pbmonster
5d ago
I don't think I have ever, in my entire life, heard anyone discuss fertility rates "in real life", outside the Internet.
Interesting, is this in the US? In Europe in general, but especially in France and Germany, the "demographic transition" has been a permanent fixture in the media and in public discourse for at least 30 years. I have childhood memories of seeing inverted age pyramids in newspapers.
Understandably, since the fertility rate (or "children per family", the more palatable euphemism) has cratered earlier here, and the financial scheme behind their social systems is reliant on young workers. Which means they are even more fucked than all the other countries with low fertility, so at least they are aware of the problem.
pbmonster
6d ago
And if they don't die, they need to change. The doctors know the stats, at the very least they could/should be frank with their patients.
A friend of mine was told during her first consult with the IVF clinic that a chance of success at "high confidence" would require a number of eggs equal to her age at implantation - so to prepare for 3 rounds of egg retrievals at the bare minimum, and as soon as possible. She got unlucky, and the first round only retrieved about 4, so the number of cycles was immediately upped. When she asked if they couldn't try those 4 first before cycling again, she was advised to not waste time and get the inventory as young/soon as possible, and to expect more setbacks.
Sounds like this lady did a single (more successful) retrieval cycle, and nobody showed her the math.
pbmonster
11d ago
OK, all good arguments. Maybe I'll have to take a deep dive on what's possible in open source land on that front (I refuse to touch Adobe/Abelton et al.). Do you use commercial models/implementations or do you have a recommendation where to start if I want to set it up myself?
Not to mention they tend to have ridiculous censorship
That's the nice thing about just renting a VM on expensive hardware from runpod. They don't care at all what you do, because you provide all the software yourself.
pbmonster
11d ago
Interesting, does the software integrating those non-LLM AI functionalities offer to run this in the cloud for you? My experience with both image generation/manipulation and local LLMs has been that its almost always better to run those loads in the cloud - either directly from the big AI labs, through a vendor like openrouter.ai or on a rented GPU like runpod.io.
You can very well do it all locally, but it's a pointless toy with 8GB of VRAM, semi-interesting with 16GB and you're finally cloud-independent with 24 GB of VRAM. And you can get many hours of GPU time on runpod.io for the price you'd have to pay for this much VRAM.
But yeah, I haven't worked with audio models and the things Photoshop can throw at a GPU.
pbmonster
11d ago
what stupid and crazy people are like. They always existed, and always had these ideas. The only thing that has changed is that Duggan can now see them. Nothing got worse - if anything from my impression, the internet makes correct information easier to get than ever
I think unfortunately, this also goes the other way. Misinformation is also much easier to get, giving us the toaster fucker problem:
"Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers."
I have previously been using an old non-subscription version of AutoCAD, but I’m not sure the budget will support paying for a subscription moving forward, so I’ll need to switch to something free/cheaper. I was thinking most likely FreeCAD.
This sounds like light hobbyist use, like for some 3D printing? Any laptop from the last 5-7 years will have no trouble running that. Unless you're designing large assemblies or planning on doing simulation work on your designs, I'd just get >16GB of RAM and call it good.
I'm a firm believer that nothing important has happened in the PC space for the last 15 years (Apple Silicon is another matter, but it didn't sound like you're interested in that). We did everything you want to do 15 years ago on Windows 7, and it was fine. Because we suck at software design, doing the same thing now needs more RAM, so we gotta buy that. Done.
If my current PC dies, I'm getting another Thinkpad X1 Carbon, probably 8th Gen (those are from 2020 and go for around $500 when getting a good condition business lease return, and sold for >$2000 6 years ago). Matte full HD screen, good keyboard, solid build. X series Thinkpads have lasted more than 10 years of hard use under my care historically, and I would expect this one to continue the legacy.
But really, any PC from that era will do fine at your workload. I'd choose on price or other secondary features. If you get a desktop tower, spend your money on a nice display/mouse/mechanical keyboard and maybe passive cooling instead of compute.
pbmonster
11d ago
The writing smacks of the fedora, if you catch my drift
Reddit certainly loves it, yes. Read it on recommendation from one of the SF subs, and hated it. Its main weakness is that Locke is such a Mary Sue. I find characters that simply excel at everything annoying. Other than that, it's decently written Fantasy James Bond with forgettable world building.
Would not recommend.
do slave concubines even count against the 4 wife limit?
Of course not, what are you talking about!?
In that sense, the predominant genetics of the area got polluted.
There's no genetic evidence of this happening. Northern and Southern Italians differ genetically quite significantly, but that difference goes back much longer - bronze age and copper age. Southerners are most similar to Greeks, while northerners are most similar to French.
Also, that span of genetic difference isn't really that uncommon. North and South Germans have similar genetic differences, for example.
Maybe it's a regional thing?
At least internationally, for sure. Ironically, women in France almost never wear "French manicure", but anecdotally I'd say wearing nail polish in a muted color on short nails is more common than in the anglosphere. Practically all French (or western European women in general) I can think of at least sometimes paint their nails at home, and wouldn't even get acrylics for their wedding.
pbmonster
24d ago
You go on to propose that black men should be encouraged to be less masculine, basically. In other words you are trying to bring him down to a level where you can compete with him as you are a non-black man.
submit to the stark reality that women choose mates based on primal instinct of masculinity and dominance and physical power which you or the less dominant man knows he can't compete at and win.
Come on, this is oversimplified to a degree it's wrong. "Masculinity and dominance and physical power" is only one dimension of what makes an attractive man. There's also charisma, verbal/emotional intelligence, appearance/style, competence, and (of course) status.
If you send the most masculine gangbanger to a party also attended by a sunny boy pro surfer, a lead singer/guitarist of a half-decent band, a frat bro lacrosse player, a male ballet dancer and a navy fighter pilot - and they all agree that gangbanging is low status - the gangbanger will not pull, not even secretly.
pbmonster
25d ago
I don't just want an open source model roleplaying as Homer Simpson (or whatever), I want it thinking nothing but Homer thoughts from the ground up.
The main problem for something like that will training data. You say "at only minor expense", which means you're considering renting GPUs (as opposed to just training on a gaming PC)? The most common tutorials on that scale use many hundreds of millions of tokens of training data (training on TinyStories (500M tokens) and Wikipedia English (4B tokens) is common, books3 (100B tokens) is sometimes used for more ambitious and capable toy models).
And even if you just take a small open source model (or your own toy model trained on TinyStories) and do some post-training fine tuning, you'll still need millions of tokens of training data. I'm not sure Homer had enough lines across the almost 40 seasons to even get this far.
And all but one of male friends have paired up with women who are also not like this, even if some may be a little woke, and only one or two ever spent significant time on the apps the rest just met at work or school like the old days.
Exactly, and all my female friends and family members also all have paired up with entirely normal men (desperately holding out for Chad to finally commit never seems to have been an important part of their lives). The vast majority also still get married.
With regards to the fertility crisis, the real problem seems to be that all those "normal, old school" couples seem to consciously choose to have exactly zero or one child. Even two children is rare in my bubble, three or more totally unheard of. Which, of course, results in exactly the TFR we're seeing.
I don't really understand why. Especially the in-official one-child-policy baffles me. Maybe having one child already scratches the itch of parenthood enough? Maybe the tolerance for discomfort has gotten lower, and most young parents end up being surprised how difficult (especially without significant support from family, who universally live far away now) the first few years are - and choose never to do that again? Maybe the "universal theory of housing" is correct: most of us live in classic 3 Bedroom apartments, condos or town houses, which works out exactly to parent's bedroom + child's bedroom + study/guestroom?
It's all of those, right? There's women who want children but lack partners; but there's also women who have stable partners and never end up having children anyway; and women who have children, but stop after 1/2 - either because they started to late, or because of lifestyle choices (housing/career/hobbies being in conflict with having a larger family). I suspect each of those groups to be significant. "Conscription" could help with the latter two.
I think there's pragmatic ways. Allow women to delay their non-military national service until they're 25, and wave it if they have children by then. Hell, do the same for men. Allow the women to drop out immediately upon reaching the second trimester while still maintaining their pay. Have the non-military national service use mandatory barracks for unmarried personell, and co-locate those with the military bases that do basic training for the conscripts. Don't actively hinder the inevitable parties to much.
Still, no way this gets you TFR > 2. That requires a pretty radical social change. I suspect making parenthood high status might be the only way.
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