1. Many major universities prohibited (and some continue to prohibit) the use of standardized testing in admissions starting in 2020. This removes the competency check and relies almost entirely on grades that are stunningly inflated nowadays because...
---a. Teachers are pressured not to "ruin the college prospects of their students".
---b. Not fail students because the districts aren't allowed to hold students back.

2. They're ALLOWED to enter the university because higher education funding has been so massively cut in certain administrations that the universities **need** to rely on student tuition to keep the lights on. If you need 25,000 enrolled students to survive to a better time and student quality has tanked... you just lower your standards.

It's not video games. Video games can definitely share some blame for the reduced physical activity of the millennial and Gen Alpha, but scholastic competencies are the result of K-12 schools & school boards being the battlegrounds of political causes for the last 30 years.

The kids are stupid because a generation of nutjobs intentionally screwed up their education.

1. No, the unique individual student of a UC college/university is not becoming less literate by the day. They're actually becoming MORE literate while enrolled.
2. Yes, the colleges and universities acknowledge that graduating 12th-graders are significantly less capable in math and reading than 10 years ago and are still admitting them to their freshman classes. Thus, the overall competencies of the enrolled student populations are lower than in the past.

Why is this happening?

1. Long-term strategic degradation of public education
-- Massive coordinated defunding of public education over the last 30 years (private school vouchers, funding reductions).
-- Coordinated invasion of the education management sphere by people with no educational background for the purpose of pushing political/social agendas.
-- Over-empowering parents to influence or pressure educators to give certain grades.

2. Continued devaluing/undervaluing of the teaching profession

3. Some **horribly misguided universities** prohibited the use of standardized tests in admissions (some temporarily, some ongoing). This allows students hyper-inflated high school grades and easily-cheated essays to be able to enter university without proving their competencies.

4. Massive defunding of colleges and universities via changes to research funding and direct funding force those campuses to accept less capable students to just keep the lights on.

So ya... this isn't new. It's not sudden. It doesn't come as a surprise. Anyone who's been embedded in higher education for the last decade or more has seen it all coming. And the faculty are so sick and tired of basically having to teach remedial high school courses to people who are supposed to be in the top 10% of students are starting to rebel.

Apparently they're homeless because Microsoft didn't pay out so getting out more is probably the last thing on their mind since mission accomplished - they're outside already.

There was a time when Anthropic had successfully convinced a LOT of people that they were the one and only trustworthy AI/LLM. They've pretty much blown that tentative good faith up and they should know that.

I find it odd that they're still carrying on as if they're the "good guy".

It's not as good as we want, but it's not as bad as you say.

The INTERNET has a ton of bullshit. It also is the single greatest source of fact in the history of human civilization. The challenge is separating fact from bullshit. Pre-evil Google figured out that if you rank websites' relevance according by references, the truth tends to float to the top.

Every pseudonymous/anonymous communication outlet has a ton of bullshit. What matters is the scoring structure, though, tends to float stuff to the top. That whats makes it useful. There's has been enough truth in Reddit posts and the scoring system had been sufficiently successful that after everyone learned how to game Google in search of clicks, people started adding "reddit" to their Google searches knowing that it genuinely increased their ability to solve a problem.

It just so happens that now its getting even worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

While typically used to advise against holding a person's job hostage based on KPIs, I see it's relevance here as well:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" or

"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."

ChatGPT and the Reddit management both assert that scraping Reddit for solutions and facts is good because it's full of real solutions from real humans, but once it became known that was happening, it became certain that people were going to exploit that by spamming Reddit.

For criminal negligence by foisting their QA and QC upon their users instead of trained QC/QI/QA personnel.

AB-1856 (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1856) is titled "Age verification signals: software applications and online services", but that's primarily for show. The key part of the proposed law says:

There is no verification of age. It's self-report of age at OS setup. There is no verification required by this code. The OS then provides age bracket range upon request.

Electric bikes get far better range per watt. I can get 45 miles on a 500Wh battery without pedal assist, putting my consumption at ~12Wh per mile.

Like this is so basic of a thought exercise that anyone with a brain (or anyone that owns an e-bike) can see this story is utter bullshit.

Do you know the difference between correlation and causation? Are you completely ignorant of history and lack the ability to search the internet for information? Here's a shortcut to finding some of the many forms of control asserted on the use of nuclear weapons--

- the Mutually Assured Destruction Doctrine
- Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
- Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty
- Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
- Outer Space Treaty
- New START Treaty
- INF Treaty
- Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement
- Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
- the very existence of the International Atomic Energy Agency
- Nuclear Suppliers Group
- Missile Technology Control Regime
- Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones - Latin America & Caribbean, South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa, Central Asia,
- Unwavering levels of diplomatic conversations and economic deal making

And on and on...

Good people have put in work and continue to put in work to prevent bad people from using nuclear weapons. The lack of nuclear holocaust is a direct result of these action.

I'm wondering if we're having an exceedingly unlikely misunderstanding of the genie. I'm using "the use of nuclear weapons in war" as "the genie". No one has used nuclear weapons since 1945 because of the control efforts. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a threat of the genie being unleashed again, but control was maintained.

There will always be threats and concerns and fears. We actively fight them all so that the worst (the genie) doesn't kill millions.

Literally the same thing was said about nuclear war. You're trying to predict the future. I'm saying that we should forget about prediction and put in the work to prevent disaster. Those are two completely different ways of thinking-- Doomer vs. Worker.

Are you seriously equating the potential of nuclear attack with actual nuclear attack?

That lack of nuclear weapons in use is evidence of the control. You can call that control "tenuous" or "scary", but we don't exist in a post-apocalyptic nuclear hellscape because of the many different controls put in place over the last 80 years.

Your awfulizing is not representative of reality.

Back to the topic at hand -- the genie cannot be put back in the bottle, but it can be controlled. You have to put in the effort to control it.

But the genie can be controlled.

Nuclear weapons are a "genie out of the bottle" and they threat of nuclear war is ever-present, but we've not yet obliterated each other with nuclear weapons because we acknowledged that it's probably best that we restrict the the proliferation and possession of nuclear weapons.

We need to do the same with AI.

It's worse now. If it was a "shade of gray" before, it's very dark gray today.

1. August 2025: Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer (a Senate-confirmed, bipartisan appointee) after accusing her (without evidence) of rigging jobs data after a weaker-than-expected July report.
2. September 2025: E.J. Antoni (Heritage Foundation economist with no qualifications in this field) failed in the nomination process due to lack of credibility.
3. January 2026: Trump nominated Brett Matsumoto. He is yet to be confirmed.
4. More than a third of senior positions at the Bureau of Labor Statistics remain unfilled after massive DOGE cuts. BLS staff is currently at 1/4 of normal.

The department is under explicit political duress. It's different today.