idlehand

This has been a line of argument from every Luddite since the start of the industrial revolution. But it is not true. Almost all the productivity gains of the last 250 years have been dispersed into the population. A few early movers have managed to capture some fraction of the value created by new technology, the vast majority has gone to improve people's quality of life, which is why we live longer and richer lives than any generation before us. Some will lose their jobs and that is fine because human demand for goods and services is infinite, there will always be jobs to do.

I really doubt that AI will somehow be our successors. Machines and AI need microprocessors so complex that it took us 70 years of exponential growth and multiple trillion-dollar tech companies to train even these frankly quite unimpressive models. These AI are entirely dependent on our globalized value chains with capital costs so high that there are multiple points of failure.

A human needs just food, clean water, a warm environment and some books to carry civilization forward.

Now we are in Ship of Theseus territory. If I downsample an image and convert it into a tiny delta in the model weights, from which the original image can never be recovered, is that infringement?

These AI models are closer to Google in that regard, yes, you can instruct them to generate a Mickey Mouse image, but you can instruct them to generate any kind of image, just like you can search for anything on Google, including Mickey Mouse. When using these models you are essentially performing a search in the model weights.

Facebook is a walled garden, but Twitter is indexable and searchable. It has become a megaphone for celebrities, companies, individuals, and institutions.

Potatoes are a brilliant food. They're filling, contain an appropriate amount of calories, a lot of nutrients and a lot of potassium which helps balance out all that salt we're eating.

The US military budget is ~3.5% of GDP. It makes up about 10% of all government spending. 90% of your tax money does not go to war machines.

Nicotine is associated with considerable adverse effects on cardiovascular health. Caffeine has not been found to have any long-term effects on cardiovascular health.

Working hard implies the labor theory of value, which is that all work is interchangeable. While that might have been closer to the truth during the first industrial revolution, the variability in the value of labor has never been higher than today.

It's comforting to think that those that have achieved the best outcomes in life have simply sacrificed time spent on other things, and spent more time on work. There might be some truth in that, but often they have had better opportunities, due to both circumstance and luck, that they also have made better use of than average.

Indeed, gas stations would probably love if all cars were electric. When you stop to charge, you know that you will be stopping for at least 15 minutes, so why not get a cup of coffee and a snack while waiting?

If we're lucky, gas stations might turn into alcohol-free third places where people watch sports, have a meal and hang out while waiting for their car to charge.

Driving ranges are generally high enough that driving from 100 to 0% charge means you should take a legally mandated break. So why not embrace that?

AI-generated stories also do not necessarily displace parent-child storytelling, but probably other activities with similar (non-)levels of parental involvement, such as iPad or TV time.

It's an interesting world we live in where Apple is the choice for performance. For years and years everyone talked about how Macs were underpowered compared to their price tag.

Using a limited palette has been a point of friction in Blender, too. You can't update the palette from within Blender, and you need to use tiny UV coordinates.

I think a higher rate of miscarriages also limits post-30s fertility for many women. A miscarriage is at least one and often multiple months of time lost, while the clock is ticking.

My wife and I plan to have all our kids before 30. We're doing well above average financially, and we want to be young while our kids are young. She is currently pregnant with our first.

It helps that she is not very career-minded, I have the opportunity to work from home, and I'm working a role where I earn well and never need to do overtime.

Something I like about some newer web frameworks like Next.js is that stylesheets are component-scope by default.

This means that any stylesheet I use is inevitably going to affect, at most, one React component. And so I can call every actual container simply .container without worrying about conflicts or namespacing.

I have a handy little mnemonic I use to keep track of the order of X and Y: the standard "margin: 0 auto" for horizontal centering.

0 vertical margin when centering horizontally, so Y must be the first axis.

Most people have working lives spanning decades, so maximizing the output of any one month is generally counterproductive.

However, if you have a well-rested, happy and productive team that has adequate time for leisure and recreation, you can turn up the pace for those exceptional months that are really make or break.

But if you try to get people to run at that pace continuously, you'll get a lot of resignations and a few heart attacks at 50.

Absolutely right. Unfortunately, this won't come to pass. Housing is the one point of leverage my parents generation have over my generation. It will be the leverage of my generation over my children's generation.

By keeping homes scarce, we create an asset class that old people naturally have more of, since they bought in earlier.

And we will need all the leverage we can get when every working age person has to support one or more retired people.

Immigrants still revert to native sub-fertility after a generation, or two at most.

Immigration may be a solution for countries in the Anglosphere, as there are countless educated English speakers who want to immigrate.

Countries in the rest of Europe and in East Asia do not have the luxury of educated, native-language speakers in the millions wanting to immigrate. Those who do want to come to us instead of the Anglosphere, either lack marketable skills or lack the language skills necessary to be a part of society. This imposes considerable costs, and our pension systems are not equipped to handle people working here for 20-30 years and then living off a government pension for another 20.

For example, a group such as Hispanic voters can be slowly growing over decades as a result of higher fertility.

But their voting patterns may change from one election cycle to another. Hispanic voters are not so solidly Democrat as they have been. So if in 2006 you forecast that the growth of the Hispanic community would tip the scales in favor of Democrats by 2016, you'd be in for a surprise.

I used to think that the future of the US was Democrat rule due to demographics, now I'm not so sure. I think other factors will weigh heavier.

You can do a forecast assuming everything stays static, and note the point where fertility will be the deciding factor. But because fertility is such a slow process compared to most of politics, your forecast would be quite inaccurate.

I suppose the best summary I can make is that political party messaging and voter group preferences will evolve a lot faster than group sizes due to differences in fertility. Trends in turnout are more relevant in your typical political timescale. By the time fertility has had an impact, your forecast is far enough into the future that you have a lot of unknown unknowns, and so it doesn't tell you that much.

I'm sorry if that doesn't make it clearer, it's quite late on a Friday for me but I decided to leave all explanations I could think of so you can pick which ones make sense. I might be wrong too, of course. I have no relevant qualifications in the subject.

Half the Swedish population lives in apartments, but 70% of the children live in houses.

As our cities grow larger, chasing higher concentration and productivity, the costs of owning a house within reasonable commuting distance soar. So instead we cram into little shoeboxes where we do not even have enough space for ourselves, let alone children.

Urban populations have historically never been able to maintain their population without people moving in from elsewhere. But this century we are going to see 80% of humanity live in cities. There won't be enough people elsewhere to fill up the empty apartments left by childless city-dwellers.

Unfortunately it seems that cultural aspects like accepting homosexuality, allowing women to run their own lives and valuing higher education and a scientific mindset are correlated with not prioritizing the reproduction of their culture to the next generation.

I'd like the average human in a 100 years to be a bit more like me and a bit less like the average human today. But the rest of the Western world doesn't seem to see it that way.

Cities have been places where people come to work, live, and die without continuing their line for millennia.

Cities generally vote Democrat, but minorities do too and they have higher fertility than rural whites, who are predominantly Republican.

But I would be wary of drawing any conclusions for future voting patterns from current demographic trends. Politics and the trends can change in mere months or years, the impact of the trends on politics takes decades to emerge.

Elon Musk has probably realized that wealthy white people like him will become a smaller and smaller part of the global population if they cannot reproduce their numbers. Naturally he doesn't include his employees in this important group.

An aristocrat worried about the nobility dying out wouldn't encourage the peasantry to reproduce.

Most companies have a swag budget anyway, getting to pick which items you like is an improvement.

The EU isn't quite there yet, see the issues with refund processing times during covid for an example. I heard some official talking about how airlines shouldn't be allowed to charge you until you step on the plane, which sounds like a brilliant solution to me.

Don't have to fight the airline for compensation for a flight that was cancelled if the airline doesn't have your money yet.

Many cities grow by adding more suburban areas. It's a very land-intensive way to grow, but popular among families as they don't have to live in apartments.

More importantly, the countries with high birth rates do not have enough human capital to replace aging Westerners.

Their kids aren't equipped to take the millions of vacant Western jobs, because they won't have the necessary education, especially when it comes to language.

Most importantly you communicate to investors that your government does not respect the pricing mechanism of the market. That'll make investors worried about which other norms of economic stewardship your regime will violate. The uncertainty alone will be a heavy burden for the economy of a country that decides to impose arbitrary price ceilings on commodities.

Looking at the global median income and coloring it with the mean revenue per user paints an incorrect picture. Advertisers are not paying even $35/yr for the attention of people making the global median wage.

US attention is the most valuable because it is the richest large nation and the largest rich nation.

European attention comes a distant second. Together they have 40% of the global GDP, but likely something like 60-70% of the consumption of non-essential goods in nominal terms. Accordingly, average advertiser cost per clock differs ~10x between the cheapest and most expensive groups of countries.

Would be neat to have ligatures, for example for lowercase i followed by space, to restore column alignment.