domain:abc.net.au
RenOS
something is wrong
4m ago
Adoption has changed a lot over time, as multiple people here can testify. In times of war and scarcity, there will usually be more well-adjusted orphans than families wanting to take them in, so if you adopt you're likely to have a good experience.
However currently families wanting to adopt far, far outnumber well-adjusted orphans. It's not rare that you have to wait years, and even then you'll more likely than not end up with problematic kids. We know a couple who waited and eventually gave up because the only cases they got offered were so horrible that they didn't think they'd be able to handle that.
One of my colleagues helps out those foster families willing to take in the hard cases that are the majority and it's just sad. Teens with the mental development of a three year old are among the easiest. One girl just doesn't sleep at night, screaming for most of it. Others are so heavily physically disabled that they need help with everything.
Maybe you get lucky and the kid you adopted with fetal alcohol syndrome will turn out mostly fine except for minor develpomental deficits. Maybe you get super-lucky and an actually healthy kid somehow finds its way into the foster system. But generally it's hard and thankless and more likely than not, you will get kids that are dependent on support for life. You probably will not make a big difference, either.
Adoptions from the third world work a bit differently, especially from asia, but this can be very expensive.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9m ago
Bridesprices are Lindy(as is borrowing from Shylock to afford it)
Brideprice is negative (i.e. dowry) in the vast majority of cultures with strong monogamy norms. In the particular case of cisHajnal culture, the wedding-related flow of funds is traditionally from the bride's extended family to the newly-formed nuclear family.
Every Western society is now more urbanized and educated, plus there's porn, video games and everything else people blame for the fertility decline. It's going to be much harder to do anything today than in the 50s or 60s. Implicit, unspoken social technology that worked then has now broken or been broken.
I mean, think about what was happening in the 50s, what caused it then? A prolonged period of wages growth would certainly help but there are plenty of countries with huge wages growth today and cratering fertility. There's no reason to expect that to result in success. In Sweden they'd just come up with the welfare state. We still have welfare states and there don't seem to be much gains to be made there in terms of fertility despite huge amounts of money sloshing around.
We're left with other aspects of the 50s and early 60s that are a harder sell for the general public.
The golden age of eugenics. Mad Men-style sexism. Nuclear family as standard. The mindset and assumptions that put all of these into practice. Plus an overt, explicit understanding of what the goal is, precisely what we want and why rather than free market fundamentalism. Something besides treating the fate of nations like inexplicable changes in the weather, to be observed and adjusted to rather than altered and improved. That's what we're missing I think.
P-Necromancer
29m ago
1 million tokens is a lot! (Gemini 2.0 had 2 million, but good luck getting it to function properly when it's that full). That is 750k words. All of Harry Potter is just over a million.
You know, I hadn't really internalized just how big this is. You got me curious about it. I uploaded something I'm working on -- 240k words, which, with Gemini 2.5 Pro, came out to about 400k tokens.
Honestly, I'm impressed that it works at all and very impressed how fast it works. Thought I'd at least have time to get up and get a drink, but it was already responding to my question inside 30 seconds. Just being able to throw compute at (essentially) reading a book feels magical, like nine women making a baby in a month.
Unfortunately, that's where my praise ends. It... has a general idea what happened in the text, certainly. I wouldn't give it much more than that. I'm used to 2.5 being impressively cogent, but this was pretty bad -- stupider than initial release GPT 4, I want to say, though it's been long enough I might be misremembering. If you ask it concrete questions it can generally give you something resembling the answer, complete with quotes, which are only ~30% hallucinations. Kind of like talking to someone who read the book a few months ago whose memory is getting a bit hazy. But if you ask it to do any sort of analysis or synthesis or speculation, I think it'd lose out to the average 10-year-old (who'd need OOMs longer to read it, to be fair).
(Also, the web front end was super laggy; I think it might have been recounting all the tokens as I typed a response? That feels like too stupid an oversight for Google, but I'm not sure what else it could be.)
Not sure where the disconnect is with the medical textbooks you say you tried. Maybe the model has more trained knowledge to fall back on when its grasp on the context falls short? Or you kept to more concrete questions? As of now I think @Amadan's semantic compression approach is a better bet -- whatever you lose in summarization you make up in preserving the model's intelligence at low context.
(Royal Road makes it so you can't export an epub of your own fic without paying, and without that option, I'd be doing a lot of copying and pasting)
FanFicFare can do this for free. It's also available as a calibre plugin, if you want a gui.
Though, bizarrely, Gemini (at least via Google AI Studio) doesn't support epub uploads. Concerns about appearing to facilitate the upload of copyrighted material? Kind of dumb considering epub is an open format and they allow PDF, but I could see how it might be spun in a lawsuit. Anyway, RTF should work, but didn't for me. Eventually got something workable out of pandoc:
pandoc -f epub -t markdown_strict-smart-all_symbols_escapable --wrap=none
Now we hit the real point of contention. Can the average American afford their own apartment, own a car, and pay for an adult lifestyle?
No - the question is "Can the 30th percentile 20something American man afford these things?" Half the population being too poor to date is a failure condition, telling young men to spend their 20s careermaxing and start dating in their 30s is incompatible with the cisHajnal marriage pattern, and the reversed gender pay gap for young childless people makes things worse.
cae_jones
49m ago
The upper class in Qing China had some ritual involving a square of white silk, which was supposed to come out bloodstained as proof. Or so I've read in a historical fiction which may or may not be accurate (in which the newly weds deliberately faked the results so they wouldn't have to have sex the first night).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
52m ago
Speak for yourself!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
52m ago
Yep, I link people to that book all the time.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
53m ago
No, she has to be white or at least east Asian.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
58m ago
Einstein said that with hindsight being a plumber would have been a better day job than being a patent clerk because it makes you tired in different ways, so you are more able to do physics in the evenings.
Not sure if he was true, and of course it relies on plumbers making enough to put food on the table in 40 hrs a week (then, as now, not a problem for plumbers specifically, but an issue for a lot of blue-collar jobs that would otherwise make good day jobs for struggling intellectuals).
I'm not 2rafa, but I would argue similarly on immigration. The advantage that the US has with immigration is that all their illegal immigration is Hispanic. They're not all people you would want in your nation, but the US has already integrated a huge number of them. There aren't big push factors coming that will massively bump numbers up in future, and in legal immigration the US system works pretty well, largely creaming off the best from the rest of the world. The US has relatively limited welfare which means most illegals are in some sense productive, or at least not active drains outside of the criminal elements. The US is also massive and very decentralized. Some states and cities will become swamped and turn into third-world entities, but there will still be dozens of productive urban areas with low levels.
In Europe, illegal immigration is coming from Africa and the middle east. These immigrants are much lower quality. They are poorly integrated, many going into ethnic enclaves and reigniting old tribal conflicts with other groups of immigrants, to say nothing of the dangers of Muslim immigration. They are attracted by generous welfare which they are increasingly exploiting, adding nothing to the host nations. Numbers are large and likely only to grow larger as their home regions increasingly destabilize. I can't speak for legal immigration for continental Europe, but at least in the UK they've somehow ended up importing millions of terrible unproductive immigrants in addition to the illegal flows.
Structurally, each individual nation is also poorly positioned to weather these floods. Productivity is often focused in a single primate city, and once you lose a London, Paris, Brussels, Milan, etc. you've lost most of the nation's growth. Individual areas can do little to fight against the waves. And all this is to say nothing of the respective strengths of the economies
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