No grandpa, kids go tear assing around on their e-bikes now.

Ironically, Florida does have a social media ban for under 14s, but it's mostly toothless. So, I wouldn't be to quick to jump to the conclusion that these troublemakers did this because their doomscrolling was taken away.

Gee, how could Iran find allies in Minnesota, lol

I mean, people totally won't use this to report stuff that they simply disagree with.

They really should start holding parents accountable for buying age inappropriate things for their kids. Here in FL, the public schools in Orange County recently just instituted a ban on e-bikes and e-scooters, because a significant number of kids were flouting the traffic laws, riding without helmets, and some parents were actually buying e-motorcycles for their brats. I thought giving your kid a phone with unrestricted internet access was irresponsible enough, but someone's always gotta come along and say "Hold my beer!"

On one side you've got parents flipping out because the school library might have a book buried somewhere within the shelves that says trans people exist. On the other, there's parents buying their kids smartphones with unrestricted internet access, and frickin' motorcycles. The duality of parents is a strange, strange thing.

If you bought a smartphone/tablet for your kid, what do you think they're using it for, crushing walnuts?

How about just don't connect critical infrastructure to the internet in the first place?! It's not rocket surgery.

Server-based, would have been the accurate term from the company charging so damn much to access theirs in perpetuity.

One would think they'd be quite familiar with the concept they dare not speaketh..

You are mistaken in your analysis. It is only better for now, until enshitification lands you right back into ad hell, only it is much harder to block because it is all single-source with content you want, unlike ad networks that are separate and identifiable.

Current generation AI is more than capable of reasoning toward answer it have not encountered in its training data.

Well, you know that line from Jurassic Park.

I spent a good couple of moments scratching my head thinking "Google, I know you love hiding things in your UI, but where the hell is this?" Turns out they'd already removed it.

So, I had to use good ol' ChatGPT to add a second Spaceship Earth to Epcot.

(emphasis mine)

If your pseudo code, sorry, I mean fine detail "architecture", is that comprehe dive you might just as well write actual code and let it fix that. IMO however AI code often doesnt even compile, has logical errors and is bloated. However YMMV.

But can it make the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand?

This. This right here is the answer.

Google search originally was creepy-accurate because it was built on the work that was done elsewhere. While other search engines looked at frequency of search terms and other easy-to-game metrics, Google did it based on links, meaning more linked-to pages got preferred rankings. That worked for a very long time, until that too got automated and SEO slop took over search indices. Google itself began to have more and more ads creep into search results, and reward clearly-seo-slop over the sort of sites people actually wanted to find. Sites got so plastered in ads and tracking scripts that they became utterly unusable without an ad blocker, even for people who WANTED to support the sites...then there were the cookie banners, then there were the modal overlays...and if you had a labor-of-love website that legitimately had useful, human-created or curated content that was useful and functional...you were buried on page six of the search results because you were competing against the SEO slop and backlink farms.

and then ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity came around and were able to sift through all the crap to give everyone the paragraph they were actually looking for in the first place.

You dug your own grave, Axios...when your website takes a minute to load its moving video ads, people tolerate it in the absence of an alternative. Gemini is terrible for 101 other reasons...but if it puts the slop sites out of business, I'll accept the tradeoff.