It's pretty easy to trace the events which destroyed search, useful content. genuine engagement and the subsequent timeline. Broadly speaking it's 2007-2008. Google acquired DoubleClick and monetized YouTube. Concurrently, you had a populist presidential campaign legitimize Twitter which allowed it to shift from entertainment for people with poor attention spans into a new and media giant.

Google and other peer search quality didn't immediately suffer. There was sufficient inertia and hysteresis to hold it as largely functional for the next 2-4 years depending on what you were using it for, but easily by 2011-2012 you can start tracking stories and discussions about, "Why has Google search started to suck". In fact Gemini will give you a shockingly honest set of answers if you just make that your search, "stories from 2012 about why does google search suck".

Reddit and Discord have emerged as winners in social media knowledge forums due to appealing to the worst common denominators, mob morality, and petty tyrants running fiefdoms.

Reddit messing with their algo isn't a threat to Reddit as much as you think. They have cultivated dregs towards a level of mediocrity and intellectual sloth in most areas that the inertia is a black hole and have handed out fiefdoms to those who will freely labor 80+ hours a week to feel important. Being too articulate on Reddit triggers accusations of bot / AI generated content. There are entire subs which by context should be incredibly technical and science oriented which sound like a Pakled echo chamber.

What will kill Reddit is a sufficient global economic downturn. When enough mods get laid off from jobs they are not doing in favor of moderating their sub, they will start up the monetized / paid mod conversation again, and the serfs will want democracy and mod elections. Reddit will try to pivot to AI moderation and control of subs. For most subs not based around AI will cause massive backlash, but the failure dynamics will already be in full rotation by then.

So, mail-merge for the 21st century?

Take this training dataset and sanitize it of all references and code from that project and dataset over there. Gotcha, right. Then use the resulting dataset to train a new functionally equivalent model with 0.0000000001% of its training data missing.

We'll call that a job for the 0th AI Agent.

Not hard to make it to a clean room implementation though with AI agents. You follow the same steps:
1st AI gets the code and extrapolates a complete and fully nuanced functional spec.
2nd AI gets the clean functional spec and writes net new code without ever having seen the original code.
(largely unnecessary / could be 1st) 3rd AI performs parallel unit and functional testing against both versions of code and feeds back a list of exceptions and revisions for 2nd AI to make to net new.

If you want extra sanitation safeguards, especially for F/OSS and other code which might have been scraped in the creation of 2nd AI's dataset, build 2nd AI from a dataset explicitly filtered from all reference and code for the project.

As for the copyright issue, there will be copyright guidelines and protections for "AI derived" creative works legislatively fabricated in the next decade across North America and the EU. There will some hand wavy requirements for where the human is involved in the loop and how much agency they exercise over the AI generation process, but it will be not so much different than the volume of books written by a room and similar content mills with the single big-name author on the cover and the Library of Congress application. The major IP and content owners (think Disney) will want to use AI in their workflows and not hassle with copyright questions, and they will get DMCA v3.0. Or DMCA++, however you want to look at it. If it gets really excessive, they'll even bolt on the circumventions for needing 2 different AI instances outlined above for clean room laundering.

I worked at Autozone for a brief minute about 20 years ago and loved the terminal system they had for handling warranties. The usability and efficiency of a UI that had to fit in an 80-column interface cannot be overstated compared back then to its contemporaries and certainly much lower efficiency derived from the trash of phone / mobile centric development.

Similarly with the textbook thing, in the 90s my Algebra II teacher had a class set of books for proofs and formal logic from the 60s or 70s which she had gotten library rebound because an equivalent quality new text did not exist and the logic chapters of the normal semi-disposable textbook were poor quality. The dual-income driven college hyperinflation as well as state funding for textbooks has turned that industry intentionally malicious with making human-generated slop in order to increase the ephemerality of textbooks. Can't show that the new shiny textbook is better for students if you don't intellectually kneecap a generation of them first.

This was basically my first thought -- not the humblebrag they think it is. Any sufficiently large company declaring a ban on AI tools is effectively announcing their profit margins are padded more than enough to not need any potential scalability and efficiency increases AND no legitimate competitors to be concerned.

Across a lot of the "art" related games and crafts, AI has become a one acceptable opinion community. It transitioned from popular virtue signaling to fascism with surprising velocity.

As for the actual ban at GW during the content creation phase, won't actually happen. I'm pretty strongly of the opinion one of the utilities of AI art is to relieve artists of a volume of commercial dreck in favor of art for the sake of human expression. Ignoring the fact that AI art is trained on other art **just like human artists**, artists churning out generic art against a project goal are going to be looking at other art for inspiration and it would be naive to think there hasn't been a bidirectional circle and wandering back and forth across media with tyranids and Starship Troopers and similar. The artists in looking up and mocking up ideas are going to be using or taking in, if even accidentally, AI generated material. Are they going to get magical luddite-edition Google accounts which skip the AI summary in search? There is not a way to sanitize content production from the influence of other artists and AI content. It's as intellectually absurd as the concept of using technology "virgins" when reverse engineering a competitor's product.

I've been in favor of a binary choice for manufacturers / vendors when it comes to *consumer* electronics goods. Allow the manufacturers to register / legally classify their device as either (A) computing device or (B) smart appliance. Here's the general gist of the legal distinctions:

If it is (A) computing device:
  - Consumer provided with permanent root / administrative access day 1.
  - Complete offline functionality outside of services with a reasonable need / hosted online (e.g. email client works offline, but obviously must be online to update content).
  - No greater legal liability around software defects than current requirements.
  - Consumer has 100% rights to modify the software and hardware on the device, though no open source / code requirements for any proprietary / secret sauce (e.g. driver blobs).
  - Consumer use of rights does not cause a loss in functionality outside of services and features which inherently can't work (e.g. when offline, internet-based services are unavailable vs Google blocking Google Pay on rooted phones would not be allowed).
  - Consumers have a right to API functional spec details for any internet or external dependencies for advertised device functionality and have the right to direct the device to use locally hosted / 3rd party alternative services.
  - 100% right to repair, hardware parts BOMs and board diagrams publicly available.

(B) Smart appliances:
  - Support and services provided in perpetuity.
  - Shutting down services / sunsetting devices has an open-source poison pill -- all device source and root access must be registered / escrowed and get released. This includes all proprietary blob source code and similar from all contributing parties.
  - Reducing functionality is the same as sunsetting the device -- no neutering protection.
  - Software and hardware defects carry the legal liability of consumer products, no EULA / TOS / arbitration clause / etc. protections.
  - Security vulnerabilities are in scope for legal liability and must be fixed in perpetuity. For hardware defects or unfixable software, a mitigating control must be provided.

There is also the worker bee problem. Government work attracts workers often with one or more of the following traits:
1) Don't care about productivity and output in the workplace (i.e. lack of pride in workmanship).
2) Don't have the intellectual capability to rate or understand useful output in the workplace. This is pretty extreme in areas like social work*.
3) Are risk adverse to the point of being otherwise useless and unemployable. They're in government work for the safety net of a good retirement program.
4) Were indoctrinated by the education system to consider certain careers as some consecrated mission or otherwise aspirational (e.g. teachers / police / military).

*People like to make fun of post grad degrees in education should see the critical thinking skills of a turnip the average social work major possesses. And it's sad, because many of them genuinely care about people. Their work and personal lives constantly challenge Hanlon's razor.

Odd, I have a similar Samsung remote for my TV and only once in 2-3 years have needed to flip it so the underside is up after the TV prompted me (was actually a couple weeks ago).

The living room it is in isn't a full-on man cave, but the main window has double blackout curtains (more for sound absorption) and the other window gets almost zero sun with a covered patio in front of it. That room also almost never has the main lights turned on, maybe a couple times a month for 5 minutes at a time.

The remote has been impressive frankly in its ability to harvest enough light from leakage from adjacent rooms and a night light at the far end of the room for navigation.

It was simply bad writing. It really looks like they were given a set of plot points and callback scenes to get into each episode, and like the sub-70 IQ characters they wrote, they were not clever enough to weave it together into something coherent.

In the horror side of the genre, characters making stupid decisions in a moment which come to haunt them is normal -- it's part of the contract between the audience and the writing, to buy the bit. Characters feeling like they would fit in Idiocracy the TV series takes you out of the world and is too much to ask.

The show was run by someone who thought their success with Bones was because the show was smart and clever like House or Sherlock Holmes, not the reality of low brow comedic sexual chemistry between two people much of the target demo thought were obtainable.

Crysis actually.

They also consistently demonstrate massively worse blind spots around false communities. The blind faith towards "person from Discord / reddit" is truly extreme.

Part of it looks like the general social dysfunction from social media overexposure - conflating acquaintances with friendship and such. Hustle culture plays in, as integrity is just something for old people and "not the way the world works". Then they rage at companies and CEOs like they're personal friends beholden to conform to their worldview and in-group politics.

I mean it is all tribalism, but like zero effort, zero intellect applied tribalism.

If they have the technology to descramble the average reddit post, they're already sitting on trillion-dollar AGI tech.

It's about these things in balance.

Suburban homes sourcing most / all of their drinking water from bottles is insulting unless there is a Flint water situation due to toxic city leadership. Having a crate of bottled water as backup / leaving the home is more reasonable. Abolishing straws or going to paper ones was always at the opposite end an absurd, insulting virtue signaling. When it comes to changing what something is made from to make it easier to biodegrade, the first question should always be energy input. How much more energy and cost accompany things like reformulating straws' plastic.

Disposable diapers are a necessity of the dual income household. There are a variety of other disposables and consumables which fall in the same category where given the option and time, many could / should / would use reusables. The dark gray area are things like laundry and dish detergent pods. They probably shouldn't exist, but portion control isn't just an eating problem with many people.

Going from selling something a thousand times instead of once, the selling something a few times extra instead of once though is its own form of rent seeking by defect. We're seeing this in the automotive world with PZEVs, direct injection, and SCR systems all designed to incur costly repairs which shouldn't have been necessary.