One of my kids went to a magnet school for performing arts. They’re public schools, and they don’t cost extra, but you do have to apply for them if you don’t live in the immediate area and there’s an element of competition to get in.

The idea behind magnet schools is that you can improve the overall academic performance of a school if you increase the diversity of the economic and academic backgrounds of the students. Schools in the US are tied to a geographic area, which in turn is generally correlated with income - poor areas tend to have bad schools with low funding; richer areas have much better schools with better funding. With magnet schools the state/school district/whatever will take a struggling school, pump a bunch of extra funding into it, and give it some sort of academic theme (e.g. visual arts, performing arts, STEM, etc.) with the goal of attracting gifted students from outside to come to the school.

It’s not a term invented by critics of the AI craze, but rather proponents (who apparently don’t realize just how insane it sounds). First time I heard it was when an enthusiastic coworker sent this article to me in an email. He was completely serious. Made some off-hand remarks that sounded borderline cultist about people who are “completely misguided” about AI. He’s been sending out emails about AI for a couple years now and I realized that I’ve been watching a case AI psychosis gradually unfold.

Firefox is totally doable on that much RAM. Not going to be pleasant, but usable. You want to strip down as much resource usage as you can: inside Firefox throw in uBlock Origin and Tab Unloader; outside Firefox use a stripped down desktop like XFCE or just a straight low resource window manager with no desktop environment (I was a big fan of WindowMaker back in the day).