skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with this sentiment but wonder… as long as there are humans, is an ever increasing resource consumption and waste production inevitable? Isn’t this unquenchable desire for more intrinsic to humans? Yes, this means we will probably blow the planet it up, but is there any other way?
I know a lot of people that will only use HN for that post alone. Don’t know if you’ll get a true representation here.
I've seen this take before, especially around climate and the environment. It's correct that having 20,000 humans on Earth would be more (actually indefinitely) sustainable.

These "degrowth" strategies mean tremendous suffering. People have to die to make degrowth possible. Those who stick around have to suffer of curable medical complications. They have to live hard lives without the comforts of modern life.

Why do we need to descend? It's not strictly necessary: the "environment" has enough fissionable material for nearly limitless electrical power. The "environment" has enough raw material to increase the amount of computation on our planet by many orders of magnitude. And that's if we stay here on Earth -- if you want to think on "indefinitely" timescales, Earth's constraints may not apply.

It's profoundly cynical. I don't actually understand it. All of this technology, this art, this incredible organization that the modern world provides, and think "we need to turn back, tail between our legs, and give up."
the material standard of living has been dropping and it's now getting to the point where people can't afford shelter any more and thus no more kids. CA's birthrate has already plummeted to a level lower than in the great depression several years ago.

What i don't get is why decreasing fertility is always presented so negatively in the media. falling fertility is a huge blessing in the long run. we can't keep growing our population exponentially.. there's already way more people on the planet than the planet can support (see overshoot theory; climate change, earth mineral shortages, shelter shortages, etc). Humans outnumber other animals (non-domesticated) by orders of magnitude: it's not natural or sustainable.
Why? What if those left alone in rural areas end up moving to cities for the exact reasons they already do? At least that is what happens right now. Rural areas do nothing to make the young stay. If you don't own a car, you are lost. Most jobs are mechanical in nature, software almost nowhere to be found. And the cities are growing, slowly, but they are. What maes you think this effect would be changed just because overall, population goes down?
You can hate the game and also be careful about the consequences of your actions in the badly designed game.
The GP didn't talk about a certain nuance and used evidence based medicine to cover all forms of science.

A double blind placebo trial is the gold standard for testing causality. We don't have to go that far. We can use a hybrid of intuition and correlational tests, we can maybe sometimes not always need a placebo. The point is the causal test comes with a lot of technical challenges and we have options for other tests that are less challenging.

There is a spectrum of correctness and rigor for science and we should know when to utilize something extremely rigorous or less rigorous. The barbaric practices you describe only come from an lack of awareness of what statistical rigor and science is.
Another way to save sales people time is to wear a t shirt that says “No, I don’t want it.”
That's just a function of changing economic conditions. Do you care about Detroit the same way you care about SF? It had a roaring culture in the 40s-60s, but is now little more than a derelict husk.
I got hired from there about a year ago
Brian Eno – Don't get a job
Yeah most people saying they can't afford to have children probably are in the richest 10% of the world's population. They can absolutely afford a child.
Exactly that, it can very quickly snowball and then you just don't need as many buildings anymore.

Or look at it this way: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s...

> There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population.

If the USA was net neutral on immigration (as many people entered as left), the birth rate would be too low, there would be some tens of millions of dwelling units either empty or never having been built.
> A war machine can be built once and maintained for a long time.

This might be true in theory but is somewhat irrelevant here given the gargantuan levels of waste in US military spending.

There is also gargantuan waste in healthcare costs, but those are spread out via insurance, not taxes.

The presence of gargantuan waste in both sectors and the different avenues of spending both make any after-the-fact, simplified explanation of why one costs more than the other kind of moot.

The presence of gargantuan waste should also be addressed before implying that the costs of healthcare are all presumed necessary.
We better get energy technology sorted out this generation! Because from what I see it's going to become impossible soon - there won't be enough available productive people.

It's already hard to hire people to produce all the services people want. (You can pay more for one particular thing, but then other things don't have enough people - it's a zero sum game.)

With a declining birth rate it's going to become impossible.
Yes, there are opportunists at every level. The gifters selling DEI-washing to industry as talked about in this article. The yellow journalists doing things like framing murdering police as primarily a race problem rather than focusing on the utter lack of accountability of police not being bound by the same laws as everyone else.

And that is exactly the crowd you chose to quote! Legitimate criticism squandered on bootstrapping more anti-productive culture war garbage. But tune in tomorrow at the same time to get riled up again. Tucker Carson is not some opposite of DEI grifters - rather they're both peas from the same damn pod.

Sure, there are tiny bits of principled actions in each party's muck (although I've seen far fewer principled
actions from Rand Paul than I remember from his father). The problem is what is given play in the greater tribe, with the media and organizations leading them to stupid places. For example, what has the NRA said about Taylor or Locke, on what is essentially the most important second amendment issue of our time? Crickets! Because acknowledging the other team might have a point wouldn't sell memberships. But never forget, tHeY aRe cOmINg tO tAkE yOuR gUNs!
True, they claim in this paper this is inevitable
It's never "mechanic retires, no one available to fix planes."

It's "we slashed benefits, we flat-lined the pay, the hours are a nightmare, and then when no one wants the job, obviously blame the retirees."

Capital often attempts to distort the market with a press release about "no one to do this job." Welcome to capitalism, capitalists.
True, but we're seeing a measurable decline of standard of living in the west, which forces people to make sacrifices in their lifestyles. Millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that they're gonna be worse off in adulthood than their parents were and one of the easiest ways to try to maintain their standard of living is not to have children. It's not just about how many raised kids in squalor, it's about how many people are experiencing socioeconomic decline.

It's also purely anecdotal, but anti-natalist sentiment is very much on the rise in my community. I meet more and more people concerned that bringing a child into the world now means condemning them to suffer the worst consequences of climate change. No idea if this is represented at all on a global scale, but it's very present in my area.
I think most of the chaotic engineering of Ai centers around software tools and social networks... As prime places to fool people into thinking they're talking to real people, Social networks have given bots free reign, and even driven bots to make their own sites look lively.

I think that the lack of accountability for major social media platforms and for software makers has really left us at the mercy of scams and manipulation of companies more than independent hackers. Social networks, even dating sites have spent years getting us used to the idea of a dead and isolating Internet.

Companies divide us through segmentation, paywalls, and by artificially limiting post reach because it's more profitable to keep everyone swimming alone. This is not what the Internet was made for at all... I feel we lost the battle for reasonability long ago.

The movie "Her" released years ago kind of sums up where I see all this going. It's a neat idea, but not sustainable, and eventually many people will rebel against the ideal of artificial company, it just can't work for everyone.
Seems irrelevant if it's outright never appropriate. Tools should generally be designed to make it difficult to do things that are never or almost never desired.
especially since the wait times are in the US now too.
How old is your age group? I noticed the same thing among my friends, but then also noticed they all didn't start having kids until mid-30s. It turns out career-oriented women are choosing to start having kids much later in their lives than in previous decades, which is definitely a compounding factor.
Unsurprising that (at least some implementation of) Swift does the least wrong thing in returning 1. I think it's also one of the few languages that will return a count of 1 for the madness that is country flag emojis https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...
I think the answer is the opposite. Consumption of resources is proportional to standard of living: it takes resources to make the most modern lifestyle available. The demographic collapse, however, is evident in highly industrialized societies like Korea, while backwards regions with a low standard of living still have high birthrates. Subsaharan Africa, for example, consumes less than Korea per capita but has a higher birthrate. It seems more likely that higher rates of resource consumption are correlated with lower birthrates.
Freedom from being forced to reproduce in recent/modern times for women, and the fact that a lot of women now have a lot of choices (such as going career focused).

Not to mention the fact that a lot of younger people would prefer to have financial security "setup" first, before embarking on the journey of child raising (but unfortunately, this takes a lot of time, and fraught with uncertainty).
Thing is, the marginal cost of kids has shot through the roof. It’s no longer a sensible thing to do - in the horrible times you mention, children were investments - you spend ~ 10years raising them, and after that they worked for you, almost free labor. And a lot more things required labor to function.

Now, kids are almost all cost, as the government / society itself captures their economic output, and doesn’t give enough back to the family that did the work to raise them.

So now you have kids because you want to, and its no longer rational act, more emotional one.
I like worker representation but leaving wet concrete in the trucks is a pretty horrible thing to do.
It's entirely because people now have a choice of whether or not to have kids and most people are choosing not to for completely valid reasons.
The cost they don't want to pay isn't monetary, it's time/commitment. And to avoid the time/commitment, you need lots and lots of money, and even then you still lose control of your life; suddenly there's other forces that require you to do things you don't want to do.
There are already compelling VR games, but they are heavily outnumbered in fun but shallow arcade experiences and games which would be bargain-basement tier on any other platform. I highly recommend trying Echo Arena before it is taken offline in August. The player base is as awful as you would expect unmoderated 13-year-olds online to be, but if you mute everyone and just explore the mechanics it is mind-blowing and other-worldly. Unfortunately due to the weightlessness this is one that will definitely be off limits to those who struggle with nausea in VR.
It gets created, not extracted
Birth control
In Rust using iterators is almost always better than for loops. The compiler is virtually guaranteed to optimize out bounds checks vs indexing in.
well, we don't have a choice. when the standard of living drops so low that you can't even provide enough shelter for a couple, how are you going to have kids? all those ipads and electricity you mentioned won't help you one bit when you're out on the street.
Good. There is too much traffic and food is too expensive.
The propaganda that hyperfocuses on speed (ignoring all other factors in the system) has been very effective.

People seem oblivious to the reality that vain platitudes will never convince aggressive drivers to drive more safely in traffic.

Police are guaranteed to obsess over speed. It's just like the war on drugs: officers can measure and record criminal behavior! Easy money. Not once in my life have I even heard of the other law that is posted on signs - slower traffic keep right - being enforced.

Traffic flow is as important as any other variable in this system. Crash intensity is zero when there is no collision.
Forgive me for asking but does your insurance not have a max out of pocket associated with your plan?

Btw I understand and feel you how rough the hospital is, had 4 little ones each spending several months in the NICU hold on it gets better and the debt will eventually be gone.
People don’t have to die for degrowth, just less people have to be born
> someone has to be there to pick up / accept the parcel

It's been years since fedex/ups/usps has done anything but quickly drop packages at my front door and get back in their truck asap
> Scared of what you don't understand?

Oof, big flashbacks to conversations I wish I never had with essential oils advocates and religious fundamentalists.
how much does sim racing cost to get into with the quest pro?
I appreciate preferring other options, but I haven't experienced your frustrations. I love getting work done on the plane. It's too close to me for sure (I've only flown coach), but not so much that I mind it in chunks of a couple hours.
Would someone please explain like I'm five which components of LLM's like ChatGPT are still closed source? What are the specific technologies that OpenAI is holding on to?

I know a lot of LLM stuff has either been released or leaked out, but don't have enough expertise in this area to understand the competitive advantages or breakthroughs OpenAI has obtained.
Most people are/will be novice LLM users.
> seeing a measurable decline of standard of living in the west

is this really true? With the exception of the covid lockdown causing issues, i've found that i've been able to acquire all my necessary material needs, and more.

It is true that my purchasing power is being clawed away via inflation, but this is counteracted by wage increases and investment returns (on average).
Being pregnant, birthing kids, breastfeeding them, and raising them to age ~3 sucks for a woman.

It could just be that evolution did not bestow humans with a sufficiently easy and risk free process to reproduce, hence the price women demand is too high (in an environment where women can actually price their sacrifice in birthing and raising children due to achieving in financial independence).
Surveys in general like this are kind of useless, you have to see what people actually do.

Almost everyone when surveyed says they want to reduce pollution and help the environment, but do they actually do things (especially things that inconvenience them)?
> From what I hear it's very much to do with a maker's implementation

Right, if I had to condense my issues into something more constructive it is just that: if regulators want to pursue a mandate for these systems, they should also work on establishing testing criteria and specifications that cover the many different conditions drivers face and reduces variation between manufacturers as possible. Not an easy task.

To give a quick example: another commenter in this thread states that lane assist only kicks in at 35mph. That is true in some models but not all which could lead to some nice surprises. Further, the speed limit in NYC is 25mph so it's not unusual if the road surface is decent to be cruising closer to 30. Unless there's a threshold for activation, you might be walking a fine line between "safety on"/"safety off" and any resulting corrections it might make.
If Ada and Spark solve problems as well or better than Rust and have been around for longer, why have I never seen any program written in them?

I don’t know anything about ada/spark but it seems clear that something has gone terribly wrong for them to not have taken off like Rust has.
There is no country on the planet that doesn't have a scarcity of medical resources. In fact there is an entire set of academics devoted to the appropriate utilization of medical resources - healthcare economics.
So, someone should be working to provide you with medicine, education and utilities and paid for that by... someone else?
Is there a number between 20,000 (which seems so low as to not be a serious suggestion I have ever seen anyone make) and "growing forever"--for which there was that great analysis done by the physicist arguing with the economist, to whom they were trying to explain that even small amounts of growth forever led to us boiling our oceans with heat output to satisfy everyone's energy needs--that would work for you?
> These "degrowth" strategies mean tremendous suffering. People have to die to make degrowth possible.

But nobody's saying they have to die early. A fertility rate under replacement will lead to degrowth. Yes, it's going to be difficult during the degrowth phase (less young people to support the aged), but eventually the population will stabilize at a lower level and that will be better from both a sustainability and resources standpoint.
> People have to die to make degrowth possible.

I’ve read some statistics that say there’s more than an 80% chance that everyone alive right now will die at some point.
The main one that comes to mind is https://surf.suckless.org/

But there are many other minimal UI browsers as well as Firefox that support no tabs.

I’ve been using qutebrowser which doesn’t have much of a UI since it is vim based
I did about 2 years ago.
Glad it worked for your dad and I can definitely see it working for others. Part of the difficulty with being told that I need to make life style changes is how open ended it can be. It can make it hard to plan or know what to do or stick with it. I can definitely see it makes the on ramp to life style changes so much easier if you're given a plan and have to think little about it. This helped me. My doctor recommended a diet and gave me sites with meal plans so while I was trying to navigate my way through it, I had resources to get me going the first few weeks.
If you are going to leave C, why take a half step when you could go the full way and end up with the better tool.
Same, about 3 years ago
There were predictions 10+ years ago that illustrated this _global_ trend. One stuck with me in particular, I might of found it through /. or Ars, not sure can't find the exact paper. But it predicted all but a handful of nations would be at or below replacement rates by 2050. It was spattering of African countries and Yemen. I think there was one another non African country but it escapes me. It stuck with me because I scoffed at the idea, yet every year and now seemingly every week we see more and more data that shows we are quickly lining up with that prediction.
I don't think we'll be able to navigate this decline with any semblance of grace. Not with the state of our culture and politics. We'll see tremendous instability leading to further erosion of rights, we'll see wealth inequality skyrocket... I mean we are barely even talking about the birth rate issue let alone at a point where we could perhaps have strategies to confront this rapidly approaching future.
As children, humans are receiving a torrent of new information all the time. For hundreds of thousands of years, the torrent slows as the human becomes an adolescent, puberty kicks off, and then they have children as the product of the latest new sensation. All that is upended, now. Not only are people continuing to have an available torrent of information into their twenties, but now it is possible to just never stop, so the transition to the next stage of life doesn't happen for more and more, and we just stay (functionally) children into the thirties, forties, or later, after which it's too late for more than half of us.

Not sure how seriously I take this. :)
Sure, then a propelled net
Why is it so weird a very rich honeypot manager would off himself? He'd already tried.

Sure, the state was happy to look away. You think the guards protect pedos in state/federal facilities? He's no different. What you want to know is who did he have contact/calls with the week before. Obviously he didn't do a deal for Ghislaine, there must be someone else he wanted to save by making it easy for the honeypot master.
Consider Victorian era Britain, when the average person is much poorer, the air is heavily polluted with coal use, and the medical care is almost non-existant by modern standards. Fertility rate is about 5-6. Then it dropped to around 3 over 100 years and has been on a steady downward trajectory ever since.

This pattern is broadly replicated everywhere that industrializes.

Whatever the cause, it's not due to wealth per capita or personal health. It's probably cultural. Contraceptives / family planning definitely plays a big part too.
Tokyo also has earthquakes. Real estate is not an asset that appreciates in value in Japan, because it's eventually damaged or destroyed during an earthquake.
Widescreen and especially ultrawide makes sense with bigger screens but is terrible on laptop-sizes screens, at least outside of media consumption.
One minor correction (sort of), just noted in docs that kysely provides a built-in camel case plugin, for transforming camel to snake case so, eg.g, createdAt to created_at in db. Not as flexible as arbitrary transform but it serves my needs perfectly.
Meta will require employees to RTO three days a week starting in Sept
Do some research about your healthcare coverage. There is no rush to settle the bill once the baby arrives, push the hospital on every little thing and lean on your insurance.

It does suck that the burden of the payment falls on the patients, but if you know the system well it doesn't have to be that stressful.
The reason only partially is due to economic factors(gets rehashed alot) but one major thing everybody overlooks is the simple fact that males and females, in this era, are having difficulties pairing up! Platforms like Tinder are only making it harder for the majority* of people to build lasting bonds. I personally make good money and have a decent home but have never been able to find a mate in my entire 28 years of life.
> populations are supposed to reach a maxima.

This is an assumption.

In nature, a population reaches a maxima but it's a survivorship bias metric. Populations that _didn't_ level off struggled to find the now scarce food, and died off too fast to re-populate, or some other reason died off.

Humans are the only species so far to be able to exploit more resources as population grew, and have the technology to prevent such a collapse (by constantly expanding the resource acquisition game). In the future, i would expect space exploration to be space resource collection. Therefore, we will not reach maxima because there's no such thing. No natural force should be able to kill off humans or their expansion.
Tiktok is essentially "Ow, my balls"