In this particular case, as crazy as it sounds, I think early attempts by both the parent and school to make reasonable accommodation for in-person students with IBS to take a lot of extra bathroom breaks would have at least tilted the scales a little bit. It looks like the kid was shifted to remote school after he got IBS and some people at school weren't understanding of his situation. This put him on the path where he was staying up all night "doing remote school" but also had a nearly full-worknight amount of unfettered time with suicide-AI for months on end with no daytime obligations, sleeping in and not seeing his parents in the morning, and losing contact with peers.

Of course this is a hindsight analysis, but there's not much evidence that more contact with family and peers would make the situation worse.

I think from my prior comment it's obvious I'd like to prevent a lot of isolating policies on low-risk groups from happening again during another pandemic, so I don't think I need to go over that again.

For broader society, I suppose the concrete action item is if you see a young family or friend, we should aspire to reach out to them and see how to integrate them in something we might like to do with them.

you're kidding right? Alex Jones would not stop telling everybody that the families made everything up to the point the families were getting death threats and phone calls non-stop, years after their children were murdered.

Alex Jones made his money by convincing people that the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary were actors in a conspiracy, which resulted in them bein harassed endlessly. He even continued to attack them during the defamation trials. I think it's unfair to say he was merely "the closest vile person around with big pockets," he really was the cause of a lot of pain.

> They desperately needed someone to clamp down on … It drove them insane.

> Whatever in their brains that needed to hold someone accountable, they did it, and it was soothing to them.

Now do Peter Thiel & Gawker.

The government won't be regulating business usage though that my entire point.

Isn't one of the common complaints about GPT5 that it is less sycophantic and people feel less connection to it? That is a design choice and it isn't hard to see it as similar to the choices maximizing engagement for social media. You can call it maximizing engagement, but that is addicting. And it works.

I recently started using a site after years of being mostly on a small number of forums, and I can feel the draw of it. Like I've lost the antibodies for my attention. Or they've made it better, either way I'm working on either coming up with a strategy which minimizes my feeling of needing to check in, mostly by adding friction, or just deleting my account.