anovikov

People's habits usually don't change. They still eat the same plastic crap, just less of it.

GLP-1 provides the only plausible way to do so.

No, it's a lot simpler. Governments should just have babies of their own, using donor eggs and sperm of people they consider to be high-value, using cheaply hired foreign women of any race for gestation, and raising them in specialised institutions - and funding it by abandoning all (indeed terribly inefficient) family-stimulating policies like childcare, tax benefits, etc.

To avoid political problems, make sure these new people do not become citizens so they don't vote, let them just be workers and consumers.

But this is not some "hard" problem, let's say in a way "peak oil" was seen as a "hard" problem 20-25 years ago: a resource limitation you can't just wish away. There's no problem with having as many babies as needed, it can be solved at a flip of a switch with only a minor readjustment of political expectations with almost no physical cost to anyone.

Debt to GDP ratio only increased by 1/3 in 15 years, not 3x. And this is a natural consequence of population ageing and is less pronounced than in almost any other developed country. Money supply to GDP is only 1/4 up from 1950s when interest rates were a lot higher. Homeownership is at nearly all-time high except a short stretch of speculative housing bubble ~20 years ago when a lot of people who couldn't afford homes, bought them to speculate, being financially illiterate and tricked by the banks to do to. Do i need to continue?

What's the crisis? I mean, what makes you feel there is a crisis? I know social media can make anyone feel extremely anxious these days, but for real?

It seems like any solution to the housing crisis is going to trigger economic doom?

Oh well, it's a drone interceptor. It was never meant to be easy.

One can formulate it a lot simpler: whatever are you arguing about, you are mostly arguing with idiots because normal people have shit to do and they don't care arguing about abstract things unless paid to do so.

Is normal DC-DC fine? It gets ~22-25V on input and produces 5V on output and is rated at 5A. That's the way i use it and i had all kinds of problems in the project but not RPi power problems.

So the message of it is - "if people have a lot of agency because they have liquid capital and network that allows them to not give a shit about incentives, they usually behave better and create more valuable stuff for society"? I agree with it. But this is almost an uncomfortably far-right take, because this is same as claiming that systemic, generational inequality is a virtue.

My opinion of Rails as a side observer: it allowed to cut coding time/effort/skill very significantly at the expense of performance. In the era when coding is dirt cheap thanks to LLMs and CPU and RAM are expensive, i don't see where the value is.

Why? Every significant invention extracts value by putting someone out of work. Putting people out of work is the whole point of progress. Cinema, Radio -> money made by putting musicians, theatre actors, etc. out of work. Internet -> putting newspaper journalists, printers, real estate brokers, tour agents, etc. out of work. Cars -> putting everyone in the massive horse ecosystem from breeders to vets and horsheshoe makers out of work.

And i don't even mean predatory ones, like Uber -> highstreet robbery, grabbing capital from taxicab medallion owners. This too, is progress, and makes lives of humanity overall, better.

Positive civilisational impact of an invention can be directly measured by number of people it put out of work. Harmful inventions usually don't do that. I can't think of anyone who lost a job because a nuclear bomb was invented.

I was offered this a lot and usually declined because it means that someone is looking for someone who will, unlike a contractor, take ownership and keep themselves on top of what's going on, but unlike a full time employee, won't have time or budget to do so. People who offer these tend to have wildly unrealistic expectations. I think a good engineer won't touch these.

Exactly because everyone can do it. There is no money to be made building software anymore. Even traction or network effects don't work - it will be copied on first signs of success before network effects properly get in play.

No, a kind of electric FPV drone.

I have basically vibe-coded a guidance system for air defence interceptors in 6 weeks. It works. Took getting my hands dirty with soldering and some mechanical work to test, but Cursor was guiding me on even that. And i started with understanding concepts like "what is a quaternion" and "why doesn't an infrared camera have a concept of exposure time even as it does have a framerate".

I had a "wow it can vibe code a React app" moment 1.5 years ago. AI evolved a lot since.

I admit i had to hire contractors to do designs for 3D printing. I don't know how to outsource it to AI yet, maybe i can't.

I agree. There is no point in hiring anyone into a technical-only role anymore. It's very valuable (and probably always will be) to be something-and-technical: a specialist in the target field who also understands how computers and software work. But not "just" technical, these are already completely obsolete and all of them who still have jobs, do so simply because of institutional inertia, connections, and companies being awash with money. Which is not to say that this is not a sustainable state of affairs - it may very well be so forever.

Well, being harmful is the whole thing about tech. Economic and technological development happens through harming people, this is how society grows. Finding new and new ways of harming ever larger groups of people, forcing them to adapt.

If law enforcement still does a good job, what are the downsides? I can't see crime climbing really high, after all, population ageing, and crime was on the decline for decades.

They always have been. As an outsourcer, i observed, for decades, organisations with lots of American tech workers who did almost nothing except nodding on meetings, most being utterly incapable. All actual work was done by outsourcers - bulk by Indians, complex parts by Russians and Poles.

Now AI does it instead, with outsourcers out of work.

With the productivity growth since late 19th century, vast majority of employees only exist by tradition, for political and social purposes. It's not "work", it's "service" (not as in "held in service or labor" but as in "public service"). They exist to make organisations they work for, look big and respectable. They exist to make their boss feel like a real boss. They are cheap - famously real compensations have been stagnant since early 1970s while productivity skyrocketed - so keeping them as essentially, pets, wasn't too expensive for business and keeps getting cheaper. They do bullshit work (Cory Doctorow).

This is why i am not at all worried for those workplaces. There is no AI can replace what was useless from the beginning.

Oh well, one thing will change. RTO will be mandatory nearly everywhere.

That's still McMurdo, not the South Pole. It's not that exceptional.

This is striking. So much for the "socialist" society in China as opposed to "capitalist" in Netherlands.

So the point of study was to find out "whether becoming skinny provides comparable benefit when everyone already knows that it's possible vs becoming skinny at the time when it was in general assumed that obesity was one's own moral fault and was immutable" with the conclusion that yes, it does? This is a very optimistic take on humanity.

Well it's their problem if everyone wants to live in the capital. Perhaps it's another manifestation of people being deeply irrational.

But indeed Moscow is one of the cheapest cities to buy housing in Europe... On par with poorer East European capitals and second-tier Central European cities.

With housing their being so cheap, what the hell is the problem anyway? It's impossible to have expensive real estate in a country that's dying out fast.

It seems like the sooner the economy will really wean itself from dependence on consumption of the poor (lower 90%), the better.

In the era when Upwork provided lots of opportunities to cheap outsources and was heavily gated - anyone without highly sought after skills had a hard time getting their account approved - around 10 years ago - there was a similar market for account approvals. In Philippines or Indonesia, in order to get an Upwork account, one had to go to the village elder, pay them, they reached to the backchannel in the Upwork HQ, and a manager (who came from same ethnic group) approved them.

Once Upwork found out and they realised there was no way they could fight it, they just made it into a free-for-all it is today.

Well, this is certainly the case. Many migrants said that they were encouraged and directed by Moroccan police that informed people in advance, removed border controls and on the crossing site, encouraged people to cross.

It's an exaggeration to call this an attack - those people were not military, we not legally obliged, conscripted, or paid to do it - the are willing migrants, they actually want to immigrate and live in Spain. What changed is that they were given the opportunity, "they did it because they could".

In any case, they are all back now. It failed.