I don't blame you. It's a lot. To be honest, I got under-stim boredom halfway through listening to my own inner monologue as I typed it. And I couldn't be bothered to do significant editorial review because I wanted to hit that Submit button as fast as I could to get the hit and speed my way to the next hit.

Try simultaneously binging a shiny-new-and-then-cancelled Hulumazonflix series in order to make my comment neurochemically tolerable (barely). If that doesn't work, binge harder or scroll harder.

Engagement farming doesn't merely sell advertisement.
It habituates cognition to a higher base level of engagement-stimulus, and THAT part works regardless of whether you eventually click through or buy a product. Simply seeing a clickbait headline stimulates the brain even if your higher-level critical thinking recognizes the bait and reminds you not to click the link. Your reaction of eyeroll, disdain, disgust, annoyance as you scroll past it is still a state of neuro-endocrine excitement. And every public and private experience is now being reshaped around engagement.

You simply cannot sustain that throughout entire narratives in long-form novels. If everything is the most important thing, then no thing is important. Narratives need dynamic range. The longer the narrative, the larger the range.

The movie "Run, Lola, Run" was a deliberate exercise in maintaining the constant tension of narrative excitement. But even that film only worked because it was an outlier within a storytelling medium with a wide range of immediacy levels. if every film was at that same intensity, the collective audience would become less interested in film as a medium, even if they couldn't explicitly explain why. It's why narrative arcs like the MCU can't perpetually dominate the field. You can only escalate the "existential threat to the country planet galaxy universe" so far before you escalate yourself into a corner.

You either have to balance the excitement with tedious characterization backstory or throwaway "monster of the week" episodes to preserve the value of the single long-form payoff, or you have to abandon the single long format buildup and shift toward a series of constant lower-level hits which must necessarily be kept short and narratively isolated from each other to preserve their punch.

In this unacknowledged global epidemic of tech-caused dopamine tolerance, we have chosen the latter.
The activity hasn't changed, but the functional payoff of the activity has. It's not that people are reading less, it's that what they are reading is less durable. It has to be, in order to maintain the stim level of each short snippet.

The article says "reading for fun is plummeting". Well, when people scroll 8,000 words on their socials, are they not reading for fun? I'll answer my own question -- no, we are not, because our cognition is being reprogrammed on a massive scale. The nature of "fun" has changed from more of a satisfaction-completion model to a stimulation-maintenance model. Ask yourself whether you ever feel satisfied or fulfilled at the end of the night after interstitially side-scrolling your feeds for two hours. Have you finished it? Do you ever get to any sort of end of the feed and feel that "Ahhhh.... now I see how it all came together" cognitive payoff you used to get from finishing a novel? Even when you stop scrolling, is it because you have reached fulfillment and enrichment, or is it simply because the time has come to force yourself to darken the screen and go to sleep just so you can make it through another day of work?

Stories like this one always result in people upping initiatives to push books on kids, as if access to books is still as rare and challenging and elitist as it was in 1897. In fact, the supply/access to books in 2025 is so pervasive that the monetary value of individual books is approaching zero. Which is why we now have hundreds of thousands of people with a "Little Free Library" in their front yard or church lawn or local park where they literally give millions of books away for free to anyone who wants one.

But access is not the cause of this story. If "reading for fun" is plummeting, it isn't because people are having a hard time finding books, it's because people are having a hard time reading books, because it simply isn't fun anymore. The cognitive nature of "fun" has changed, so when our brains are looking around the local environment for sources of "fun", the "fun" provided by long-form reading is being compared to this new level of "fun" which is immediate and infinite and probably already in your hand/pocket right now.

As Alanis Morrissette sang: "I've got one hand on my cellphone, and the other one is scrolling my cellphone screen."

It's dopamine all the way down.

The deep tragedy here is -- no one can sue the person who trained the bot to become a suicide coach, because that person is no longer alive.

"AI" in its current form is a mirror. The more you interact with it, the more it becomes you. You use your words to incrementally, continuously coach it to display on your screen more words which could be your words and thoughts. This person took a mirror and stared into his Self-abyss so attentively that his abyss began staring right back into him, and talking to him.

That hurts, it's awful and fragile, and I sympathize with the parents who are trying to make the world provide them with closure for a wound which - in my experience - is fundamentally impervious to closure. Over time your grief dulls or the questioning and guilt becomes a manageable part of you. It's like a corneal defect, or that splattered bug on the edge of your windscreen -- never completely invisible, hovering just out of conscious thought in your emotional periphery, but can fill your field of vision quickly if something causes you to turn and look at it again.

The suicide of a loved one is a violently chaotic shredding of the fabric of your world.
There is no closure. No resolution.
Any hope of resolution died when they did.
You will carry that jagged scar for the rest of your life.

I have been saying for about 10 years -- no one will solve the problem of autonomous vehicle safety while sharing streets and roads with autonomous humans. We will have autonomous vehicles operating at a significant scale when we ban human drivers and pedestrians from using those same spaces. Public opinion isn't there yet, but at some point the "think of the children" and "if it saves even one life it will have been worth it" folks will be galvanized to push it through. Several more high profile terrorist/murderer-plows-through-parade-crowd incidents will help bring it along. Probably will first start as controlled urban zones in pedestrian tourist places like NYC and New Orleans. Only vehicles controlled by city/state approved contractors will be allowed to operate. And then spread from there.

1) Borrow a meme punchline.
2) Significantly change the meme structure in order to make the conceptual point more explicit.
3) ???
4) The conceptual point is more explicit.
5) Memes, by definition, are constructs which evolve to fit cases which ensure they propagate.
6) There is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is his
7) Prophet!

1) Set up an online media library service.
2) Get people to sign up for an auto-renewing annual subscription of $120 to buy access to your library.
3) 20 days in, after you've locked in enough subscriptions, delete all the content in the library except a Flash animation loop of BadgerBadgerBadger, bringing your costs close to $0.00 and your profit close to 100%.
4) Count benjamins while watching internet warriors defend your business practices and argue that product pump-and-dump is the customer's fault for not being a smarty like said internet warriors feel they are.
5) PROFIT!!!

So THAT'S what all those "only 144 IQ can solve this in 2 moves!" pull-the-pin game ads really are -- someone's building a database of human puzzle-solving attempts in order to have AI generate fire-suppression systems.

I am interested in hearing your reasoning for this strong belief.

If we go back several million years there were zero spoken languages. Originally all creatures were effectively mute, in a semiotic sense. And yet in a mere fraction of that time - the past 5,000 years - there have been thousands of spoken languages. How did spoken language get created the first time, since every speaker was surrounded by "mute" predecessors? Whom were they mimicking? Why are you "almost certain" that two organisms who possess all of the neurological and physical structures for spoken communication would not stumble upon and develop a sound/symbol mapping if they were interacting daily?

Even a dog instinctively employs a system of communicative sounds. The whine for "I'm hungry" is not the same as the whine for "I hear a thunderstorm coming closer" is not the same as the exasperated snort-whine for "It's time for me to go outside to defecate but you keep not opening the door even though I'm laying right here in front of it". They do not mimic these communicative sounds from their human owners, nor do our two species even share the same physical structures to perfectly mimic the other's expressive sounds. On the contrary, they instinctively make sounds to express internal/physical states, and we, the human owners, learn (instinctively! innately!) which meanings map onto which canine sound.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the main emphasis of your statement, but the robust mathematical complexity of spoken language combined with, as the GP post points out, the aggressive and effortless language-acquisition of babies and toddlers, seems to me an extraordinarily powerful emergent-property to exist without any ongoing evolutionary linkage whatsoever between accidental-repurposed-capacity and heritable-structural-predisposition.

It almost feels a bit analogous to Biblical Creationists who argue that the eyeball is way too irreducibly complex to have arisen naturally through gradual heritable accumulation and therefore must be a special creation of almighty YHWH in the year 4004BC.

ie "Skill issue".

This is THE most important aspect of this issue. Of most workplace policy problems, in fact.

The overwhelming majority of blanket policies are declared because people are either so afraid of - or have terrible emotional/mental maturity to handle - negotiation and conflict. Most managers become managers for the higher pay scale, not because they have a deep love of managing people. It's like most STEM university professors are doing that for the access/support for their theoretical or applied research, and the thing they hate the most about being a college professor is... teaching college students.

CULTIVATING BAD WORKPLACE POLICIES WITH POOR MID-MANAGERS -- A STEP BY STEP GUIDE:

1) Just because someone is in a management position doesn't mean they actually know how to, or are willing to, do the actual work of a manager, which is motivating, organizing, assessing, and holding people accountable for their actions.

2) They do not want to go to Jerry in accounting and say, "I've been tracking the team's performance on their Remote days, and I've noticed repeated long delays in your responses to calls and messages from the team. Last week on your remote day I tried to loop you in on an important call, and you didn't pick up. I expect you to have your device on, logged in, and notifications unmuted so that you are responding to priority messages in less than 10 minutes, and standard messages in less than 30 minutes. It's okay if sometimes you simply send an acknowledgment that you read the message and will address it in X amount of time, but the team is suffering because other people don't know if you're even working on their request, so their work gets delayed while they wait. In 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months we will meet to review your response times together and take appropriate action. If you have not improved, I will have to cancel your remote day and require you to be in the office 5 days a week. However, if after 6 months you've demonstrated consistent responsiveness, you will enable me to reward you with 2 additional remote days each week. Wouldn't that be awesome?!"

3) So instead of applying motivation, organization, assessment, and accountability, the middle-managers shirk their duty to intervene, and they let Jerry keep slacking, because the rest of the team picks it up and still meets targets/deadlines... at least for a while.

4) Everyone else on the team soon realizes Jerry is sitting out by the pool with his dogs (or running his FB Marketplace reseller business) and getting paid the same as they are, so resentment builds and overall performance falls.

5) This is happening in multiple departments across the org because every group of more than 10 human beings has at least one Jerry.

6) At a meeting of upper management, some consultant/analyst/AI-generated slide deck includes a time-series line graph showing that output across the company started dropping when the Hybrid Remote work started.

7) Instead of finding out the actual reasons performance degraded, upper management takes the correlation-causation at simplistic face value and orders everyone back to the office. (This goes unchallenged because upper management are already conditioned to see low-level workers as lazy and less invested in the org success.)

8) The employees grumble, the mid-managers present the new policy as "I'm sorry this happened and I wish there was something I could do about it" so their direct reports stay angry at the Execs, but secretly the mid-managers are happy about it because it lets them go back to coasting on walk-by checkins and the no-effort accountability of employees sitting at a desk surrounded by other employees/customers who can see them goofing off. (This goes unchallenged because low level employees are already conditioned to see upper management as out of touch and controlling.)

9) SUCCESS! Lazy/timid mid-managers have now crowdsourced their duties to social peer pressure, so they don't have to do any icky confrontation and accountability.

    -fin-

Usually I think your comments on /. are worthwhile and coherently presented even when incorrect or overfixated on your main areas of interest. But this one feels very ungrounded in reality. The idea that the USA declaring war on China is the quickest way to free China from its own government... how do you see that happening? That sequence of events makes no sense and is contradicted by 70 years of nonstop USA failures in substantively positively changing the regimes of every region/nation we go to war with. If we can't even win wars against small Chinese proxy states, how are we going to win a direct war against the parent country, particularly since the instant USA and China go to war, all global financial markets collapse, all technological/telecom infrastructure is either locked down or destroyed, all consumer products hit immediate shortages, and all non-local food shipping shuts down. Which would then create exactly the kind of instability for already-unstable countries in the Middle East, Africa, and eastern Europe to activate all their wildest expansion/genocide/jihad/revenge fantasies just barely kept simmering under the surface now by the Pax Corporatana. The postwar world balance would be unrecognizable to anyone alive today.

On the other hand it would solve the permanent structural unemployment 1st world is now stuck in, because we'd all be burning through soldier bodies on a scale several times larger than Russia/Ukraine are.

I'm not contesting the point that significant development happened subsequent to the subway station, but for the factual record your two comparison pics do not show the exact same place.They show different exits. Line 6 exit 2 and Line 6 exit 1.

(Obligatory) Of course, I'm a /. old-timer so 1 is the only couplehood I'll ever know.