This is ridiculous. The real explanation is a level of uncaring incompetence that can only be sustained in large organizations.

Government backed loans inflate demand. If banks had to consider the risk of repayment prices would come back to reality.

Colleges should be on the hook for a least a portion of defaulted student loans. That would give them a direct incentive to hold down tuition.

Is defaulting on student loans possible? I thought, at least in USA, the only way to get out of student loans is: pay it off, work for a qualified nonprofit for awhile, or die

Automation being more profitable implies it’s more efficient (by the market’s measure of efficiency, which is the best measure anyone has come up with)

Not necessarily. RTO's policies are profitable but not efficient. Existing commercial anti-depressants are profitable but not efficient. Fuel oil is profitable but not efficient. I can go on but I hope you can get my point. The market is made up of humans who are not purely rational beings nor are they capable of thinking over too long periods of time.

When graduating is essentially just aging out, it isn’t really graduating

what does "really graduating" even mean in 2025? you're eligible for a slightly less bad minimum wage job?

Lowering standards is why a high school diploma is nearly worthless, it wasn’t always the case. If you can graduate with a high school diploma while still being illiterate, innumerate, etc. it is a signal with no entropy.

when was it not the case? as far as I know teachers have been pushing kids through to their diploma for 50 years so they could get out of their hair and into the workforce... both illiteracy and dropout rates were higher

one complication is that standards for jobs you could live off of were at that point much lower... many more people could drop out and make a living, this is less often the case now

Not having a highscool diploma or GED can limit one's future career options; an example is the US armed forces[1].

[1] https://www.usa.gov/military-requirements

What about pipelining? Something that has clear serial dependencies could still be pipelined to execute separate (but dependent at work boundaries) units of work in parallel.

The real equivalent is something like Stockfish, AlphaZero, etc. that performs at superhuman level across _all_ domains. It is something that beats any human at any competitive activity. Arguably, super human intelligence exists already in the form of corporations, institutions, and state actors. Organized collectives of humans augmented by computers are obviously more capable than any individual across domains. “Country of geniuses in a datacenter” is simple enough to get the idea across, but something more like “company in a datacenter” or “state actor in a data center” might be more useful terminology for describing relative capabilities.

Kolmogorov’s library

Calling harassing employers to get someone fired ‘individual boycott’ is blatantly bad faith.

The drop in ChatGPT usage once summer started was similarly indicative of what is driving growth.

Yeah, I’m not sure I see the problem (other than that threads are more expensive than e.g. file descriptors, but this is a moot point without a better API). You define how many requests in flight you want to allow and that sets the cap on how many worker threads you spawn/use, you could also support an unbounded number in flight this way by lazily spawning worker threads per requests. Cancellation/kill interfaces for multithreading are pretty much always a footgun. Even for multiprocessing on modern machines, if you’re doing something non-trivial and decide to use SIGKILL to terminate a worker process, it’s easy to leave e.g. file system resources in a bad state.