerds, if that's still Slashdot, don't have to. Be a nerd. Shut it down.

Exactly. It's not just the cost of production, it's the cost of transportation/POS management/convenience/etc. TCO.

Anyone telling you that it's a bargain is only looking at the numbers... poorly. Poorly because it doesn't save enough money to bother in the first place when we had a $6.8 T budget in 2024. Kilobytes or megabytes on a multiple terabyte drive aren't worth the bother.

I mentioned the scale comprehension problem in its own thread. In a $1.8T discretionary budget (2024), you're talking about saving 1/16th of a peanut by going to coins. It's not even whole peanuts, guy, and 1/16th is charitable; it's far less than that.

$1 bills are fine as they are. We have much bigger fish to fry. You probably want to save at least $10 billion (0.556% of the discretionary federal budget) before it's even worth bothering.

There's no sense making everyone retool and reprice for such meager savings. It would only be change for change's sake (see what I did there?)

The federal budget last year was $1.8 T discretionary. That does not include mandatory items, which brings total spending to $6.8 T. This is worth a few megabytes on a terabyte SSD.

If I did my math right, 0.003% of the federal budget. At two decimal places, it's zero. As in 0.00% of the federal budget.

Big numbers are not big any more. It's a scale comprehension problem of the human brain. Any time anyone talks about how much so many million dollars is saving us, think about your disk drives. This is 56MB on your 6.8TB disk.

If a politician is not talking billions, they're saving us essentially nothing.

Not when it's illegal. If there's evidence, the DOJ should arrest Biden. Now.

Justice is the operative principle here. Did you learn how that works in high school or watching Bat-Man? Demand the DOJ bring Biden to justice if you are so inclined.

Spoiler Alert: There isn't evidence, there is no indictment coming, it's not "turnabout." What's happening now, in 2025, is blatant political persecution that would justify granting asylum to its victims in most countries. Nobody would have gotten asylum under Biden, because he didn't illegally persecute his political enemies.

This guy. This guy literally fired federal prosecutors to find others who would comply in their absence. Should tell you all you need to know. How many Biden firings over a specific indictment? Yeah. None. You clean house at the start of your term, not when a competent prosecutor gives an opinion that opposes political goals.