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This has nothing to do with economic security.

Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet. There's no desire to have kids because kids were a pre-internet and pre-modernity phenomena.

Now that we're fully entertained, there's little need for having children. The FYP has enough entertainment to overcome the biological itch.

Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms.

We're microdosing on pleasure and that's desensitized every biological urge to raise children.

Technology did this.


Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms.

People have been having children later since about the 1930s. The change has been gradual, so it's only really hitting hard now because they've not had any children during the years when it's relatively easy, and now some can't. That could still be due to technology but not social media exclusively.

Coincidently though, this aligns pretty much perfectly to people's stability also shifting to happen later in life. Specifically the economic stability to raise a family on a single income. That's not really possible any more, so it shouldn't be a surprise that people don't do it.

Just to add a little factual data to this point, the fertility rate in England and Wales has been below two children per woman since the 1970s.


>That could still be due to technology but not social media exclusively.

the tech before social media - TV:

https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/tv-birth-control/

"TV As Birth Control

...

The impact of the new TV programming in rural India has been profound—and very positive, say Jensen and Oster. Their interviews revealed that when the new TV services arrived, women’s autonomy increased while fertility and the acceptability of domestic violence toward women significantly decreased."


Every economic bracket got smartphones and internet.

The men are playing Fortnite. The women are on TikTok and Instagram.

Babies went off trend so we could collectively do dopamine maxxing as a species.

Evolution didn't anticipate this.


Evolution doesn't work like that. What we have here is a dead end. For whatever reason, this system isn't advantageous from an evolutionary perspective, so we don't reproduce. That's natural selection.

The economic argument is oversold. Poor people have kids more than any other demographic.

Smartphones are why we don't have kids.

Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids.

The internet is why we don't have kids.

Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies.

Modern life is TOO FUN.

Fun is why there are no more babies.

Babies are not fun.

Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do.

Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest to arrive in the mail.

Babies are the anti-dopamine.

For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied.

There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet.

----

Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?

The answer is probably "fuck no".

And you know why.

Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.


Babies are also free labor. They are just like the AI agents of today, parents had their children do a variety of things around the farm, instead of paying for tokens, they had to feed them, thats all.

This is an unfalsifiable pet theory. It is hardly worth discussing.

Don't be so dismissive.

Just because you don't like the hypothesis doesn't mean it doesn't have merit.

https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6749621

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14758

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6257058

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-016-0605-0

https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04575

The dopamine and devices hypothesis has been picking up steam.

It is entirely possible that our modern pleasure technology has short circuited our evolutionary drive to have children.

We have too many easy ways to not be bored. That throws a wrench into the biological algorithm.

We've been poor and resource constrained throughout history, yet we've always managed to have children. What is the one thing that has changed?

Smartphones and internet and YouTube and online gaming and porn and social media.

That's why the babies have disappeared.

Fun killed babies.


> Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?

Yes, next question


[flagged]


Harsh words but there’s truth in them.

Seems like someone could use Claude to port rsync to Rust and the whole enterprise would be safer from things like this.

Start with unsafe then gradually convert into idiomatic Rust.


Your let's redo this in Rust made me wonder if generative AI will also be susceptible to software fads. One LLM writes a few blog posts extoling a new framework/lanaguge. Other agentics read these and get 'influenced'. Then they start clamoring for 'lets redo this in X!'. Can't wait to see it. /g

You can get 80% there with rust which is what is impressive. Then you have a reference implementation that you can always check against. If a Rust library have 0 unsafe, i dont care if it is written by a dog, it still have 0 UB.

Prompt: automate writing commits to increase safety in these software projects so that my profile increases and I can snag a high-paying Rust job.

LLM: this commit changes whole codebase to Rust!


We will need rigorous agnostic statistical experiments to know what stuff is better

its bad enough when humans do it

> it's still lacking in two areas

This is entirely different than what Redis is and tries to solve.

Sqlite is embedded. It's not a distributed SQL. Redis is a distributed data structure store and concurrency primitive. These are worlds apart.

> HA story is so much more complicated than it should be

It is precisely as complicated as it needs to be. You don't want data loss.

If you're in the business of high available fault tolerance, you read the manual and learn how to Redis.


What kind of an answer is that? This software is perfect the way it is, you’re just to inept to hold it right?

A high availability protocol should not leak into the client. It should be able to discover other nodes. It should not land in broken states so easily. It should not limit the number of writers. It should not error during failover.

Are these hard problems? Yes. Should we just accept that things are hard because that’s how the gods have given them to us? No.


High availability and abstraction complexity are orthogonal.

Redis is a low-level concurrency primitive, and it made certain choices in dealing with CAP.

It might be single-threaded, but it can easily absorb 100,000+ requests per second.

I've built systems that handle billions of dollars of online payments flow, active-active, with six nines of uptime reliability on top of Redis. It does what it says on the tin, and it doesn't need to be everything for everybody. This is a hard domain and you're going to have to deal with different problems and tradeoffs.

If you want something higher level, there are other systems to reach for.


Is any of this experimentally testable in the real world?

Would gravity or spacetime under these definitions behave differently and yield something we can observe?

Or is this fancy math modeling that looks nice on paper, but that we won't be able to test until we become a Kardashev type III civilization?


See the end of the article, after further research quantum gravity could be simulated on a quantum computer. The links between research on quantum computing and quantum gravity are fascinating anyway!

Simulating it on a computer, even a "quantum computer", is not the same as testing it against actual reality.

Ah. You're assuming we're not living in a simulation?

I mean, I don't think we are living in a simulation, but even if we were, there is no reason to believe that simulating something inside of a simulation is going to prove anything about the outer simulation.

Would the designers want us to know?

If they're powerful enough to build a universe simulation, theoretically they can blur the edges so we can't discover them. They might even be able to construct and limit the systems of maths and physics we have access to.

I suppose the simulation could be smaller than a universe simulation though - and this is actually really compelling -

It could just be you that is simulated.

Maybe your consciousness and sensory inputs are simulated. You're kept largely on rails and the rest of the world is run at lower fidelity. They know you won't go poking at particle accelerators and theory, so they can keep those pieces low effort and you just get fed narrative. The only things to simulate are those that are directly in front of you now.

Almost like a movie. Not a universe at all.

We might have that capability within 50 years. All your sensory input being simulation. And the virtual brain playing with that input or replaying recordings.

That could be totally feasible. And we might have that tech soon.


As far as I know it’s the latter and that’s a big problem for physics. A lot of stuff like string theory, loop quantum gravity, etc. require energies that would take a particle accelerator the diameter of the solar system or something nuts like that.

Without tests it’s just pretty math that can be coaxed into agreeing with reality but that proves nothing.

Physicists try to indirectly test all the time via cosmological observations but that is extremely hard and limited to what you can infer and how well you can eliminate other explanations or sources of error.


I believe there was a science fiction story all the way back in the early '80s describing a scenario where physics gets reclassified as a soft science or an art form because it is no longer feasible to prove anything.

Does the model need to offer new testable hypothesis if it provides a way of explaining existing results that current models can't?

If it is competing against another model that does both that and offers new testable hypothesis (which experiments match), the other model is the clear winner. But lacking that, if no other model explains all existing data, is new testability really necessary when it is the only model that currently explains all existing tests?

That said, aren't most of theoretical models only contenders for such, as in they haven't been expanded to actually explain all testing results, only that, as far as they have been expanded, there are no contradictions yet? So they need physicists to expand them, but if the model is wrong, the effort might largely be wasted, and we have some models that there is disdain for not because they contradict existing experiments, but because they have eaten too many careers without showing value in return?


These wild ideas eventually arrive in textbooks as if they were tested, proven with none of the nuance or contradictory evidence

Do they though? Are physics textbooks putting forward some version of string theory from the 1990s as proven fact?

There's a lot of ire for string theory. It's non-testable and wound up attracting lots of minds, funding, and resources. It hasn't seemingly led to any tangible results. Many scientists express anger about it and claim entire generations of progress were lost.

It's unfair to compare the US, which is incredibly and wildly diverse in race and culture, against monocultural Europe.

I grew up in the South. You'll have to kill these people to take away their sweet tea and fried chicken. And that's just one dimension.


In fact, America's wealth (and our fairly generous welfare programs, despite what Europeans might think) actually enables the massive obesity rates we have, which is one of the main reasons we have lower life expectancies. If Europeans were richer they'd likely be eating themselves to death more like we do (though cultural and other factors play a role too).

You don't think Europeans can afford to eat the cheap crap that makes one fat? Healthy food is expensive, garbage food is cheap. Obesity is a poverty problem in the whole western world.

No it must be that Europeans can't afford corn fed omega-6 beef, corn syrup water and baked extruded corn mush coated in MSG so they have to get by eating real bread, tomatoes and ham.

Google needs an anti-trust breakup about 10 years ago.

They need one more than ever now.

This is ridiculously anti-competitive.


This is literally competition

1. Google is dumping on the market to weaken OpenAI and Anthropic.

2. Every time you search for Claude or ChatGPT, you get presented with an AdWords bidding war.

3. Google is deploying its models in Search, Docs/Drive/Office, YouTube, Chrome, ...


1. This isn't dumping

2. I'm not sure what this has to do with the case, unless you're arguing Google has an ads monopoly, in which case the best argument would likely not be that adwords lead to bidding wars because that just sounds like they're selling a product people really want to pay for

3. There's nothing criminal about being a very diversified business


> For all the potshots about AI,

Most video is going to be AI in the near future. They see the writing on the wall. Their camera business line is going to sharply decline.


> Most video is going to be AI in the near future

That's like saying all fine art would be photography, all film would be CGI, or all music would be synthesized electronica.

That's not how aesthetics seem to work. Artists will make more or less good use of generative AI in their work, and it will probably seep into most media in some way or another, effecting them, but arts mostly don't get replaced and AI doesn't really offer an exception to that history.


> That's like saying all fine art would be photography

Or is it like saying most portraits will be photographs rather than paintings? There are still a lot of portraits painted (maybe even as many as the pre-camera days), but by raw numbers most portraits are created by photographers.


There will also be a longer or shorter period of time in which such technology will be abused by artists (because it's new) and at some point it will stabilize.

It's saying most art will be created with AI.

Like saying most pictures will be made with digital cameras.

Like saying most music will be captured and edited digitally.

You guys have an anti-AI bug and it's eating you alive and blinding you to the future that is unfolding. It's toxic and you're all 100% wrong. Your hate makes it impossible to see all of the improvements.

I've been a filmmaker for decades. This tech is the most amazing thing I've ever witnessed. And it's just getting started.

Stop being old men yelling at clouds. If you don't like it, you can continue doing things the way you're used to.


The quantity/quality tradeoff is horrific. And I speak as someone who's watched hundreds of low budget "B" movies. AI is going to allow churning out vastly more movies than anyone can ever watch. Even if some might be good, the average quality goes down, and the adverse selection problem of trying to decide if something is going to be worth committing two hours to becomes harder when you have to scroll for longer and longer distances.

There's already a bit of a fatigue with CGI and the "flat lighting" Netflix TV style. AI is just going to make that worse. Mind you, I'm old enough that I would call any movie where more than 50% of the frame for more than 50% of the runtime was never real objects and created entirely on computer "animation". It's a subtly different discipline.

But yes, there's going to be a lot of it, and it's going to rack up a lot of Netflix watch hours, in the same way that "4k crackling fireplace" does.


It seems like you have trouble handling the idea that people disagree with you. You should try listening instead of immediately jumping to being reactionary.

It isn't like saying any of those things because they are referring to recording media and not to a pipe dream invented by tech bros to attract investors so that their deeply-in-the-red company can stay afloat a little while longer. AI can't create anything.

> AI can’t create anything

Individuals are now making eight-minute movies with AI that are definitely wandering across the line of “watchable” into “entertaining”:

https://youtu.be/gtnt84CDP-s


It isn't like saying any of those things because they are referring to recording media and not to a pipe dream invented by tech bros to attract investors so that their deeply-in-the-red company can stay afloat a little while longer. AI can't create anything.

How do you know you aren't arguing with one now?


>You guys have an anti-AI bug and it's eating you alive and blinding you to the future that is unfolding

For the moment what is unfolding is a dystopia shoved down most people's throats, whether they want it or not.

And the bug is obviously the "AI bug", a foreign body recently introduced. The "bug" can't be our default previous state (no AI).

>I've been a filmmaker for decades. This tech is the most amazing thing I've ever witnessed. And it's just getting started

Hopefully it will be over soon.

>Stop being old men yelling at clouds

You know that the leading AI providers and experts in the field often discuss how AI can/might/surely will wipe us off? Not some random guys with signs in some street corner. The main people behind it.

Now, I don't believe it's so, at least not for the reasons mentioned, like the singularity. But there are very dark results from AI in society and in many domains.

But hey, we can make pretty uncanny valley (for now) videos and special effects! No need to involve or employ humans in our art either. And the human art can be drowned in a sea of AI crap, so noone will really see our AI art either. Such amazing tech /s


> "shoved down most people's throats"

Can you people PLEASE use an LLM to give you something creative and original to say instead of this thought-free copypasta?

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shove%20throat&sort=byDate&typ...


"AI makes real world obsolete." I think that's enough hacker news for today.

Aren’t the cameras they are making aimed at professional productions? Those are probably going to replaced last, the first thing will be (or are) TikTok clips shot on smartphones.

I don’t think they’ll see a decline in cinema camera sales due to AI soon.


> I don’t think they’ll see a decline in cinema camera sales due to AI soon.

Happy to bet on this!

Expensive glass and all of the processes around it takes more time, money, and resources than Seedance 2.0. And these models are only a few years old at this point.


> Expensive glass and all of the processes around it takes more time, money, and resources than Seedance 2.0.

Sure, but the results will also seem better to a cinematographer.

When do you expect the first movie with fully 3D-generated imagery (which would mean that a camera was actually replaced by AI) will be released?

I can imagine it will happen at some point, but I don't see it soon.


Yeah they don't make a single consumer grade product. Prosumer at its lowest, and even then they're way too technical for the uninitiated. No one is picking up a BMPCC and just shooting/posting online.

You are only looking at your own consumption at the moment. There are a lot of problems that still need to be fixed especially with rope artifacting. The 4k most models taunt isn't equivalent to a real 4k image or video as well at the moment you need a quality factor of two to get the equivalent result of a shot image or video. Resolution does not indicate quality.

Why do you believe this? Are you expecting all media to become fully AI - sports, TV, movies, youtube?

They've been spamming slop project submissions the last few months. But then again, who isn't?

I doubt it because I wouldn't waste my time watching it and I can't imagine all that many people today that don't already watch AI videos are going to suddenly change their mind and decide they like AI produced Hallmark movies.

For commercial use maybe. Not for documentary or personal use.

Actually what ruins camera businesses are smartphones, not AI.


So live A/V is just dead now? Movies are dead? I really don't get where this take is coming from.

> So live A/V is just dead now?

I'm an indie filmmaker and I do community theater. We use gaussian splats for 3D filmmaking, and we're already using AI for background plates and VFX shots.

Where this is going - your local community theater will be able to have Lord of the Rings / Gollum-style facial/body rigs that eventually work in real time, and actors will markerless mocap into super high fidelity fantasy and science fiction scenes.

> Movies are dead? I really don't get where this take is coming from.

Movies will never be more real and more personal. The folks at A24 are going to have Marvel powers with way better stories.

Stop being so bearish. These are tools, and creative people will abuse the hell out of them to do wildly cool things.


I’m not bearish. I’m incredulous at their statements and agree with you. Take a second look at it.

Good luck on your journey as a filmmaker (truly not being sarcastic), I’ve been in the industry for 15 years so we are colleagues here who can have a dialogue.


No way.

Even the frontier models running on insanely powerful hardware could only generate 15 second clips in low resolutions.

And yeah, I saw some demos from Seedance 2.0, and they were awful. It's ridiculous how much people on Xitter were like "You can't even tell it's AI!" and I was like "It's trivial to tell it's AI" and could easily pick out all the markers. An individual screenshot could look good, but every time the camera angle changed, there would be a glaring inconsistency.

You people are either blind, delusional, or outright insane. AI might be used for a quick clip, or used to enhance something recorded by a camera, but "most video" is definitely wrong.


God I hope not. That’s depressing.

Even more reason to check out.

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