> Childbearing decisions are memetically influenced. They are shaped by the decisions peers make and the examples they see around them in everyday life.
Surely this explanation is circular. People look around and see that their peers are having fewer kids. But why are their peers having fewer kids to begin with? There has to be a backstop somewhere otherwise you get infinite regress.
Because children are expensive, in time, fiat, and opportunity cost while the freedom of being childfree is free if you choose to have less or no children. Social media allows for the socialization of these ideas at speed versus historical transmission rate of culture and social norms. This is covered most robustly in my Birthgap video citation above, additional citation below (by the same author as the tweet that is this post).
> "As of 2026, humanity is likely below replacement fertility. That has never happened before, not in wars or pandemics. But the real surprise is that the fall has been concentrated in low- and middle-income countries and among poorer and less educated women. We fit a single-factor model to 236 countries since 1950: the common component peaked in 1978, and what drives fertility down today are country-specific trends, 219 of them negative and not one leveling off. None of the commonly cited mechanisms can account for this pattern, so we offer a conjecture: modernity itself, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap. Children come in integers, so it takes very little to move a cohort’s fertility rate from 1.8 to 1.3. And nothing in an economy pushes fertility back to 2.1. We close with the main economic consequences, in particular slow growth."
> There has to be a backstop somewhere otherwise you get infinite regress.
In summary, the global population boom happened because women were not educated and empowered to assert their reproductive choices. They are now. We are currently performing neutral fertility rate discovery via who does and does not choose to have children when it is a choice, versus when it is not a choice or forgone conclusion. A byproduct of this was economic growth, which is coming to an end, and will not repeat in our lifetimes based on demographic trends and trajectories.
Yes, I want to do dual boot (well, multi-boot) with one OS per disk.
Also sometimes friends come over to my house and need to use my computer to do their stuff. So it is convenient if I can easily swap out the SSD and hand it over to my friends.
These NAS machines always have great price and good specs but when you try to actually run your own OS instead of their OS you'll always find various issues like power consumption or fan speed control not working or LEDs not working or SATA being unstable or some system stability issue like random reboots or other. Usually you end up wishing you had just used normal off the shelf motherboard
That's why I looked into the UGREEN NAS and ended up deciding not to get it, same reason as all the other cheap Chinese NAS boxes
I'm running Linux on a UGREEN NAS without a problem from the OS perspective. On AOOSTAR even Windows 11 ran fine after digging for appropriate drivers.
Where most of these machines suffer is the default UEFI config and the cooling. The UGREEN luckily gives the option to dig into the advanced UEFI settings (they just left the entire setup open in "engineering" mode so every option the firmware gives is there to tweak) and optimize what the manufacturer defaults, change the power saving options, turbo and power limits, etc. This makes a huge difference.
But the CPU cooling is still sub-par and there's no off the shelf replacement. Most of these smaller Chinese NAS brands I tried have this issue, they take very decent hardware and slap on them the crappiest accessories like cooling. You get a hobbled CPU, always pegged at low clocks because the temperature spiked to 99C. Sometimes the disk cooling isn't too well conceived either and the disks bake at 45C idle but these can usually be compensated if you're willing to take the noise.
I ordered a Xyber NAS (N150) back when they were still in stock, wiped the Ubuntu that came with it and built up a NixOS config [1]. The power usage is very good (12W with 2 internal SSDs, bluetooth, wifi and a bunch of services running).
If it dies, I won't be too sad since it was about $210. But it's doing pretty well (24/7) so far.
[1]: This ended up being useful. The built-in eMMC chip that I had installed the OS on gave out after ~1 month of usage and I had to reinstall. Thanks to the NixOS config, it took me much less time.
> We used surveys of 4,266 members of these parties to learn more about their personalities – including those traits associated with the dark triad.
> Of course, in psychiatry it’s considered unethical to diagnose someone with a personality disorder without meeting them – and we are most definitely not psychiatrists.
And yet despite this, the author went ahead and started diagnosing people anyway, as having "dark triad" traits, including psychopathy, despite the fact that psychopathy CANNOT be diagnosed from a self-report survey (for obvious reasons) and has to be diagnosed by an external observer.
What is the point of this whole article other than to label an entire group of people as bad on the back of laughably weak reasoning and evidence?
It's not only AI that uses em-dashes, but AI only seems to use em-dashes.
And there's an ellipsis ascii char in there too (not 3 periods in sequence, a single ellipsis char), somewhat of another AI tell.
Yeah, and it's alt+k on my default keyboard layout on debian… I think some punctuation is available on macos as well — so perhaps it's a windows-ism that «only AI can use punctuation».
I usually don't complain about stuff being AI generated. But in this case, regardless of HOW it was written/generated, it reads exactly like claudese and frankly I am so exhausted of reading that particular voice that I made it half way through this article before I just couldn't do it anymore. I really don't care if AI was used, I care that it is readable. And frankly, it isn't.
Yeah. Different authors should have different voices. Having them all sound the same is like having all your food taste the same. It makes you want to throw up after a while.
I think you missed the point, "That particular voice" - is the claude vomit that I have to consume everyday and it makes me shudder every time I see it.
That voice grates on you. It grates on all of us. But it would grate on us less if we didn't hear it all the time - if it wasn't half of the words coming at us.
Dibes said, "I am so exhausted of reading that particular voice that I made it half way through this article before I just couldn't do it anymore." I think what I said is exactly to his point.
Because I don't care what a machine "thinks" I care what a real human thinks. We are losing the internet's remaining culture by consuming this type of content.
To restate what I put elsewhere, I genuinely don't think I care much for how it was written. The problem is that it felt exhausting to read and was chock full of the same claudese voice that makes claude so infuriatingly exhausting to read. I gave it a try and gave up halfway through. If it was AI generated but was a good read that conveyed a central point/theme, I wouldn't be complaining. This at least is trying to argue a single point, but it does so in what feels like at least 10x the word count.
> America getting potentially balanced by China and Europe in the Americas
I can't figure out a way to parse this sentence that makes sense. Are you saying that "Europe" will "balance" the USA in the Americas? As in, European influence will counteract US influence in the Americas?
Would assume it's in reference to things like the EU offering associate membership to Canada, or China's trade deals with Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, etc.
> European influence will counteract US influence in the Americas?
Yes. If you’re Canada or Mexico or frankly anyone else in the Americas, you probably don’t want all your weapons systems to be dependant on American supply chains. And then if you think about it, you probably don’t want all your energy imports dependent on Washington’s noblesse. Et cetera.
American exceptionalism was built on the trust the world put in us getting so unilaterally powerful without being balanced.
If someone is doing something as a job... then surely they are, by definition, doing it for money? Otherwise, if they were doing it for fun, as a hobby, then we would call them hobbyists?
How would you get different behavior when you have completely decompiled the original binary and recompiled it to wasm? Shouldn't the result have identical behavior?
My understanding is that the source code itself is not the "goal" as much as a way to recompile the game for other architectures instead of having to use emulation to play the game. Also for modders who want to alter things at a low level (performantly).
Over time, as needed and where it makes the most sense, I could imagine that _rough_ source being cleaned up (same logic, but real names/comments added) so that it's easier to follow.
As LLMs make formal verification cheaper (they can generate proofs that can then be automatically checked) many of the verifiable components of software systems, such as compilers and microkernels, will be verified. I suppose the issue is that the critical bugs are rarely in compilers and microkernels, but more often in applications, such as web browsers, which are more difficult to formally verify.
Surely this explanation is circular. People look around and see that their peers are having fewer kids. But why are their peers having fewer kids to begin with? There has to be a backstop somewhere otherwise you get infinite regress.
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