> Having kids is a financial and ecological disaster. As an outside observer it's remarkable to me people are still having any kids at all, which speaks to the strong subjective factors overpowering whatever objective considerations one might have about it.
Objectively if no-one has kids then there will be no more humans. I guess you could consider that an ecological win. If you don't, then someone has to have kids.
No, there will be plenty of Hindus and Muslims, cos they largely don’t give a fuck about any of this noise.
But Christianity and Western Civilisation can kiss its own arse goodbye if it thinks this is a reasonable ideology to instil in to its young people.
Don’t have kids because it’ll economically ruin your life, and it’s bad for the environment anyway.
Righteo then, get on ya spaceship n fuck off to Mars then. Free up some resources and economy for us who believe having a family is the most important thing humans can do and that Western civilisation is actually pretty neat!
"No, there will be plenty of Hindus and Muslims, cos they largely don’t give a fuck about any of this noise."
Have you looked at the TFRs in India and more developed Muslim countries lately?
Mostly under 2 and still dropping like a stone. Turkey, Iran or UAE are every bit as much on the road to disastrous demography as Europe is, only with some delay.
Does not surprise me... in both Europe and East Asia, the worst and deepest drops in fertility happened in previously very socially conservative societies (Spain, South Korea), while the trend was less sharp and sudden in, say, Scandinavia.
The early lives of my grandparents (in their 90s) are so fascinatingly different to that of mine. But even by the time my parents were growing up in the 60s, life was not so different in the west. The real differentiators in living standards - energy, household appliances and cooking, modes of transport - were more or less figured out then. By the time my parents were young adults in the early 80s, so many of the aspects of "modern life" had been figured out.
I look at the life my kids live, and it's not so different to my childhood. The toys are similar, their housing is similar. Probably the biggest difference is the availability of content on demand rather than much more fixed TV schedules.
The big difference in the last 30 years hasn't so much been in the kind of middle class life you can live, but the number of people who live that kind of life. In the 90s 40% of people globally were living in extreme poverty. Now its under 10%. The kinds of lives the middle class live in China and Vietnam are closer to those of Europeans today, when even 30 years ago most people in those countries were living much closer to the way your dad grew up.
I wonder if AI will result in a step change of living standards? Perhaps along with robotics we'll finally get to do nothing at all at home? I'm not convinced it'll be quick though. Maybe another 30 years.
Did you do any kind of AI assisted proofreading or grammar? So much of the structure of the article screams AI.
Stuff like this:
> Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.
And the headings starting with "The"
AI seems to have adopted a style reminiscent of startup marketers circa 2020 - really simple, lots of one liner quips and far too much incredulity about minor things. Now we've come full circle!
I do usually do a pass through Grammarly, and there are some times when I ask AI for help getting my point across. But I always try to change what they write into something I feel I would say.
As far as I'm aware most autocratic forms of government have to clamp down on dissent with some level of force, be it violence or imprisonment or seizing assets. It means people are afraid to criticise power.
Western democracies don't have that problem. Yes, they have other problems. Many problems which are hard to solve. But if you live in a western democracy you can freely criticise those in power without fear of retribution.
In a western democracy, you can, at least in theory, freely criticize those in power without fear of retribution, but also without any hope of your criticism changing anything. It's just a pressure release valve. When criticism starts taking a form that might force change, the mask and the gloves come off, as you can see in the violence against protesters once protests reach a critical mass.
You can't force change, sure, but that doesn't mean you can't be part of it. Individuals can and do join political parties and become influential within them. Political parties win elections and ultimately set policy which can start to change things.
None of those things happen quickly, and most people don't succeed in their attempt to do it. That doesn't mean it's not possible. I'd argue that it's a feature of the system that the system makes it hard to change course - it averages out the extremes.
Have you seen footage of how quickly an unbelted person moves around a car when it crashes? If there's someone in the passenger compartment without a seatbelt they can cause serious damage to everyone else - especially children.
I already said that I will wear a seatbelt whether any government forces me to or not. I just don't see the point in telling other people what's good for them.
I don't get this take. Once a modern corporation starts making money, all the people in it diligently work to expand their influence by starting new projects and hiring as many people as possible. That seems to be human nature. Why will AI tools change that? Nobody is feeling important because they manage 50 AI agents. They feel important because they manage 50 people.
What percentage of the jobs in a modern office are truly necessary? If automation had the ability to kill jobs over the long term, we'd all have been idle since the industrial revolution. But instead we keep inventing new things that we need.
There is a possibility that the agents become better at managing the company than the people and businesses become as automated as farms did during the industrial revolution.
Yeah and you’re doing a lot of heavy lifting with the term agents.
Billions have been poured into agents and there’s no sign that they will get to a place where they on the path toward generating returns to justify more good money being invested into chasing bad.
I've found AI tools to be pretty awful for low level work. So much of it requires making small changes to poorly documented registers. AI is very good at confidently hallucinating what register value you should use, and often is wrong. There's often such a big develop -> test cycle in embedded, and AI really only solves a very small part of it.
Yeah, it's crazy to think an opaque chatbot will be preferable to a well designed UI for most users. People don't like badly designed UIs, but I'm pretty sure most people under 40 prefer a well designed UI to a customer service agent. We call customer service because the website doesn't do what we want, not because we don't want to use the website.
I got excited about that, until I actually tried to download a model and run it locally and ask it questions. A current gen local LLM which is small enough to live on disk and fit in my laptop's RAM is very prone to hallucination of facts. Which makes it kind of useless.
Ask your local model a verifiable question - for example a list of tallest buildings in Europe. I did it with Gemma on my laptop, and after the top 3 they were all fake. I just tried that again with Gemma-4 on my iphone, and it did even worse - the 3 tallest buildings in Europe are apparently the Burj Khalifa, the Torre Glories and the Shanghai Tower.
I wouldn't call that effective compression of information.
Yea, it's not an encyclopedia of facts. Language models store the FEELS of the data in vectors (or angles in Gemma4's case, it's a cool thing) not the exact string.
But what you can do with local models is give them actual data and tools to search it. Download a copy of Wikipedia locally, give the agent a way to search it and BOOM accurate information without an internet connection.
Also "small enough to live on disk" is a bit vague, especially when models get super stupid super fast when you get to the smaller size. At that point they're just basically 40k servitors that can use tools and nothing much.
I don't think any LLMs are good at accurately regurgitating arbitrary facts, unless they happen to be very common in their training, and certainly not good at making novel comparisons between them.
What you're describing is 2 or 3 sensors - effectively 2 or 3 pixels. Enough to discriminate when an aircraft launches a flare, but not really "imaging" in the modern sense.
Early heat seeking missiles would use a single IR sensor with mechanical scanning.
Thermal imaging and machine vision, of the kind you can now do cheaply, isn't 80s tech. It's probably late-90s tech for advanced western states. And now it's starting to be ubiquitous cheap tech too. You can buy a thermal imaging camera with 20k pixels for a few hundred dollars now. Combine that with some image processing and you've got a very robust target detection pipeline.
Objectively if no-one has kids then there will be no more humans. I guess you could consider that an ecological win. If you don't, then someone has to have kids.
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