It's interesting that when pushed the degree-mongers always come back to 'well, a degree isn't training you to do a job, it's teaching you to think and, uh, you have fun and shit.'

And you're going to pay $100,000+ for that? For $100,000 you could travel the world for years and meet a whole lot of interesting people and do a whole lot of interesting things.

Exactly. They'll be given a high-level job where they just have to do what they're told... which requires neither intelligence or education.

They send their kids to expensive schools to network with the other kids of the elite.

This is kind of obvious because a lot of the kids coming out of those expensive schools are neither very smart nor very educated.

Yes. Every loan should have to be co-signed by the school because they're the ones saying it will benefit the kids.

If Trump had any sense he would forgive all student loans and pay them off with a windfall tax on the schools who've been raking in the money from the loans. They know they're selling a defective product and shouldn't be treated any differently to any other business that's doing so.

Very few degrees are actually useful and the people who take those would often be better off getting a job first and then deciding that, say, they need a degree in engineering to progress further in that job than paying to get the degree up front and then discovering there are no jobs (as a friend of ours recently has). The whole degree system has been turning into a huge scam where kids borrow vast sums of money to keep pampered academics in nice jobs.

This is what happens when people see a generation of kids borrowing lots of money to get a 'good degree' and then ending up struggling to find a job in

And elite overproduction is a common sign of a society that's approaching collapse. Those kids believe--quite rightly given what they were told--that they deserve a much better life than they will have and won't be very happy with the existing elite telling them to retrain in making burgers.

Yeah, all my games were running fine on my 10-year-old Windows 7 box that I'd upgraded with a GTX-1080 until Steam stopped running on it. The only thing it couldn't run OK was new games that needed ray-tracing, though the CPU was starting to limit it (e.g. the Borderlands 3 benchmark on my new system shows 25% CPU usage at 60fps vs 100% on the old one).

Crazy amounts of money have been spent on forced computer upgrades in the last few years.

New players are unlikely to enter because it takes a lot of time and money to set up RAM production and by then the bubble will have popped. It doesn't make sense unless they know the bubble will continue for at least several more years.

If past experience is anything to go by there won't be an increase in RAM production because the producers know this is a bubble and are quite happy to sell RAM at much higher prices until the bubble pops. They don't want to invest a lot of money on increasing production and then see the market fall.

So we'll wreck the global economy because the 'elite' think they can replace us all with chatbots.

We must sacrifice general-purpose computing so we can have Emma Watson pron.

The only good news is that I replaced all of our Windows computers over the last three years because Steam stopped running on Windows 7 and then Microsoft said the old ones aren't allowed to run Windows 11. So at least I don't need a new PC for a while.

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

(Score:X, Troll)

And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real. ;)

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

And clearly God (who as we know, is a scalar field) is an AI. That's why there's so much "slop" in the Bible - factual errors, contradictions, different versions of the same text that heavily contradict each other, etc etc. It all makes so much more sense now!

At one point last week I pasted the first ~300 words or so of the King James Bible into an AI detector. It told me that over half of it was AI generated.

And seriously, considering some of the god-awful stuff passing peer review in "respectable" journals these days, like a paper in AIP Advances that claims God is a scalar field becoming a featured article, or a paper in Nature whose Figure 1 is an unusually-crappy AI image talking about "Runctitiononal Features", "Medical Fymblal", "1 Tol Line storee", etc... at the very least, getting a second opinion from an AI before approving a paper would be wise.