The instantaneous fertility rate dipping below replacement level does not mean humanity dying out. It might mean that this particular civilization with this particular population level is. Infinite growth ad infinitum leads to an inevitable (and likely catastrophic) collapse. No one can say with certainty what the "correct" fertility rate is. That being said, if a society is set up as a pyramid scheme, it must have infinite growth to sustain itself so I won't argue that this way of life is likely dying.
We've already passed several Malthusian moments because we invent stuff that allows growth to continue. 50% of all nitrogen in human tissue came from a process we invented like 70 years ago. And we're nowhere near fundamental constraints like energy absorption of the sun onto the earth, and sqft of land per human.
Yes, though don't forget about the incompetence of adding the wrong person to the chat which goes part and parcel with the embarrassingly superficial/cynical discourse.
I still can’t believe this. It’s just so comically absurd, like it’s straight out of the plot of Veep. Of all the people to add to the group chat, you add your most vocal critic with the largest megaphone?
There are a few possible explanations:
- “It was intentional.” This doesn’t pass the smell test and it’s not clear who benefits.
- ”It was a setup.” I suppose this is possible, if the Intelligence Community is preloading the application onto the devices in question.
- ”It was an accident.” In some ways this is the most believable and unbelievable. What are the chances that you just happen to add Jeff Goldberg to the chat?! Which leads to the final possibility…
- ”It was an accident, and not the first time.” We just heard about it this time because Goldberg was the one included. This would explain the astounding coincidence, because it changes “the one time they messed up was in front of the editor of The Atlantic” to “this time they messed up was in front of the editor of The Atlantic.”
If they did it once, what are the chances the most vocal recipient was the first example of the mistake?
I’m sure we can count on an extensive audit of the participants in these 20+ other chats……
As a good friend who is the maintainer of a widely used oss tool likes to quip: the two hardest problems in computer science are naming things and making money in open source.
This little experiment lasted for about 6 weeks for me before I broke front and back glass and cracked the camera lens in one go on a cement floor. I’ll take the $6 rubber case now and save me some grief.
I think this is akin to the "wearing a seatbelt makes me drive more dangerously" argument. (I also don't use a case, but mainly because I don't like the extra bulk and don't mind dinging my phone up a bit, not because I think I'll take better care of it).
I don't use this method and have broken zero phones in ten years because of it.
Each phone gets a 9h glass screen protector and thin TPU case, each about $10 on Amazon. I crack the screen protector maybe once every 8 months and there is usually three screen protectors in the pack I bought, so I just replace the cheap screen protector.
When I drop the phone, I try to soften the impact with my shoe.
One thing I do appreciate about Apple is their new ceramic shield material on the 6.1-inch screen. It actually does appear to be more scratch-resistant than other smartphones. Working our way up through the Mohs scale of hardness, usually I can feel the level-6 pick grab the glass and start scratching, but with this latest generation of ceramic shield, it still feels pretty smooth—even with that sharp level-6 pick. The marks are still appearing, but they're so faint and subtle that I almost can't say "scratches at a level-6, with deeper grooves at a level-7" anymore. Almost.
You can get more scratch-resistant screen protectors, but as far as the builtin glass I don't think Apple is falling behind anywhere.
I carry a work iPhone 15 Pro and a personal 16 Pro, actually my second, I had a warranty replacement when faceid stopped working. It scratches easily, especially on the edges. The glass is too hard.
The 15 is pristine. And I treat it worse! I typically carry iPhones naked and the only mishap was I dropped two iPhone 6 because that thing was like a stick of butter.
I don't think correlation vs causation is the right question. Loneliness was clearly rampant long before chatgpt showed up. The question is whether chatbots are capable of reducing people's loneliness. To me it feels self-evident that in the long run, they are far more likely to increase feelings of loneliness than reduce them.
For me, the only thing that can reduce loneliness is conversation with another conscious entity. Many, if not most, people are barely conscious so this is hard to find in the physical world. But I don't believe llms are conscious, so for me they are a complete dead end for reducing loneliness whatever other virtues the may have.
It sometimes feels like there is a strange resistance to defining ad hoc sum types. If your language has good pattern matching capabilities and an expressive syntax for declaring data types, then this scales very well.
For example in a pseudolanguage:
data FooResult = Number | Error
def foo(n: Number): FooResult = ...
foo(42) match {
case n: Number => print(n + 1)
case e: Error => // handle error case
}
This gets you very far most of the time. If the tag overhead matters (which should largely only matter in a hot loop), then try to refactor so that the hot loop doesn't error out.
Granted in many languages the above cannot be expressed succinctly and is often avoided for this reason.
That looks more like ad hoc union types than sum types. What happens if you do:
data FooResult = Number | Number
If you can't distinguish the two cases, then it means they're not an actual sum type, since e.g. the set size is |FooResult| = |Number| whereas a sum type should have 2*|Number|.
The reason ad hoc union types are avoided in Hindley-Milner (HM) languages is that their usability depends on subtyping, which is incompatible with HM. You could get around this by saying that ad hoc sum types require the types to be distinct, but this would greatly impede usability. For example:
ErrorA = FileNotFoundError | ParsingError
ErrorB = FileNotFoundError | PermissionError
ErrorC = ErrorA | ErrorB // Oops, trying to ad hoc sum FileNotFoundError twice
The tried and true solution in HM is to use generic types like Result<A,B>, where you separate the cases with labels Ok and Err.
On the other hand, languages with subtyping aren't that averse to ad hoc union types. TS and Python already have them and C# is adding them soonish [1].
My definition is very different. It is about my ability to have control over my life in the areas that matter most to me. I value my time and personal development above material wealth (to a point). I don't need a giant house. I don't need regular fancy vacations or to own a car. I personally have been not working and living comfortably on much much less than 5mm in a high cost of living city for over five years. I do have to make many tradeoffs but I am happier than working a soul sucking job. It's not a path for everyone.
That's a young man thing. Still trying to grow, to attract mates, etc. It switches (at least for those who develop correctly), to be able to provide for offspring and descendants material wealth is key.
>I don't need a giant house.
Perhaps, but we were talking about fuckyou money. Living in a crackerbox isn't an indication or test of fuckyou money... if Warren Buffet drives a beat up pickup truck, he's not interested in signalling fuckyou money. But he could also drive 31 different Ferraris, one for every day of the month right? My point was that fuckyou money has changed, and that by any measure even lottery jackpots aren't really fuckyou money anymore. Those are "yay, we get to send the kids to college without them being debt slaves" money. It's a strange world now days, that didn't used to be the case.
