Haha I started on computers really young, so I got to experience a lot of the early 2000’s era internet.

I forgot about eDonkey, sharing forums are another, used to frequent astalavista forums lol.

You’re right about torrents though in general, really changed the sharing game.

I remember Firefox 2 having TABS, instead of a bunch of IE or Netscape windows lmao.

Trying to play warcraft 3 custom maps and getting booted from games because of dialup making the map download take forever (or a phone call mid-game causing me to lag out and get kicked).

I didn’t get cable/dsl until my parents divorced around 2008, I remember sitting in the corner of our empty house (they had to short sell it during the housing crisis and my mom took most of the furniture when she moved out) trying to connect to my neighbor friend’s wifi (that I had flashed ddwrt on lmao) with this windows 95 laptop I managed to flash Linux mint onto to make it usable just to watch some anime.

Fun times.

I’m not old! I’m still in my 30s 🥲

Yet I too did all of the above except winmx, I used limewire lol

Literally any programming issue is now vibe coding, didn’t you hear? People wrote perfect code always before LLMs took over all coding and started writing slop.

I’d like to see scientific proof of that

China is building them in 5-6 years, the best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago and the second best time is now.

Yes that’s why I said both, renewables require a lot of space both for generation and storage and generally has peaks and valleys on generation, vs nuclear which can consistently provide a stable amount generally.

“tend to attract questionable investors” what does this even mean, every industry attracts questionable investors and there’s basically zero nuclear in the US to even gauge that from.

There’s a huge anti-nuclear crowd, I’d prefer we focus on renewables as much as possible but it’s stupid not to phase out oil/gas for nuclear as a more consistent source.

Would you be surprised Noam Chomsky was an Epstein buddy?

My cats, gasoline, pinesol, Mac n cheese

Or state, Texas just made it way more expensive with their “Anti-China” regulation, the irony is multi faceted, the so-called “Anti-big gubbment” passing regulation like that, though I’m sure it’s for someone’s enrichment as it always is, most of the big names just moved packaging to indonesia or similar to get around it, and many of the small business owners who own the vape shops are having to close becuase of the increased cost.

It’s all so stupid.

Honestly it’s generally really easy to install Linux these days, first time I did it back in 2008ish when I was like 12 on a shitty win xp laptop was not too bad either tbh.

Lmao that’s how it is for me too a good bit of the time.

It can’t be done without MONEY.

“Quietly” I saw the article announcing it weeks ago

The only one actually relevant to “cognitive decline” is the second, do we know what the math questions actually were?

Also I wasn’t making an anology, I’m seriously asking if we’d see the same drop-off, as I think the root of the problem is moreso that humans will generally choose to use less effort rather then more, so any tool that reduces effort might see the same amount of drop off in end result when taken away.

Going with analogies though, people having cars mean less people learning about/using horses/carriages/bikes and as cars are increasingly more complex and less repairable, less people put in the effort to learn how to fix them if something goes wrong.

Ultimately though I have to wonder what does that really matter in the long term? Did people stop doing/understanding math once calculators became common?

One of the points the paper makes is people who used it to help rather then solve the problem for them performed better once it was taken away, which adheres with my own observations on how people use certain tools vs seek to understand how those tool work and deeper their understanding. However again, is it really a problem that a majority of Americans (for example) don’t know how to change the oil on their car? Does that actually indicate they’re less intelligent or unable to rationalize/logically process information? Or do they generally put the effort that would be put into learning how their car works into other efforts.

Unfortunately I think many are simply too burned out with day to day life to care about much learning at all, which is a much larger issue IMO.

Though I will say I do think AI/LLMs will only reinforce that behavior, I’m not sure if that’ll be all bad or really all that different then the existing status quo prior to their spread.

Edit: We could talk about the economic impact it will have, but the root cause is the same as all the other wealth inequality, and I can easily forsee how LLMs could be much more equitable rather then used as vehicles for enrichment.

On the math test, I’d be curious if a calculator was provided instead then taken away half-way through. Would we see the same drop off?

I think it’s because it’s much more visible in boomers as they’re more likely to be gambling in casinos whereas I’d bet (ha) the majority of betting is online these days.

Go into any casino and see what the age distribution is, in my experience the majority are boomers.