The audience for USENET and slashdot was about 400 times smaller than the people participating in broader social media. It was much harder for a critical mass of fringe ideas/susceptible people to coalesce into isolated circles when the population was just so tiny.

Australia's youth emerge as the smartest and most together in the world....

Oh should this bubble pop, it will take out a *lot* with it.

A lot of tech companies have effectively retooled themselves so they don't know how to keep being a functional business without the AI hype spending.

The level of dedication to the LLM game dwarfs the dot-com bubble, and so too will the negative consequences...

It's the boiling frog approach to revenue. Start at an attractive rate and increase it by 'no big deal' until eventually it would be a big deal.

See also, microtransactions.

Companies have learned that customers barely pay attention to the absolute costs, and just note the incrementals they incur in the moment.

... in more detail.

EOM

What is 56 billion dollars?

BTC market cap is $1.8 Trillion....

Might not be about the popularity, the popularity is good, it's about the affordability.

The student loans were well intentioned, but just turning the money faucet on has significantly reduced practical concerns about pricing.

There are two sorts of campuses that have been *way* nicer than almost any corporate campus I've ever seen, medical and universities. In my day it was already pretty plush, and recently toured some and it's just gotten even more crazy, super large campus in the middle of some of the most expensive real estate with just amazingly nice amenities...

These easy loans started to help tackle the problem of higher ed being a *little* expensive and unfortunately made it a *lot* expensive over time. Needed to come with some regulation on the pricing side, at *least* for public universities.

Similar story on health care, by all means help people with premiums (even better would have been public option, but putting that aside), but don't just write whatever checks the insurance companies demand, regulate the health care costs.

Everything is gambling now.

Meanwhile, the most preventable of diseases are becoming commonplace.

US college is a joke, especially to young men. Raw deals left, right and center. You're more likely to get your life ruined by a guilty-until-proven-innocent sexual harassment accusation than finding a mate "for life" that isn't saddled with obscene amounts of debt like you are, ready to bail out once you've paid through the nose for both of you.

US colleges now trying to be "places of connection" for young men has to be the biggest joke of todays age of misandry and man-bashing.

If I were a young man in the US, college would be the very last place I'd be looking for connection these days. And for just about everything else - highly specialized degrees in engineering, CompSci, physics, chemistry and such aside - I'd steer just as clear from US colleges. As a regular young guy without huge amounts of money to burn you're way better off learning and working a trade than going to college these days.

Laughably overpriced US colleges are going the way of the Dodo, and they're feeling it. That's what this recent change of mind is all about, nothing more.

It's worth *something*, but the price has been outpacing inflation by a wide margin for years and years.

So we have value, but the price has been running away...

Think the point would be that even if you try to opt out of AI summaries, you end up hearing someone read a script that they used AI to generate, or read comments or emails that AI generated without your awareness. Then there's a tendency to adopt speech patterns that you see in use.

So even if you refrain, you are still inundated by the content by virtue of everyone else overusing it without specifying. Even if you have a tendency to recognize AI BS a few sentences in and go away from it, you still read probably two or three sentences and may have influenced your speech a little.

... and that somebody as omnipresent as an LLM-bot would influence those way more effectively than a regular human should be of no big surprise.

I mean, sure you can mine some crypto, but the perceived value of those is essentially nothing.

The market cap for all those cited coins together is considered about $7 billion (Monero being the vast majority of that). So mining that won't do them any good to recoup expense unless they suddenly got all the crypto-bros to abandon BTC in favor of Monero (Etherium is at $380 billion, BTC is at $1.8 Trillion).