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.

I'm a huge fan of AI. I predict that it will help us solve previously intractable problems in science, engineering, medicine and maybe even politics.

Presumably you mean LLMs. LLMs cannot think; cannot synthesize new ideas; thus cannot solve unsolved problems. LLMs are not the path to AGI.

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.

Yup. It's pretty hard to do the right thing when the oil cartel that has invaded Alberta keeps threatening to shit itself and is actively trying to engineer a separatist movement entirely for its own benefit. Here's hoping Carney eventually finds a way to disembowel them.

Its only real flaw with the latest tech is the pacing, but it doesn't take much for a human to correct that. It's not at all what I'd call slop

Its objectively slop and the best models sound dead and lifeless. What *I* want is for Voice artists to still have the career they've been slaving their asses off to still exist. Your not going to get the traumatized performance of Astarion collapsing with grief after killing the vampire who enslaved him, without Neil Newbon drawing on his own experience of trauma, or even the narators snarky delivery without a voice actor whos spent her life playing D&D with absolutely diabolocial nerds informing her subtle intonations and knowing delivery. All you hear in AI performances is .......... nothing. No acting, no emotions, just a dead plagarism machine sewing together stolen performances.

It is the very definition of slop.

The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.

When I looked a few years ago, motorists in the Youkay paid 8x as much in motoring taxes as the Youkay government spent on roads. They're a generic tax grab rather than something to pay for roads.

But yeah, it's incredibly unfair that EVs don't pay the tax when they're typically significantly heaver than ICE cars and road damage scales with something like the 3rd or 4th power by weight.