I suspect people perceive raising children is hard and scary and expensive and stressful, the rewards being less tangible and easily dismissed as parental delusion.

I also think there has been an increasing infantilisation of adulthood since Gen X (people playing video games and watching Marvel movies in their forties) which makes people less willing to give up personal pastimes to take on the responsibilities of family.

Contraception, abortion, and now online porn and an apparently decreasing interest in actual sex amongst the newer generations would also all lead to fewer unplanned babies.

In other words you can offer me all the money and support you want, but if I just don't see myself as wanting to, or being able to, look after another human being and be a role model, it's not going to work.

I've read speculation that the reason the iPhone Air exists is because they're figuring out how to make thin pieces for the eventual foldable.

For balance... I'm always looking for something huge that isn't a flagship Pro Ultra XL Plus megabucks model, because I'm old and the bigger the screen the more easily I can read it.

Thought experiment: in 100 years' time, do we think people will have plastic driver's licences and paper passports?

I'm not convinced they will, barring something like the internet becoming unviable because of runaway cybercrime AIs or somesuch civilisational calamity.

So at some point between now and then those things would go electronic, and I don't have any massive objection to things starting now rather than in a couple of decades' time.

Other countries have done it (Estonia is the one that comes up time and again, and they did it before smartphones existed) and the sky's not fallen in, so I'm not overly worried.

I expect egovernment stuff will make this easier - i.e. the government app that ends up on everyone's phone (digital ID, healthcare etc) could prompt you to answer 1 question from time to time for a chance to win an Amazon voucher or something.

This won't be about helping the driver, it'll be about monitoring them, and gathering data for AI.
Did they run the stop sign before the accident? Did they check the Amazon driver app 12 times per hour as contractually required? Does their gaze linger on men or women? What is the demography of the area they're driving through? etc

My alternative prediction: no IT work will be possible except in airgapped environments because AI malware will make having a device connected to the internet essentially impossible. Site visits will be a thing again.

Reading the article *gasp* it seems this isn't the end of the road, it's still up to the government/communications regulator to figure out where Wikipedia sits on the risk scale and thus what kinds of safeguards they might or might not need to implement.

Another security nightmare - securing your llm against malicious prompts attempting to DDoS it by getting it to consume resources, or to divulge privileged information it has access to. This is like putting a sociopathic teenager in charge of customer support (aka the DOGE methodology)

I work on a code base that is, in parts, 40 years old. There is nothing more satisfying that digging into some bizarre lockup or slowness, discovering it's because of assumptions or constraints from the 80s that no longer hold, ripping out or rejigging a load of code and seeing the problem go away not just in one application but in all the applications. Yes of course you need to maintain code without breaking things, and the damage footprint is higher the more dependents the code has, but there are well-established techniques by which you mitigate that risk (i.e. automated testing).

Libraries can have their issues but they are also absolutely a part of the answer to improving performance. Any library you include will be used by more than just you, and is therefore statistically more likely to have encountered, had reported, and fixed any performance issues before your application encountered them. Plus it will have been written by someone who cares more about the problem than you (after all, they bothered to write the code whereas you wanted to focus on other things to the extent that you went looking for a library). That said, knowing when to use a library (don't try to write a faster strcmp() than libc's) and when not (you can do better than qsort() in many circumstance) is something that only comes with experience.

As a general guiding principle it would probably be enough to direct optimization effort at older code, which by definition has survived the surface churn of innovation. Obviously I mean older code that is widely used, which will tend to be the stuff towards the bottom of your stack.

To some extent this is surely happening - I bet there's more optimization work done in kernels and operating systems than in apps. But even within apps it will be happening - your UI might be tweaked weekly, but those query optimizations you made months ago survive.

On my occasional visits to the USA I'm always struck how commerce is the culture. The people I come across don't really find it at all strange that everything is mediated by some business or other.

So while Americans might find it creep to be surveilled, I don't think they generally object to being constantly advertised to ("isn't that just... life?"), and would probably rather like more targeted advertising if they just didn't know about the surveillance (in the same way that spam fritters are tasty, as long as you don't know or think about what spam is).

So in a way all these companies are both defining and adhering to the prevailing culture. What galls is not so much that they assume the rest of the world is the same, but that they might be right.

I remember wondering how they did the 3D vector graphics flythrough of New York in the opening scenes of Escape from New York. Turns out, they built a physical model, painted the edges of all the buildings with luminous paint, and shot it in the dark or under UV or somesuch.

I guess this is the internet version of the old joke: "No one goes there any more, it's too crowded"

In an ideal world, phones would be human centric. If I want to send a message to someone, I send it using the UI I prefer and they receive it in the UI they prefer, and neither of us has to know what the other uses.