Caffeine is not chemically addictive. It can lead to depedency but that is not addiction. Motivation and wanting are not altered but unpleasant withdrawl effects can occur.
There is no real importance to the concept of “chemically addictive” and it has largely gone out of favor in psychology. Even physical behaviors like gambling and sex that obviously cannot directly, chemically act on reward system pathways, can still be just as life destroying addictive and challenging to quit as any drug. The dsm now classifies gambling disorder as an addiction.
Caffeine, unlike some drugs and alcohol, doesn't cause severe withdrawal symptoms. Because of that, experts don't label regular caffeine use as an addiction.
What’s the point of this distinction, what does it mean that it’s not chemically addictive? It causes withdrawals, dependence, it definitely acts on brain chemistry.
That lancet article very well refutes the point you are trying to make. The term “chemical addiction” is not really used anymore because it really just refers to mechanisms of chemical dependence, which are neither necessary or sufficient to cause addiction on their own.
There has been a major shift in how addiction is understood in modern research, but you have it backwards- your perspective of chemical addiction or direct chemical mechanism being important is the old discredited concept, not the new one, which sees it as a psychological process that requires no direct chemical mechanism at all.
The chemical dependence is quite a factor in the psychological process you refer to. It nudges and reinforces this psychological behaviour. You can broaden the definition to include addiction without chemical dependence, but it does not mean you can omit the chemical dependence factor from the equation.
This chemical dependence is often the number one reason people cannot physically stop their psychological process. Potential effects from quitting include simply dying, or with less strong chemical dependence, feeling anxiety or generally ill.
The explanation for the headaches is that coffee raises blood pressure short term, and the blood vessels in the brain prepare for the predicted caffeine ingestion, and if it doesn't come there will be a mismatch.
What triggers the blood vessel constriction on the brain? Will avoiding e.g. certain places at certain hours also avoid the preemptive blood vessel constriction and associated headache?
That's called chemical dependence and it's the point I'm trying to make. Dependence is not addiction. Addiction means wanting is hijacked, not that stopping is aversive.
Addiction and dependence have real medical meanings and in the context of this discussion and we shouldn't mix them up. See this very short and to the point lancet medical journal summary, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
>Addiction (synonymous with substance use disorder), as defined by the DSM-5, entails compulsive use, craving, and impaired control over drug taking in addition to physical dependence. The vast majority of patients taking medications such as opioids and benzodiazepines are doing so as prescribed by clinicians, with only 1·5% of people taking benzodiazepine being addicted, for example. Physical dependence is much more common than addiction. Importantly, withdrawal effects occur irrespective of whether these drugs are taken as prescribed or misused.
>Failure to distinguish between addiction and physical dependence can have real-life consequences. People who have difficulty stopping their medications because of withdrawal effects can be accused of addiction or misuse. Misdiagnosis of physical dependence as addiction can also lead to inappropriate management, including referral to 12-step addiction-based detoxification and rehabilitation centres, focusing on psychological aspects of harmful use rather than the physiology of withdrawal.
>It should be made clear that dependence is not the same as addiction. The problems with prescribed drug dependence are not restricted to the small minority who are misusing or addicted to these drugs, but to the wider population who are physically dependent on and might not be able easily to stop their medications because of withdrawal effects. Antidepressants (superkuh note: and caffeine) should be categorised with other drugs that cause withdrawal syndromes as dependence-forming medications, while noting that they do not cause addiction.
Yes! Thank you! He is talking about AI generated summaries being inaccurate, which is plenty to get up in arms about.
A lot of folks here hate AI and YouTube and Google and stuff, but it would be more productive to hate them for what they are actually doing.
But most people here are just taking this headline at face value and getting pitchforks out. If you try to watch the makeup guy’s proof, it’s talking about Instagram (not YouTube), doesn’t have clean comparisons, is showing a video someone sent back to him, which probably means it’s a compression artifact, not a face filter that the corporate overlords are hiding from the creator. It is not exactly a smoking gun, especially for a technical crowd.
I, for one, find it extremely odd that any of these video posters believe they get to control whether or not I use, directly or indirectly, an AI to summarize the video for me.
They're under the encouraged belief that they are in control over what is shown on their youtube channel. They think they should control what text is shown under their videos on "their" channel. This illusion of control of presentation has been unconvincing for quite a while but now Alphabet is just throwing around it's weight because there are no other options except youtube for what youtube does: allowing money to flow to people who make videos without the video file host getting sued out of existence. Alphabet does this by mantaining a large standing army of lawyers and a huge money supply. Trivial technical issues like file hosting and network bandwidth have been repeatedly solved by others but when they become popular they're legally attacked and killed.
Most of my use for my blog posts is linking people to them on IRC and forums. I don't need or want search engine traffic. It's true there's no money or the churning waves of activity associated with that money in blogging anymore. And that's great. Social media siphoned off the profit chasers and all their running in place activity to stay on top of the eternal wave of now in recommendation engines.
I log on once in a while to a channel I used to use, and some of the same people are sorta still there. IRC is weird now, nostalgic but also... the things that made it truly fun aren't really a thing. Weird !fserves for warez, strange early chat bots, a/s/l... I do miss it. I think it has moved on except in little bubbles, and I cheer those on from afar.
It is no surprise to me that people still have to use HDD for storage. SSD stopped getting bigger a decade plus ago.
SSD sizes are still only equal to the HDD sizes available and common in 2010 (a couple TB~). SSD size increases (availability+price decreases) for consumers form factors have entirely stopped. There is no more progress for SSD because quad level cells are as far as the charge trap tech can be pushed and most people no longer own computers. They have tablets or phones or if they have a laptop it has 256GB of storage and everything is done in the cloud or with an octopus of (small) externals.
SSDs did not "stop getting bigger a decade plus ago." The largest SSD announced in 2015 was 16TB. You can get 128-256TB SSDs today.
You can buy 16-32TB consumer SSDs on NewEgg today. Or 8TB in M.2 form factor. In 2015, the largest M.2 SSDs were like 1TB. That's merely a decade. At a decade "plus," SSDs were tiny as recently as 15 years ago.
Perhaps my searching skills aren’t great but I don’t see any consumer ssds over 8TB. Can you share a link?
It was my understanding that ssds have plateaued due to wattage restriction across SATA and M.2 connections. I’ve only seen large SSDs in U.3 and E[13].[SL] form factors which I would not call consumer.
The mainstream drives are heavily focused on lowering the price. Back in the 2010s SSDs in the TB range were hundreds of dollars, today you can find them for $80 without breaking a sweat[1]. If you're willing to still spend $500 you can get 8TB drives[2].
I bought 4x (1TB->4TB the storage for half the price after my SSD died after 5 years (thanks samsung), what you mean they 'stopped being bigger'?
Sure, there is some limitation in format, can only shove so many chips on M.2, but you can get U.2 ones that are bigger than biggest HDD (tho price is pretty eye-watering)
By stopped getting bigger I mean people still think 4TB is big in 2025. Just like 2010 when 3/4TB was the max size for consumer storage devices. u.2/u.3 is not consumer yet, unfortunately. I have to use m.2 nvme to u.2 adapters which are not great. And as you say, low number of consumer cpu+mobo pcie lanes has been restricting from the number of disks side until just recently. At least in 2025 we can have more than 2 nvme storage disks again without disabling a pcie slot.
I think this is more a symptom of data bloat decelerating than anything else. Consumers just don't have TBs of data. The biggest files most consumers have will be photos and videos that largely live on their phones anyway. Gaming is relatively niche and there just isn't that much demand for huge capacity there, either -- it's relatively easy to live with only ~8 100GB games installed at the same time. Local storage is just acting as a cache in front of Steam, and modern internet connections are fast enough that downloading 100GB isn't that slow (~14 minutes at gigabit speeds).
So when consumers don't have (much) more data on their PCs than they had in 2015, why would they buy any bigger devices than 2015? Instead, as sibling commenter has pointed out, prices have improved dramatically, and device performance has also improved quite a bit.
(But it's also true that the absolute maximum sized devices available are significantly larger than 2015, contradicting your initial claim.)
I read that SSDs don't actually guarantee to keep your data if powered off for an extended period of time, so I actually still do my backup on HDDs. Someone please correct me if this is wrong.
A disk that is powered off is not holding your data, regardless of whether it is an HDD, SDD, or if it is in redundant RAID or not. Disks are fundamentally a disposable medium. If you don't have them powered on, you have no way to monitor for failures and replace a drive if something goes wrong - it will just disappear someday without you noticing.
Tape, M-DISC, microfilm, and etched quartz are the only modern mediums that are meant to be left in storage without needing to be babysit, in climate controlled warehousing at least.
Do you poweroff your backup HDDs for extended periods of time (months+)? That's a relatively infrequent backup interval. If not, the poweroff issue isn't relevant to you.
(More relevant might be that backups are a largely sequential workload and HDDs are still marginally cheaper per TB than QLC flash.)
>frontend barely works without JavaScript, ... In the past, it used to gracefully degrade without enforcing JavaScript, but now it doesn't.
And the github frontend developers are aware of these accessibility problems (via the forums and bug reports). They just don't care anymore. They just want to make the site appear to work at first glance which is why index pages are actual text in html but nothing else is.
I'd love to hear the inside story of GitHub's migration of their core product features to React.
It clearly represents a pretty seismic cultural change within the company. GitHub was my go-to example of a sophisticated application that loaded fast and didn't require JavaScript for well over a decade.
The new React stuff is sluggish even on a crazy fast computer.
My guess is that the "old guard" who made the original technical decisions all left, and since it's been almost impossible to hire a frontend engineer since ~2020 or so that wasn't a JavaScript/React-first developer the weight of industry fashion became too much to resist.
But maybe I'm wrong and they made a technical decision to go all-in on heavy JavaScript features that was reasoned out by GitHub veterans and accompanied by rock solid technical justification.
GitHub have been very transparent about their internal technical decisions in the past. I'd love to see them write about this transition.
> But beyond accessibility and availability, there is also a growing expectation of GitHub being more app-like.
> The first case of this was when we rebuilt GitHub projects. Customers were asking for features well beyond our existing feature set. More broadly, we are seeing other companies in our space innovate with more app-like experiences.
> Which has led us to adoption React. While we don’t have plans to rewrite GitHub in React, we are building most new experiences in React, especially when they are app-like.
> We made this decision a couple of years ago, and since then we’ve added about 250 React routes that serve about half of the average pages used by a given user in a week.
It then goes on to talk about how mobile is the new baseline and GitHub needed to build interfaces that felt more like mobile apps.
(Personally I think JavaScript-heavy React code is a disaster on mobile since it's so slow to load on the median (Android) device. I guess GitHub's core audience are more likely to have powerful phones?)
For contrast, gitea/forgejo use as little JavaScript as possible, and have been busy removing frontend libraries over the past year or so. For example, jquery was removed in favor of native ES6+.
Let them choke on their "app-like experience", and if you can afford it, switch over to either one. I cannot recommend it enough after using it "in production" daily for more than five years.
I honestly believe that the people involved likely already wanted to move over to React/SPAs for one reason or another, and were mostly just searching for excuses to do so - hence these kind of vague and seemingly disproportional reasons. Mobile over desktop? Whatever app-like means over performance?
Non-technical incentives steering technical decisions is more common than we'd perhaps like to admit.
What's nuts about that presentation is that the github frontend has gone from ~.2 to >2 Million lines of code in the last 5-6 years. 10x the code... to get slower?
That also means a much larger team and great possibilities for good perf reviews, so basically an excellent outcome in a corporate env. People follow incentives.
> My guess is that the "old guard" who made the original technical decisions all left, and since it's been almost impossible to hire a frontend engineer since ~2020 or so that wasn't a JavaScript/React-first developer the weight of industry fashion became too much to resist.
I very much hope not, but fear you're right.
I'm (theoretically) an iPhone app developer, and I really dislike the Reactive idiom: I can see the theoretical benefits, but in practice, the magic glue has never worked right, and comes at a painful performance cost. React is to me what LLMs are to LLM-skeptics.
I'm retraining anyway due to LLMs and how well they eat UI, but I don't yet know where I'll end up next.
It has been, this year, 30 years since JS became a normal part of the web. You don't need it to render text and buttons, but we do different things with the internet now.
It's 1 step forward 2 steps back with this "server side rendering" framing of the issue and in practice observing Microsoft Github's behaviors. They'll temporarily enable text on the web pages of the site in response to accessibility issues then a few months later remove it on that type of page and even more others. As that thread and others I've participated in show this is a losing battle. Microsoft Github will be javascript application only in the end. Human people should consider moving their personal projects accordingly. For work, well one often has to do very distasteful and unethical things for money. And github is where the money is.
To be fair, the developers might care, but upper management certainly doesn't, and they're the ones who decide if those developers make their rent this month.
While there are use cases for NAS, generally, if you have a desktop PC it's far better to put the hard drives in it rather than setting up a second computer you have to turn on and run too. Putting the storage in the computer where you'll use it means it'll be much faster, much cheaper, incomparably more reliable, with a more natural UI, and it'll use less eletricity than having to run 2 computers.
Now if your NAS use case is streaming media files to multiple devices (TV set top boxes, etc), sure, NAS makes sense if the NAS you build is very low idle power. But if you just need the storage for actual computing it is a waste of time and money.
It's pretty simple: 2 computers have twice the parts and having twice the parts means there are more chances for something to die. But it goes beyond this too. Far less software stack complexity (the big one), no flaky network link, no complex formatting that cannot be recovered with common tools, etc.
Being rolling doesn't fix the lack of upstream support for GPUs that AMD does for the first half year (and any years past 4~). LTS distros are great because they work pretty good "forever" instead of great for brief unknowable periods.
The problem isnot cracking the glass. The problem is breaking it apart enough to get through. Your reference joke is not quite appropriate to this context.
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