No, actually theres plenty of studies. You have to look first if you want to know!

Look up "watching eye effect supermarket" in google scholar or your academic search engine of choice. Theres literally hundreds of studies.

Too bad Australia's court hold zero sway over these social media companies and their fines mean nothing.

If they do business here, they have an office here, servers here and have legal liabilities here. Just like any business.

All the major social media companies dont just have offices here, they have datacenters, or major presences in data centers, here. More than that, they have clients here, and like any company that gets fined, if they dont pay those fines, the courts just *take* the money.

Don't be naive.

You speak with the bias of a person who has experienced a life of multiple hobbies and multiple possibilities and dismiss very legitimate concerns. For people who are actually addicted to shit like social media things can get very nasty indeed.

Thats who the legislation is for. Break the damn screen addiction.

And we keep automating stuff that really shouldn't be. Classic example is customer support phone lines. I cannot remember the last time I used one of those and didn't have to ask for an operator. Believe it or not, most people call those lines because we need something to be done, rather than information that we almost certainly already have or can easily obtain via the website (which you keep advertising over and over again while we're on hold, and even before we ask the question, but has no options to contact a human other than calling this number.)

I kinda feel we need the entire commercial world to take a time out, and revisit everything we do that involves interactions between the different parties involved in commerce. Is it really the right approach for companies to value shareholder value over long term sustainability? Should customers and employees be valued just as much as the investors? And if you (not you Morromist, the generic you) are about to respond with "But Friedman said" or some other "economic" argument, why do we, as a society, allow shareholders to exist? Is our aim to ensure those shareholders can make money, or is our aim to provide funding to ensure the institutions needed to do everything from develop technologies to providing food on our tables can exist and get the funding they need?

Because I can tell you, I sure as hell wouldn't sign on to the entire that we create an entire legal structure aimed at ensuring people with money can make more of it, and damn the consequences.

I'm not entirely sure how a rant about automated customer service lines turned into this, but now I've written it I'm going to submit it anyway.

Damn. You're right. That article doesn't say it, and I didn't find the one I originally read, which was about bacteria living deep in the earth where the radiation generated ionization states that they used. IIRC it was about bacteria living in a granite based low-level uranium source. And they were living a lot deeper than previously detected bacteria. (This was about 3-4 decades ago, so it's not surprising that I can't find that article. I think it was in Science News, but possibly it was in New Scientist. In any case, what I read was a magazine article. And it was rather explicit...though of course not detailed.)

Sorry, you seem to think your link invalidates the point. It does not, but you're welcome to make up a strawman and answer it. I would dress up as a batman to keep you honest, but in my culture we don't know what that is. Thanks for playing, though.

As whacky as the research sounds, theres precedents, albeit less funny ones.

Back in the 1980s where I lived, supermarkets used to always stick cardboard cutouts of policemen around the shop, cross-armed and staring. Apparently those where really effective.

Nobody actually thought it was a real policeman staring, but the psychological effect was enough that people felt too *observed* to actually go and do the crimes. I can only assume what this shows is it doesnt really matter what the authoritarian figure is , be he commissioner gordon, or batman, its enough to make people feel anxious about wanting to do good, or rather to be SEEN as doing good.

As the philosopher foucault observed, panopticon doesnt work by the prison guards doing the discipline, but the discontinuous sense of being observed made the prisoners discipline themselves.

The uranium has never been the expensive part of nucllear.

its building the bloody thing. The reality is nuclear is stil one of the most expensive forms of power out there whilst solar and wind (Especially in australia) are by far the cheapest. Its kind of weird to ignore the obvious solution to go for a plan that wont even come online until a decade after the solution is due.

Sometimes, social scientists who are under pressure to publish, anything, no matter what, to increase their publication count, will propose stupid experiments, that don't cost much to do, do not measure any intrinsic behaviour of humanity, and can be modified trivially to generate alternative papers. The trick is to brainstorm and try out a lot of these, until the p-value finally fits.

First, your goal going to college should be to learn _way_ more than you did ever in high school. Most people find it's where your real learning begins. It's a time to grow, experiment, and dream big. For many, it's also a time to take all the required courses necessary to do what are considered professional jobs - engineering, science, math, medicine, the list goes on.

Secondly, you've eliminated the 4 year degree barrier which is still actively deployed nation-wide by companies for jobs which otherwise have no business *requiring* a 4 year degree. The lack of a 4 year degree can be weaponized to reduce pay during employment negotiations. The same talking heads advising people on TV and YouTube to not get a college degree, somehow don't seem to have followed that same advice themselves.

Each step in education to a point provides you more choices, and sometimes more upward mobility. You can always, always find the one-offs, the make-it-rich-quick stories - but the reality typically doesn't reflect their luck.

I remember joining the military as a private, no college. It wasn't even six months in that I fully regretted that decision, suddenly understanding that even doing two or three years of college first could have drastically altered my lifestyle. 35+ years later, I've never regretted for a moment spending the money (which took years to pay off) or time invested in my college education.

Here's one reference, though not the orginal one I read.
https://academic.oup.com/ismej...

Note that this is not DIRECTLY eating radiation, but that's still its energy source, as that's where the H molecule comes from. So to simplify, saying it eats radiation is not wrong.

Good lord, we agree on something.

Anyway I think the issue is that there are idiots everywhere, and a lot of people who jump on bandwagons and are too proud to jump off once the evidence comes out it's a scam. And while I hate the idea personally, it sounds worse than flying, I would assume a lot of people look at the transportation speeds involved, and just assume it would be successful for that reason, especially in an era where a significant number of people believe America's railroads collapsed due to "flying", when the story is way, way, more complicated (essentially a systemic shock from all sides, over regulation, poorly thought out taxes that weren't applied to rival transportation systems, poor management, and out of control dumbass unions. A perfect storm of crappiness.)

The bubble will need to last 5 years before there's any chance of new players.

40 years ago, sure, you might have been right: silicon fabrication was still a relatively cheap industry to get into. Leaving aside environmental concerns (our old friend MOS Technology of the 6502 managed to end up as a superfund site...) it was quite simply a lot easier to make foundaries that worked on a micrometer scale than on today's nanometers. Gordon Moore said that while his eponymous law predicted a doubling of transistors per IC each year, he also saw a doubling of how much it cost to build a new foundary.

If it were cheap, even in countries that already have fewer regulatory hurdles, someone would have build new factories anyway. It's not like there wasn't any profit in memory production until a month ago. They're not commodity devices.

The article talks about a rise in temperature of half a degree causing a societal collapse over multiple centuries.

By comparison the Earth has heated by 1.1-1.2C in the last 150 years and is still rising, currently at a rate of about 0.2C per decade.

So, meteoric rise vs slight rise within the Earth's usual temperature fluctuations. This should tell you two things:

1. The current rise is, indeed, unnatural, and not due to the Earth's usual changes.
2. This is going to cause a hell of a lot more damage than one civilization smaller than the size of a typical European city collapsing.

> * rise of AI that takes control

I think that's unlikely, but I think the AI crap we're currently following suggests a different path.

The LLM fad is most probably going to eat itself, but take down a lot of things with it.

Let's take a look at it: We had the World Wide Web.

The web was built over a period of a couple of decades maybe (by the mid-2000s it could be considered the primary source of knowledge for everyone in the developed world), with virtually everyone switching to it en-mass. Newspapers went online and closed their paper versions. Magazines closed, to be replaced by websites that were vaguely related. People who once might have written books now wrote blogs or maintained websites with information that was dear to them. Manuals went online. Programmers I think know this more than most, it's easier to search for "Java list to array" than it is to actually go to a physical book and, even with the help of an index, find the method that does that. (Spoiler: Java's version is an ugly hack! I wish Java had kept the original versioning scheme as that'd have made it easier for them to make a Java 2 that didn't rely on the way Java 1 does things, breaking some backward compatibility but implementing things properly. Anyway, I digress.)

So then the first hit came, social media. Not a major hit, and not an obvious problem at first as the first social media sites were glorified blogging platforms. And that was fine, except one of these, Facebook, felt that it was in its best interests to hinder search engines from working with it, which undermined the web.

Then the next hit, the iPhone and Android. Again, not initially a major problem, but over time they encouraged massive amounts of content to be locked behind "apps", with any web interface being a third class option or worse.

Then Facebook came up again, they REALLY didn't like Google. How could they kill Google? By making normal content unsearchable, not just content posted behind Facebook's registration wall. So again, not caring about the web, they came up with a scheme to encourage everyone to post everything as videos. They lied about their own metrics, claiming it showed videos caused a crazy amount of engagement, and the rest of the content providers saw this, and put autoplaying videos on every web page, very often (as was Facebook's intention) without any readable text. Google's search couldn't actually search the videos at that time, so it undermined Google.

Meanwhile... Google was fucking around too. They intentionally made their own search engine less useful, noting that their competitors were apparently just copying them rather than trying to make their own search engines more useful than Google's. So now a Google search is very, very, unlikely to give you relevant answers without a lot of adding quotes to things.

Finally, LLMs. LLMs are the nail in the coffin. They remove any incentive to post anything on the Internet aside from documentation, advertising copy, and rants. There is decreasing incentive at this point to post anything you'd be paid to write or just to make the world a better place. Whether it's journalism, fiction, research, or even a Wikipedia page, fewer and fewer people will ever read what you have to say, but an LLM will, combine it with eleventeen other sources, and produce a summary that's inaccurate and dubious but is "good enough" for people looking for a quick answer.

So what we're left with are LLMs that will tell you things based upon the latest information as of 2025. They'll tell you the latest information as of 2025 today. And they'll tell you the latest information as of 2025 in five years. And in ten years, unless someone's willing to employ an army of researchers whose sole job is to write well researched and accurate articles to be ingested by an LLM, they'll be useless.

But so will the web.

And we don't have a replacement for the web, which is unfortunate because we don't have a replacement for the things we replaced using the web.

And as should be obvious, that means a world without information.

And I can't see how our civilization survives that.