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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • We’ve already lucked into a solution to the population boom, the numbers will level off around 10 billion. Given how intractable population control is, we’re very lucky we’ve found this without some dystopian shitshow.

    In the developed world we are approaching the opposite problem, we’re currently dependant on immigration to maintain our societies, but as the rest of the world stops growing we’ll have more trouble getting that immigration and won’t have the local young population to care for our elderly.

    Given that we should be trying to figure out how to encourage a sustainable population whilst we still have time to do so. If we can choose between 1.9->2.2 children per couple as needed then we’ll be in a healthy position to slowly reduce the population to a comfortable level.

    Right now our natural population decline in the developed world is too fast, probably because our society has made being a parent quite an individual burden. Of course, totally moving the costs to a societal model would be a disaster, but presumably there’s a middle ground where people are comfortable keeping the society going at a healthy rate.


  • That’s exactly the answer given to you above - the line is murky and grey, there is no clear point that everyone agrees is the right point.

    In such a circumstance, the right answer is open to interpretation, and the right solution for a society is to accept that the best person to make that decision is the person involved.

    If you want my answer, it’s when brain cells develop enough to start looking like a functioning brain (somewhere around 16-20 weeks). Before that it’s just a brain dead mass of cells regardless of how it looks.

    Clearly you have a different moment, and that’s fine, but you don’t get to ignore that the issue is open to interpretation. Otoh, I admit that both sides are guilty of trying to railroad a “simple” interpretation as the only right answer, it’s always tempting to force a simple answer and declare the problem solved, it’s harder to let people decide for themselves what the right answer is, but that’s the right thing to do when we as a society cannot reach a consensus, and we certainly don’t seem to have a consensus on this one.


  • I think your take is a bit extreme.

    Currently their statement (regardless of the questionable justification) is largely correct, no major c++ projects have been written in a safe subset and no real work has really started yet. It isn’t practical.

    I do agree with you that a safe form of c++, once fully implemented and not frustrating to use, could easily become viable, the feature can be added. But that’s still years away from practical usage in large project, and even when done, many projects will stick to the older forms, making the transition slow and frustrating.

    The practical result is that he’s sort of right, if you just add the word “currently” to his statement.

    Otoh, I do agree with you that rust cannot be the sole answer to this problem either, it’s almost as impractical to rewrite codebases in rust as an as-yet unfinished safe form of C++. Only time and lots of effort can fix this problem



  • On the one hand, if you don’t enjoy the game that’s fine. It’s a masterpiece, but that doesn’t magically mean that everyone will enjoy it.

    That said, if you want to enjoy it more, focus on one thing per loop, everything is designed to be completable in a single loop, (or maybe a few for the more complicated puzzles if you get stuck). And if something is frustrating, do something else.

    Things really go wrong if you keep smashing your head against a brick wall or if you keep jumping around and never manage to finish anything.

    We’re trained to think of death as a major failure by other games, it’s not in this one, it’s just jumping back home, repairing the ship, and starting from a central location and a known state.


  • I don’t dispute your point about nurses and housekeeping, but when people talk about underpaid doctors, they’re not talking about the consultants with Teslas, they’re talking about the junior doctors with a mountain of student debt. They may earn more than nurses, but after 7 years of accumulating debt they kind of need it.

    Sure, the rich ones whose mummy and daddy paid for it are fine, but becoming a doctor for ordinary people in this country is pretty thankless and rough, so unless we want doctors to just be toffs we do need to offer compensation on the assumption they won’t be rich going in.

    Again, not disputing that nurses deserve better too, but there’s no need to disparage other groups to make that point.



  • A solution for a small but notable chunk of the problem perhaps.

    There’s no way that we can solve the entire problem that way.

    Before human civilisation trees covered entire nations that are mostly bare today. Humanity cut down a lot of trees during prehistory, and it presumably had an impact on the climate. But it was nothing compared to our fossil fuel burning.

    And that’s pretty much the upper limit of what we can dream of achieving, realistically it seems unlikely that the UK will ever go back to mostly woodland, what countries will? Its have to be most of the countries in viable climates, and probably means most farmland, and we’d still just make a small blip compared to the scale of the problem.

    Once we’re truly carbon neutral, and we’ve covered the world in trees, we’ll still have more carbon in the atmosphere, a lot more, and I guess a few billion starving people since we’ve turned the farms into forests that can’t sustain our population, and we’d still be a few degrees warmer.

    We need a way to turn co2 back to solid carbon that won’t decompose, that’s the only way out long term (lower priority than carbon neutral of course).

    Not to say that planting trees is bad or anything, it’s just not a solution to the level of problem we’ve created, it never could be.



  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzT. rex
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    2 months ago

    I don’t think that’s what the meme is claiming.

    I think instead it’s just claiming that all fossils have the same implied increase in maximum size implied by the paper, not just T rex.

    I’m guessing the illiterate paleo fans were excited that maybe T rex was king of the dinosaurs again, but the logic fails if all the dinosaurs get bigger max sizes…




  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzLinguistics
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    2 months ago

    “Divorced from the context that brought them about” Ahh, so you’re complaining about all the Germanic words in English, or the Latin words? The whole point of their diatribe is that the “brain rot” words you hate are little different from most words. It’s just that for some words the “in group” is Latin speakers, and for some words it’s some group nerding out about their own topic that spread their word to the rest of us… actually, I’m still talking about Latin speakers.


  • Reasoning is obviously useful, not convinced it’s required to be a good driver. In fact most driving decisions must be done rapidly, I doubt humans can be described as “reasoning” when we’re just reacting to events. Decisions that take long enough could be handed to a human (“should we rush for the ferry, or divert for the bridge?”). It’s only the middling bit between where we will maintain this big advantage (“that truck ahead is bouncing around, I don’t like how the load is secured so I’m going to back off”). that’s a big advantage, but how much of our time is spent with our minds fully focused and engaged anyway? Once we’re on autopilot, is there much reasoning going on?

    Not that I think this will be quick, I expect at least another couple of decades before self driving cars can even start to compete with us outside of specific curated situations. And once they do they’ll continue to fuck up royally whenever the situation is weird and outside their training, causing big news stories. The key question will be whether they can compete with humans on average by outperforming us in quick responses and in consistently not getting distracted/tired/drunk.