Of course the first thing we replaced with AI was artists, so expect more exclusively as the lower rungs of patronage clients fall off the economic ladder.

There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect.

The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.

There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation.

The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century.

It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...

Which is not to say that conditions in graduate schools (or academia as a whole) are great. But the unionization process is entangled in the legal framework around unions in the United States.

John Nash's Ph.D. Thesis is notorious for being short: it's still 27 pages (typed, with hand-written equations and a whopping total of two citations) but that's an order of magnitude below average. On the other hand, most of us don't invent game theory.

Students used to minimum-word-count essays sometimes have to do some self-retraining to realize that the expectation is that you have more that you want to say than you have room to say it, and the game is now to figure out how to say more in fewer words.

Percentage of children to survive to adulthood.

Global food surplus.

The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...

I mean, I understand what it effects it has, and why many parties want to perfect their expanding panopticon, and why screaming think of the children makes politicians' brains turn off.

It won't fix children or social media. That's been apparent ever since Facebook defaulted to real names and people still posted everything they would have otherwise. It makes it easier to use social disapproval to destroy nonconforming individuals, I suppose. And to sell ads. And to destroy anyone who criticizes the government. So no real downside if you don't care about that sort of thing.

It'd be a stupid future, but it's a stupid present so I'm not going to rule it out on those grounds.

Yeah. I think it is under-appreciated that much of science is intended for debugging purposes. Sure, you and I know that X is positive, but what's it actual value? Can we find the causes that make it that way? Et cetera.

And then I learned that the pre-AI norms weren't any less fictional: they made an exemplar garment and did photoshoots, sure, but then they send the pictures and patterns to the lowest bidder factories with permission to make whatever edits are necessary to make it cheap and manufactureable. The whole thing was already a simulacrum.

Do you want to count calories, or do you want to lose weight? Sounds like it's possible to hyper-optimize calorie counting to the point that it becomes counter-productive...