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....

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

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...

Doesn't matter. That sort of thing is lost on the majority of the public. The climate change folks need to put a better spin on their marketing pitch.

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.

... with this news until the Northeastern US wasn't under a polar vortex forecast.

Screw the C3S forecasts and CO2 cutting efforts. Throw another lump of coal in the stove, Bob Cratchet.

Garbage gyre.

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.

I'm not so sure about law. I've met a number of attorneys who, shockingly, *couldn't* get a job anywhere, or at least not a job that paid much more than minimum wage. And this was before LLMs even were a thing. The explanation I've heard is that it's become much easier to get a law degree (some law schools essentially are open admission), so the market got saturated.

Also, if you *do* want to gun for that senior partner job at Dewey, Cheatham & Howe, you'll have to work 90-hour weeks for a lot of years first. I've met attorneys who were on that career path, and they were truly unhappy souls.

As I suggested in 2008 in "Post-Scarcity Princeton":
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process?"

AI is just one more aspect of that trend of post-scarcity technological change, as (AI-based) one-on-one tutoring is now cheap (or effectively free if you are paying for AI access for other reasons).

Indeed, educational videos on-demand to reflect current interests and needs via YouTube or elsewhere are another example of how compulsory schooling is increasingly obsolete.

Thanks for the Alfie Kohn link. He is an amazing insightful compassionate writer whose words have shaped some of my beliefs. John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Pat Farenga, and Grace Llewelyn are some other writers who have shaped my beliefs on education -- as are stories from sci-fi writers like James P. Hogan (e.g. "Voyage from Yesteryear"), R.A. Lafferty ("Primary Education of the Camiroi"), and Ursula K. Le Guin ("Always Coming Home", "A Wizard of Earthsea") and others.

Almost everything has pros and cons, and it is true that free schools or progressive schools have some benefits. Sadly, as I wrote here circa 2009:
https://pdfernhout.net/towards...
        "See, that is the false choice -- suggesting you either confine a child to [school as] prison or they will commit their first violent crime and have to be imprisoned [as a truant]. That is a very dim view of human nature, neighborhoods and families. Yet, it is a self justifying view, in part destroying the very neighborhood fabric it claims to be defending. So, we are left with streets that are safe because there are no people on them. We have successfully destroyed the village in order to save it, using compulsory schooling instead of napalm."

One reason given for sending a child to compulsory school is so they will be around kids their own age -- ignoring that the only reason there are not kids their own age around during the weekday is precisely because of compulsory school (and even on weekends there is homework and then making up for missed family time during the week due to schooling which tend to keep kids indoors).

As a former high school debater, I especially like this point by Aife Kohn on the dark side of debate training from the page you linked to:
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
        "Kohn: I grew up in Miami Beach, Florida, a very odd place, where the median age was deceased. I went to a large public high school, which was an intellectual wasteland. I didn't do sports. I had elements of competitiveness to be sure - in punning, for example. But in high school I was a nationally ranked debater. And although I was winning and liking it, it took me years to unlearn the poisonous messages I was taught: that any argument can be successfully defended if you're clever enough. And that winning is what counts most. I still describe myself today as a recovering debater. Sports carries with it its own set of problems, but competition is not limited to that. So when people say we need academic awards, debates, science competitions, and national spelling bees, what I hear them saying is, "Well, we destroy the athletes by turning their lives into an attempt to defeat everyone in sight - why shouldn't we do that to everyone else, too?""

And from the end:
        "Thuermer: If you had to reinvent yourself tomorrow, Alfie, what would you do?
        Kohn: I think if my career takes a turn in the next ten years, it's likely that I'll be thinking about raising kids and helping parents rethink the tendency to treat kids like pets. People have come up with cleverer ways of getting compliance - getting the kids to do what the parents want - as opposed to helping kids become responsible, caring, reflective people who can make decisions, who are socially skilled. Now that I'm a parent, this is increasingly an issue for me. A lot of it just deals with the fundamental lack of respect for children in this culture."

I quoted Alfie Kohn here (in 2008) from his "No Contest: The Case Against Competition" book in "Post-Scarcity Princeton" critiquing Princeton University and suggesting how that institution could improve:
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
        "[Alfie Kohn's words:] If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete. The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with "immense character strengths who don't make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport." Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down those activities. ... Each culture provides its own mechanisms for dealing with self-doubt. ... Low self-esteem, then, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of competition. The ingredients include an aching need to prove oneself and the approved mechanism for doing so at other people's expense. ... I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low self-esteem, to argue that our "state religion" is a sign of psychological ill-health -- this will not sit well with many people.(Page 103)"

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.