Cool. If you go with it, I'd be super interested to know how it went, and lmk if you need any help or elaboration on the idea.

Last year I had an idea for a debate protocol which got pretty highly upvoted.

I think once you're past a certain basic level in math, it's feasible to continue learning pretty much by yourself, just download problem sets and go through them. But it's a bit lonely. Going to classes lets you meet other people who are into the same thing as you! Shared love for something is what makes communities happen, I got this idea in Jim Butcher of all places. And the piece of paper itself is also quite nice, it can come in handy unexpectedly, and getting it now is probably easier than getting it later. So on the whole I'd lean toward getting the degree.

About the philosophical stuff, I think "the world and/or my life will be over soon anyway" is kind of a nasty idea, because it makes you feel like nothing's worth doing. That's no way for a human being to be! You're not a potato! Hence it's better to act on the assumption that neither the world nor your life will be over anytime soon.

Also check out "personalized pagerank", where the rating shown to each user is "rooted" in what kind of content this user has upvoted in the past. It's a neat solution to many problems.

Crosstalk is definitely a problem, e-drums and pads have it too. But are you sure the tradeoff is inescapable? Imagine the tines sit on separate pads, or on the same pad but far from each other. (Or close to each other, but with deep grooves between them, so that the distance through the connecting material is large.) This thought experiment shows that damping and crosstalk can be small at the same time. So maybe you can reduce damping but not increase crosstalk, by changing the instrument's shape or materials.

Reading a book, or even watching a movie, is less stimulating than ancestral activities like hunting or fighting. So maybe stimulation by itself isn't the problem, and instead of "superstimuli" we should be worried about activities that are low effort and/or fruitless. From that perspective, reading a book can be both difficult and fruitful (depending on the book - reading Dostoevsky or Fitzgerald isn't the same as reading a generic romance or young adult novel). And creativity is both difficult and fruitful. So we shouldn't put these things on par with watching tiktok.

Maybe you could reduce the damping, so that when muting you can feel your finger stopping the vibration? It seems to me that more feedback of this kind is usually a good thing for the player. Also the vibration could give you a continuous "envelope" signal to be used later.

I think Diffractor's post shows that logical induction does hit a certain barrier, which isn't quite diagonalization, but seems to me about as troublesome:

As the trader goes through all sentences, its best-case value will be unbounded, as it buys up larger and larger piles of sentences with lower and lower prices. This behavior is forbidden by the logical induction criterion... This doesn't seem like much, but it gets extremely weird when you consider that the limit of a logical inductor, P_inf, is a constant distribution, and by this result, isn't a logical inductor! If you skip to the end and use the final, perfected probabilities of the limit, there's a trader that could rack up unboundedly high value!

For similar instruments, you've seen the array mbira, right?

For marking the ends of notes, to me the most intuitive solution would be muting with fingers, but I'm not sure how that translates to electronics.

If a student is genuinely acting in bad faith—attending a class and ruining it for their peers—then they should be removed from the class and sent to a counselor/social worker.

The number of such students is larger than you think. But the more important question is what the social worker would do with the student - what tools would be available to them. Because by default the student will just disrupt another class tomorrow and so on. There isn't any magic method to make disruptive students non-disruptive; schools would love to have access to such magic if it existed.