One of the things I've observed time and time again, which makes me incredibly angry, is this SLAVE mentality reasoning: "If >big highly funded group< cant do it, what makes you think you can?"
I can. I will simply do it. Yes, I know better than them. Why do you give up?
@jonathanmcdill What you’re missing is mostly that your first premise, that someone has to be able to read and write code to make useful software, is empirically wrong
@0xAlaric Today I leaned that if you head to the literal end of the road. Then press further, into the edge of the world, to a dense, remote land largely untouched by man…you’ll find USAID and NGOs have already been there and bravely set about fucking shit up for the locals.
gpt-5.5 prompt for codex seems to have a duplicated line trying to get it to not talk about creatures?
Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query.
[...]
Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query
gh link:
https://t.co/1LF8FkRaVf
US fertility reached 1.57 last year, the lowest ever recorded, and the WSJ explanation is "uncertainty about finances, relationship stability, and the political climate"
my great grandma had eleven children during the second world war, in a country being bombed, in a house with no running water, on rations.
poor people have always had kids. the poorest people on earth right now still have kids and the financial excuse is a story we tell ourselves because it makes us feel good and the real one is unbearable
the real mechanism is that we got rich enough to redefine children as an expense instead of the point. somewhere in the last fifty years the cultural goal inverted and a child stopped being what life is for and became a line item competing with the lifestyle. once you frame it that way the math never works, because the math isnt supposed to work. that's the point
we are living in the richest moment in human history and we decided to use the surplus to buy ourselves out of the future. the most prosperous civilization that has ever existed is committing demographic suicide at the altar of personal optimization and comfort, and the official line is that we cant afford it
the birthrate is a lagging indicator of a civilization that forgot why it was alive