No. Just no.
Every single online forum I visit felt the arrival of a new kind of users. That kind that makes discussions difficult and makes you wish that their website would go back online as fast as possible.

There's a rumor that the CIA is operating 4chan, or at least keeping tabs on it, and I can see a good basis for that rumor. It's basically a containment are for what we would rather not have somewhere else.

But it is a simple fact of life that not everyone will agree on everything. Would be nice to stop having crimes so that we could divert resources away from fighting criminals and into more interesting endeavors. Doesn't mean that this will happen. Ever.
I try to do what I believe is right, which is to put myself in other's shoes. Others will simply take your shoes because they like them more than their own, and they can justify their decision to themselves as perfectly as I can justify mine.

And so some parties and their voter base like to build their beliefs and policies on a scientific basis. Others prefer what has been done before, what god said in the bible, what their gut feeling says... Whatever. It is a simple fact of life that people do things differently.

The fundamental issue is that, in a more and more globalized and interconnected world, we have to force people to do what's "right", whatever the zeitgeist believes is "right" in that moment, because all of society hinges on it.
A thousand years ago, if the villagers on the other side of the river decided to start eating poop and all caught some form of deadly illness, it was their issue. Today, the entire world ground to a halt because somebody in china coughed too much in somebody else's soup.

It's an issue with democracy and modern society, really. That every voice counts, especially the loudest, and that every voice must work with all the others, or else the whole thing comes crumbling down.

So yeah, it's not that being pro or against vaccines is stupid. It's that our lives are in the hands of everyone else, and that someone being stupid will ruin a civilization and put everyone at risk.

Reminds me of a compilation of articles I wish I could find again, where a feminist researcher/journalist wrote an article with the title (paraphrasing) "Girls are surpassing boys in everything, including school, and that's a good thing!"
But then about 8 years later she wrote an article titled "My sons are failing in school and I don't know why!".

My own SO is an English teacher at the university level, and in her desire to improve her lesson plans, she reads many gender aware pedagogy papers. When asking her about how she would apply such techniques in a mixed classroom, I got me a funny answer: She never had a mixed classroom. Lately every advanced English Literature class she teaches is for no one but young women.

"Arguably, they're listening to what some winner says on YouTube."

You hit the nail on the head. Who, exactly, are kids supposed to listen to if not the successful (At least outwardly) people?

Sadly, parents are often lost themselves when it comes to career plans and choices. If your parents are of the successful kind, then listening to them is a good choice. Plus, they're probably setting you up to have a cushioned safety net for your eventual failure, and the possibility of bouncing back from failure is the biggest contributor to success anyway.
If your parents aren't the successful kind, then whose advice are you supposed to listen to, really? There might be lessons to be learned from their failures, but the world is moving so fast that their own future prospects are alien to them, let alone their children's future. Teachers and school councilors are probably also off the list since they're just regular people living regular paycheck-people lives, which is seen as a failure today anyway.

The guy sitting in front of a camera spewing bullshit for a living is arguably the most successful person in the kid's life.

"with a single benchmark response costing approximately $3,500, according to Barclays"
At which point do these kind of numbers make any financial sense other than to someone renting you a data center?

It's a well-known fact that many alphabet soup agency operate on 4chan either to disseminate (dis)information or to watch what the social rejects have to say.
In fact, to not go into graphic details, a certain kind of spam on the political board disappears entirely when major events happen (Russian offensive, the 7th october attack...)
The agents are simply too busy on those days to do their usual spam.

There is also the issue where, if you make less than X amount of dollars a month, you get benefits and if you make above them, you lose them. There is the obvious benefit where just staying below the line is more advantageous than crossing it by a small margin.

I am with parent on this one but not because it doesn't include wealthy people, but because it's an experiment. The idea of UBI is that you're getting cash, no strings attached, stress free, for you to plan your life around.
These UBI experiments are much like the WFH experiments many companies did, where they said "We're gonna allow you guys to work from home and if productivity doesn't fall, we will keep this forever". There is an implicit suggestion to lie and to be on your best behavior in order to make the best of it. They also KNOW that the experiment will end and that this flow of money will stop, and so are trying to, again, make the most of it.

The only way to have a valid UBI experiment is to have UBI in all senses of the word(s). Give a set amount to everyone, remove all conditional "poor people" benefits and make sure that everyone understands that this is how things are done now.
Only then will we get to observe the real results of UBI.

About the same as saying "Why are you depressed? Just think positively!"
Addiction to social media is called an addiction because it affects the brain's chemistry and, to make matters worse, it has a social component where if you don't participate, you will ostracize yourself from your social peers who do.
Us adults can resist the siren call relatively well because we remember a world without it. For today's children, it IS their world.

You're mixing up usefulness and innovation. AI isn't creating anything on its own, but it's making the process of creation faster. It's just a tool that makes people a little more efficient at what they do. If I have a task to do, such as writing code, and AI can spit out boilerplate code for me that I can just build on, then that made me more efficient at my work.
Yes, sometimes it spits out garbage, but with time and experience one learns how to wrangle it and get it to spit out useful bits, and that's pretty much all one needs out of a tool.

So yeah, AI agents aren't out to reinvent the wheels, they're just there to help people get better at making wheels. The problem is, of course, that there are only so many wheels we need, and so many wheel makers we need to make them. More efficient people means less need for people in general.
The optimists out there are predicting that, with more and more productivity, there will be more and more new fields that require more and more workers... forever. I would disagree with that assessment, but only time will tell.

And the other side of that same coin is that, considering the metric fucktons of data needed to train LLMs, the only people who can legally train their models are the ones who can afford to burn loads of money, barring any sort of competition.
That and, you can write all the laws you want, deepseek proved that people will just use the other side's model if it's better and, most importantly, free.

Neo-Luddites like Ted Kaczynski and Jack Ellul pointed out the fundamental issue with this kind of technological advancement, you know that it's gonna create a mess, but if you don't use it you will find yourself left behind.
A global economy also means global markets and global supply/demand. If you're not using the biggest advancements in efficiency and cost-cutting, someone else will be, and you will be left in the dust.

Whoever said that line you quoted is, I believe, sadly right.

The problem is that AI wasn't even on the radar 5 years ago.
Sure there were articles and work and ideas floating around, but someone who just picked his major in 2020 is probably looking for a job, armed with a masters degree, in 2025.
Problem is, the world of 2020 was way different from the one 5 years later. Hell, you're saying that GPU design is huge right now, the big tech companies are building data centers right, left and center to accommodate all their GPU needs... And then the chinese dropped a model that said "You won't need that many GPUs after all."
Can we even predict what kind of world will we be living in in 2030? You, as a fresh-faced highschool student in need of picking a major, will have to divinate that.

No wonder that most of Gen Z have no idea what the hell they're supposed to do and are in a perpetual need of "finding themselves".

This line never fails to make me laugh and is a general telling of how terribly messed up the political scene has gotten.
You are conflating Hollywood showing mixed race couples and openly trans characters with leftism; when you won't find a viler bunch of Fat Old Rich People who have mastered all the secret arts of tax evasion, sued everyone and their mothers to protect their copyrights, and have stood as valiantly by their honorable codes as their monetary goals allowed (check the difference between movie posters in the US vs the versions they have for China.

They have no issues showing a gay couple in a movie, as long as it doesn't hurt their pockets, and as long as they're not required to pay their workers more.

What kind of leftism is that?

The idea behind bootcamps was, I guess, to produce code monkeys that could write the code that needs writing, while the Software Engineers holding SE degrees decided what was the code that needed to be written.
After all, in chem/biology labs, you have pipette monkeys and technicians doing the "grunt" work while the PHDs designed the experiments and theorized the reactions.