Yeah, I guess you’re right. Better just grind them to dust and recycle the metals.

So, maybe there could be a government program for collecting old electronics and shipping them to places where people would still use them.

Meanwhile, people in the west are hoarding old 3G phones in their bedroom drawers. Come on people! You’re using a 5G phone, but somehow you can’t get rid of the old 4G, 3G and even 2G phones. How about you give them away? It’s not like anyone will pay anything for them anyway.

Mussolini would be proud. His teachings are being followed a hundred years after he wrote the book on this topic.

Welcome to the trough of disillusionment.

Absolutely! You just gotta involve blockchain, AI and cloud computing. Otherwise, the investors won’t know how hot Reddit is. Slap on some quantum computing, and you’re all set.

We’re just getting warmed up here! There’s so much to do.

How about we introduce several tiers of premium currency, like copper, silver, gold, platinum rubies and diamonds, each with their unique exchange rates.

You could have limited-time awards purchased with one of the premium currencies. Also, add time-gated features, like temporary access to meme subreddits, or comment and post visibility boosts.

Pay-to-win mechanics should be included too. How about time-limited karma boosters?

Oh, and loot boxes! We’ve got to have those too. You could buy basic loot boxes with copper coins, and in those you could find a few silver coins randomly. With the silver coins, you can buy silver boxes, some of which may contain gold coins, and so on all the way to diamond tier. Now that you have a convoluted assortment of different currencies, you can use them to boost your account, posts and comments in different ways. Oh, and Season passes too, can’t forget those!

Ads. So much ads! Of course, you can get rid of some of them, depending on how much you pay and which currency you use. These are all time-limited features, so you better keep those coins and gems flowing every day.

And subscriptions too! Once you subscribe to something like 1231 copper coins a day, you can’t cancel without climbing the mount Kilimanjaro. The only cancel button is physically located on a computer somewhere up there.

And there’s so much more to come.

Here’s the idea: Deprive YT of their revenue and maximize their expenses.

Browse the site as usual, but never watch any videos. Instead, download them at maximum resolution. You’ll skip all the adds, and take the maximum amount of bandwidth.

The business stays profitable as long as people watch ads and don’t use bandwidth anywhere near as much as you could. Download a bunch of very long videos just to check if they’re worth watching. Ignore anything shorter than 10 minutes.

Make a channel and upload a bunch of long videos. A dash cam should be a pretty good source of data. Make sure your videos are so boring that even bots don’t like them. These videos are essentially just dead weight in the servers, but uploading them costs something anyway. Also, the storage isn’t free either, so 4K is the minimum.

You could also try reporting random videos and comments here and there. I’m pretty sure no human ever sees those inputs, but some machine learning model might. Messy data isn’t going to break the system, but you could make that speed bump a little higher.

I don’t know exactly how bad would it be, but my guess is that it would have a significant impact on the prices consumer pay for everything. In the past few hundred years, we’ve taken all sorts of nasty shortcuts that have allowed us to produce things at very low prices. If you want to do things the right way, it’s going to cost much more.

Burning fossil fuels is just one of those unwise shortcuts that need to be reversed completely. In the long run, we’re going to have to bury all the carbon we’ve dug up, and that’s going to be incredibly expensive too.

Fortunately though, the downsides of intermittent energy production can still be mitigated with various grid energy storage technologies. The way I see it, investing into them is crucial.

That would be possible, but seasonal production has some serious drawbacks.

Let’s say you have a steel mill with several production lines, solar powered arc furnaces, and enough batteries to keep production running through the night. During the summer you can continue production 24/7, but in the winter you’ll have to shut down completely, because there’s not enough energy to keep even a single production line running. This means that there will be wild fluctuations in a variety of things:

• number of employees on site
• rate of steel produced
• demand for storage space for raw materials and steel products
• demand for logistics
• demand for maintenance

This means, that in order to deal with the fluctuations, you would need to have lots of spare capacity in pretty much everything: More machines, more people, more money. If you could keep the production steady throughout the year, you could do so with less. Also, what will the employees do during the winter? The skiing resorts can’t possibly employ all of them.

In the winter you’ll have plenty of time to fix anything that’s broken, but if there’s an unscheduled shutdown during the summer, you’re suddenly going to need lots of maintenance personnel and materials. Incidentally, those would be in short supply in the summer, because all the other factories would have the same problem. You would need to have lots of spare capacity in maintenance as well.

The AI industry should be fine, since you could train models when energy is cheap. Oh, but what if the summer isn’t long enough for you to update all your models? Simply just buy more computers so you have more spare capa… Oh, it’s the steel mill problem all over again. Oh, but what about the people who use the models during the winter? Maybe you could charge your customers double the price during the winter so that the traffic would be reduced to a reasonable level. Fortunately though, wind power and other renewables could help with the winters, but having more grid energy storage would make things run smoother.

Interesting about Chinese energy market is that in recent decades they’ve been investing heavily in solar power. Once they’ve figured out grid energy storage, running LLMs shouldn’t be a problem anymore.

Wait, so now we have actual evidence that brain rot isn’t just a colloquial expression associated with the “good old days” fallacy?

For ages, people have been talking about the detrimental effects of rock music, TV, TTRPGs, internet and everything modern, but I haven’t really seen any proper evidence to support these claims. Maybe this time it’s different.

So… Go outdoors, but bring your phone with you? Lie on the grass, while swiping short videos?

Thanks for the link. I needed a deep dive like this.

Mastodon use to be tiny at some point, but some people joined anyway.

Or Loops. You know, being open source, privacy respecting and all that.

Nah, just kidding. Who wants any of that when you have the little red book instead.

Edit: Turns out, the fine print of Loops is worth reading.

People don’t hate ads enough to go through the trouble of using better options. Once you’ve lived without ads for a while, there’s no going back.

How about using computer for all the smart stuff and leaving all the visual stuff to the display? Besides, you can run Firefox and ublock origin to watch YT without ads, so what do you need a smart TV for?

Yeah, USB-C standard can get complicated, and in demanding cases it causes problems (especially C-C video cables). I advise solving those issues by labeling your special cables clearly and keeping them separated from all the other random cables you use for charging purposes.

Most people don’t face these issues very often because they don’t use cables for transferring data between a phone and a computer. If you really need to transfer video files from your phone all the time, it’s a clear sign you should have bought a proper camera - probably a microphone and lights too.

Good news. Can’t wait to get rid of all the archaic cables and adapters I still have left from the bad old days. Really looking forward to using my existing C cables for a very long time.