Well my trip to Costco make infinitely more sense. I saw these 3 foot tall dolls for sale of the camera head characters. They were titled “skibidi toilet titans” but I was only familiar with the song mashups, not the web series.
Kids are always gonna love stuff that pisses off their parents. It’s just part of parenting and being a kid. My parents hated my love for the weird shows on Adult Swim like metalocalypse and squidbillies.
Big shrug - no one should be surprised this portrays a non-narrative future. The future feels pretty chaotic and undirected to me as an adult. I can’t imagine how it feels to a 12 year old.
> Kids are always gonna love stuff that pisses off their parents.
Thing is, gen alpha's parents grew up with weird shit themselves, edgy stuff that pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable. MTV and Comedy Central productions for a lot of people, stuff like Beavis & Butthead, Jackass, South Park, and then the 2000's internet of Newgrounds productions. Especially South Park I think desensitized the millennial generation, to the point where there's nothing that really weirds us (well, me) out.
I never watched skibidi toilet or much gen alpha stuff, but I'm not shocked by it or anything. I just think it's weird and surreal, but nothing worse than e.g. Salad Fingers.
> I think desensitized the millennial generation, to the point where there's nothing that really weirds us (well, me) out.
You know, I used to think the same way, that so many of us got desensitized that none of this newfangled stuff should really be surprising, even less appear bizarre.
Yet out in the real world, I think you, me and the others are maybe a 5% slice of all the people out there, as many people get borderline offended by "weird stuff" and doesn't seem like they got desensitized like you and me when we were younger.
> Especially South Park I think desensitized the millennial generation
Desensitized some people, who understood and appreciated the irony, absurdity and inversion of norms.
It hyper-sensitized others, who often doubled-down on the type of authoritarian political correctness that South Park satirized.
There is clearly a huge segment of the millennial generation who don't agree with the South Park "make jokes about everyone and everything" ethos, and instead believe there are numerous individuals, groups, topics and issues which should never be joked about, and feel very offended when someone does.
For sure. Im the parent of a couple Gen Alpha kids on the younger side. I showed the skibidi toilet videos to my wife and her response was a shrug and “looks like dumb videos we watched in college”.
But as other posters say, not everyone was into that corner of internet culture as millennials. Especially the weirder offshoots.
The difference between these generations is that millennials would consume the stranger or more “offensive” stuff sporadically, as a thrill or pleasant provocation. Even among those who wanted this thrill, I think the majority of the media diet was more traditional narrative stuff.
Gen alpha, on the other hand, seems content to consume the absurdity non-stop. I think this is another angle on what “brain rot” actually is - briefly shattering a reality that made sense was a thrill, while immersing yourself in sense-shattering media starts to actually sever the connection to reality.
JG Wentworth...this guy is stuck in other people's brain's too!? I thought that was a locally aired commercial when I was younger, but apparently that earworm went nationwide!
What is or isn't edgy is defined by the dominant culture of the time and place. It changes over time. Stuff probably does weird you out, but maybe it's on a different axis than Cartman accidentally joining NAMBLA. I mean, if you think South Park is mainstream, what do you think about Paramount pulling a handful of episodes from their streaming platform? Surely if your peers, your kids, etc., stopped treating pedophiles as distasteful butts of jokes and started fighting for the censorship of media, that would weird you out, no?
> Kids are always gonna love stuff that pisses off their parents.
Does this stuff piss off parents? Some of what my child is into is incomprehensible to me, but a lot of it is absolutely recognizable as the kind of things I was into as a kid, it's just their version of it in 2025.
I'm actually rather enjoying watching her go through this, trying to understand what some of it means, and just going along with the ride of some stuff.
Yesterday, my kid very excitedly told me about something funny that the whole class did with 6 7. The 6 7 meme is completely opaque to me, but it was still an amusing story, and while I don't understand the specifics, I love that all of it is happening.
I think it does for a substantial portion, especially those with more traditionally aligned values. We know families, through our extended social groups, that would cringe at the Skibidi Toilet stuff.
I'm not sure why? At least some part of it, I suspect, is related to the "outrage economy". That is, outrage that can drive social media engagement. You don't do it because you're, in good faith, bothered by it. You do it because you can raise a stink and rally others to engage and make yourself popular.
That last bit is just a theory of mine. It seems anecdotally supported though from my own observation, but I am not a sociologist so I'm not going to claim any expertise here.
the 6-7 thing has been a source of constant amusement for me. my kid told me that one of their teachers had (with good humor) banned saying "6 7" and we immediately went down a rabbit hole of how he could "side-channel" 6 7s into conversation - like "hey, $teacher, what's the next prime number after 61?"
he told me there's a small bustling trade in learning numbers in other languages - "seis siete" for example.
On a similar note my parents didn't love the [AS] shows with more narrative but always sat down to watch stuff like 12oz Mouse with me. I still enjoy that kind of loose narrative content but I really don't get a lot of stuff these days, Skibidi included.
Idk, I wouldn't consider adult swim and friends brain rot. Whereas kids these days celebrate brain rot ("Italian brain rot", specifically). I see this as part of the larger anti-intellectualism gripping our species and really dislike it. A lot of these kids are glued to screens and are fed just a constant stream of ads and algorithmic shit while forming parasocial relationships with fake personalities.
Maybe in 20 years people will say the same about Skibidi Toilet, if it isn't already in there. Corporations are embracing it already, a local chain had a campaign titled "skibidi school".
Most of adult swim is trash. Metalocalypse is definitely better than average but squidbillies is slop, so is a lot of stuff people here might claim to like including and especially robot chicken.
squidbillies, i think, is a good example of something that appears on the surface to be completely stupid, but actually has a pretty clever core. South Park is kind of similar, I think I'd have a difficult time convincing my parents generation, for example, that South Park is at times one of the smartest shows on TV.
Squidbillies is more clever than you’ll ever understand. Definitely not “slop”.
From your comment it is very clear you don’t enjoy irreverent humor or animation really. Not everyone has $200 million to blow on Tron: Ares level animation.
I liked Moral Oral, and the PJs, Venture Brothers, and even really whacky stuff they did like
Xavier: Renegade Angel. I could even sort of get stuff like Superjail. But Squidbillies is a bridge too far. So was home movies.
Yeah, that’s pretty much been my approach too. I try to take both the positive and the negative, since even bad input can help a project evolve. The tricky part now is the energy it takes to sift through it, feedback that sounds like it came from an MIT grad one minute, or my Italian grandma (who’s never touched a device) the next.
I don’t think AI makes me 10x more productive. It does make me close to 10x less bored though.
Much of production software engineering is writing boiler plate, building out test matrices and harnesses, scaffolding structure. And often, it’s for very similarly shaped problems at their core regardless of the company, organization, or product.
AI lets me get a lot of that out of the way and focus on more interesting work.
One might argue that’s a failure of tools or even my own technique. That might be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m less bored than I used to be.
I'm happy to hear that! I hope you felt seen by this line from the article:
> Oh, and this exact argument works in reverse. If you feel good doing AI coding, just do it. If you feel so excited that you code more than ever before, that's awesome. I want everyone to feel that way, regardless of how they get there.
100%. It's made me like dev again because my head can be used for things other than remembering arcania - this may be a curse of using languages like Ruby and Elixir which mostly don't have great tooling.
I enjoyed the article, fwiw. Twitter was insufferable before Elon bought it, but the AI bro scene is just...wow. An entire scene who only communicate in histrionics.
Companies that don’t want to invest in new infrastructure.
That’ll always be the blocker with rail. Moving humans, even a lot of them, by rail isn’t cost effective by most company’s definition outside luxury pricing.
Rail wins when you need to move goods in bulk though.
Annoys the hell out of me. I much prefer train travel, even if it’s slower. But in the States, Amtrak is passable at best depending on the particular line. European rail was a lot more pleasant. Neither comes close to Japan though. Their high speed rail is a reason I’d consider living there long term.
Probably a hard question to answer. IME, cultural norms around documentation vary pretty wildly.
Some orgs I've worked for were very "wiki" driven - there's a big expectation of using Confluence or Notion to navigate documentation. This applies both big (5000+) and small (50+) organizations for me.
Other organizations I've worked in were very document centric - so you organize things in folders, link between documents (GDoc @SomeDocument or MSFT's equivalent). Those organizations tend to pass around links to documents or "index" documents. Similarly, this applies for both big and small organizations in my experience.
Of the two, I tend to prefer the latter. Without dedicated editors, the wiki version seems to decay rapidly, especially once the org grows above some size.
I mean if the joke that Google is just an Ads company with a software engineering org is true, then Oracle is just a Sales company with a software engineering org.
If there’s no feedback mechanism, verification doesn’t matter.