This is a very multi-faceted issue with many overlapping issues compounding it.

It has been repeatedly observed that wealthy nations experience declines in birth rates. And we presently see this happening in wealthy countries across the globe, right now, and we have been seeing it for decades. And it's getting worse.

Your own personal experience is a common story, but doesn't suggest a root cause. It's easy to read an anecdote like yours, maybe attach it to one's own similar experience, and get dismissive and say "women just want it all, and that makes them insufferable, so relationships are done." There really is quite a lot more than that going on, for both genders, and it isn't possible to cover it all in a short post.

But the upshot is that modern-day relationships are really hard to build and harder to keep. They are legal minefields and financial minefields. A failure of a relationship can be utterly life-destroying (not just emotionally, but socially and financially and legally). It is as if our governments and culture don't want there to be relationships, and so have built a world that is outright hostile to them.

The opposite is true, the world by and large wants there to be marriage and family. The hostility largely arises from profiteering, and from a repeated pattern of "well this possibility is bad so lets mitigate it with this solution (which sounds nice but winds up being even worse)".

When we see people walking away from all this, we result to scolding and shaming and trying to deny their access to whatever they are turning to instead, hoping the raw misery of not having their needs met will drive them to plunge right back into the minefield, and somehow not step on a mine. It's not going to work. It can't work. Until we are ready to take a serious look at how we are the problem (and by "we" I mean everyone and everything that is being justified as not the problem, a huge can of uncomfortable truths that we vehemently reject), this breakdown is only going to get worse.

Addiction and dependence ARE dangerous things and given China's very high sensitivity to the dangers of emotionally charged groups with charismatic leaders, I can see why they would reject this even apart from a desire for there to be more babies. But this measure is not going to get the birth rates up, it will just take away another coping mechanism that people want.

I don't live in the US but I recently moved to a rural area and in doing so I have started to plan out a utility-independent future.

Why? Well, various reasons, including water and sewage companies taking the piss (or actually... not... just dumping the piss in every river in the country and crying that they can't process it because they gave all my money to their shareholders, but... anyway) but also because electricity is literally a con too.

And nowadays? I *can* viably make my own electricity. So... why wouldn't I? Why would I pay a company to do a bad job when I can do it myself?

I did a number of things when I moved to that area, including demanding smart meters on everything, and I monitored my electricity down to 30 minute intervals for 2 years. And you know what it showed? That 1% of the time, I have no power. That's in dribs and drabs, a power cut here or there, a scheduled one lasting a day or there, and so on. But 1% of the time they can't even get electricity to me and... there's nothing I can do about that.

So, if I want a computer to stay on... I already need to spend money and do it myself because they simply can't do it. 1% may not sound a lot, but that's 3.65 days a year if you think about it. Spread out randomly - an hour here, an hour there. Literally my computer "uptime" was "two nines" and that was driven entirely by grid power supply.

That's ATROCIOUS in my opinion, in the 21st century. And I wasn't prepared to tolerate it. I was already buying the house with the intention of becoming utility-independent but that really drove home why I need to. So I started to build my own solar, for several reasons.

1) To ride out the outages
2) To reduce my bills so they got as little money from me as possible
3) To not be reliant on the grid
4) To ultimately remove the need for grid entirely

And it's really not been hard. I started with cheap junk just to see if it would even work in my climate, with that house orientation, etc. It did. I started with a small 12v panel and an old car battery. And it was actually worth doing when I ran the numbers. It would take a few years to pay off the cost of the panel, but it would do so.

And then every month for 2 years, I would get more panels, more and better batteries, more efficient and powerful equipment in between. And it got to the point where it is technically capable of running my whole house for much of the year. And that's before I ever got onto SERIOUS panels and professional installs. That's just me, a bunch of cheap 12V panels, some 12V LiFePO4 batteries and a serious enough charger/inverter, then later going onto 24V by re-arranging them.

And I'm looking at that and thinking: Why the fuck hasn't government / the utilities done this for me? Why am *I* having to do it? Because it really is that simple and they have access to far more land, far better kit. But, no, I'm still paying inflated grid prices from when Ukraine was first invaded because of the price of GAS. What the fuck are we doing?

So now, more than ever, I plan to be utility-independent by retirement, which is 20 years away, and whereas before I was wondering if that was even viable in that timeframe, I'm now expecting that to be 100% done way ahead of schedule, just by a factor of "whenever I can be bothered". It was that easy, and doing the maths was that easy.

I might retain a grid connection, or not. It depends on what happens and what kind of low-usage tarrifs I can get in the future but I'm looking at the whole thing thinking "Fuck you, I'll do it myself" because even as an amateur... it's perfectly viable to do so. I don't care if it even costs me more (it won't). I don't care about having a grid connection or not. It's just that I will be able to be *independent* of it. When they play games, raise prices, or have power cuts, I won't be reliant on it at all. I'll use it when it's to my benefit, and not other times.

But all I ever think about the whole thing is: How have I, an amateur, cobbling cheap Chinese shit together, come up with a more reliable and cheaper power supply, that's utterly independent of fuel prices, than an entire national electricity grid could do?

The answer, of course, is corruption and profiteering. That's the only part that I've eliminated. And that's the part that, when it's gone, makes it all viable and even cheaper.

And that's the thing that's going to see me having zero electricity bills when I retire. Just by removing the profit and corruption.

Yeah, there's two main problems:

1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.

2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.

When news is presented that fits with one's political biases (or other biases), they tend to find it believable. And it if does not align with their biases, they tend to distrust it. This is even true of people who claim they want politically-neutral unbiased news....they still tend to react to it through the filter of their own biases.

It is natural enough to do this, and largely unconscious. It is VERY hard to overcome and even people who can overcome it don't do so ALL the time. It is the nature of bias to work this way.

On the flip side, there are ALSO powerful groups who have a clear interest in controlling narratives.

So, any news source that makes a sincere effort at being unbiased will be distrusted by viewers at least half the time, and will be fighting a losing battle against wealthy special interest groups. With cards stacked against them like that, it is no surprise that there aren't very many.

Each of those answers came from a different source. And the world has many sources to consult.

This answer might not be as simple and easy as one would like, but it's what's available from these sources.

I'll say it again:

Active military personnel carrying around standard mobile phones is such a breach of all kinds of basic security protocols that it should be illegal.

But can't let the troops get bored, eh? Have to let them do their fitbit on board your cruiser that you're trying to keep secret, and have them checking into Facebook while they're in Helmand province, and giving away their movements when they're running around your bases at home, and having an always-on device capable of tracking and recording everything from audio to the radiowaves to location, made by the Chinese, wherever they go.

Dumbest fucking idea ever.

"OpenAI's success in hardware will hinge on bringing a novel approach to the market"

It says as it releases an Alexa....

Merit should always consider strictly value.

That's an interesting question. Have you tried putting it to AI? I did. The response had helpful links embedded in it, but they did not copy over when I pasted it here into slashdot. Editing this post was already more work than I really wanted to put into this, so, unfortunately, you get no supporting links. However, if you ask this of Gemini yourself, you will get the supporting links.

Here is what Gemini has to say:

While "predicting a crash" in any market is notoriously difficult, several highly respected financial research firms, enterprise consultancies, and macroeconomic analysts have published structured, data-driven frameworks on exactly how and when the AI investment cycle could face a major correction.

The most prominent, realistic predictions do not necessarily point to a single catastrophic "crash day," but rather outline a timeline of course correction spanning 2026 through the end of the decade.

  The Financial Predictor: Capital Economics
The Prediction: The AI-fueled stock market bubble will keep inflating but is highly likely to burst beyond 2026

The Logic: Capital Economics suggests that near-term momentum and massive capital expenditures (with big tech AI capex expected to exceed $750 billion) will continue to push tech valuations up
However, by 2026 or shortly after, rising interest rates, inflation, and a stark mismatch between massive infrastructure spend and actual corporate revenue will trigger a sharp unwind.

Key Takeaway: Unlike the dot-com era, today’s tech giants (the "Magnificent Seven") are highly profitable with deep balance sheets, meaning a bubble burst is more likely to result in a severe tech sector correction rather than a complete systemic collapse.

  The Enterprise Predictor: Gartner's Hype Cycle
The Prediction: Generative AI has officially entered the "Trough of Disillusionment"

The Logic: In their latest Hype Cycles for AI, Gartner notes a distinct pivot
The "Peak of Inflated Expectations" (2023–2024) has given way to a period where organizations are realizing that while pilots and demos are easy, scaling generative AI into production is incredibly expensive, logistically complex, and lacks clear ROI

The Timeline: Gartner projects that it will take 3 to 5 years (roughly 2028–2030) for GenAI to work through this disillusionment phase, weed out unviable startups, establish proper data/ModelOps governance, and finally climb to the "Plateau of Productivity" where it delivers steady, mature business value.

  The Balanced Institutional View: Goldman Sachs Research
The Prediction: We are seeing "froth and bottlenecks, not an active bubble."

The Logic: In their comprehensive reports (such as "Why We Are Not in a Bubble... Yet" and subsequent updates), Goldman Sachs analysts argue that current market momentum is fundamentally different from the 1999–2000 dot-com crash.

In 2000, the top tech companies traded at a forward P/E ratio of 59; today's leaders trade at a much healthier average of 34.

The current appreciation is backed by actual, surging near-term earnings rather than pure speculation.

The "Watch Out" Warning: Goldman Sachs' Global Markets Research Group flags a massive acceleration in tech investment (tech investment as a share of GDP has officially surpassed 1990s peaks)
Their analysts warn that investors may be drastically overestimating how long above-average profit margins can last for infrastructure/chip providers, raising the probability of a "bubble scenario" correction (estimated at roughly a 25% chance by some metrics) if valuations continue to stretch without broader productivity gains.

  The Venture Capital View: Sequoia Capital's "$600 Billion Question"
The Prediction: A massive revenue gap must be resolved, likely forcing a valuation consolidation in the mid-to-late late 2020s.

The Logic: Partner David Cahn famously outlined that the sheer volume of data center buildouts, GPU acquisitions, and energy infrastructure requires the industry to generate hundreds of billions in incremental revenue just to break even on capital expenditures.
Sequoia argues that unless the industry rapidly transitions from basic chatbots to highly valuable, autonomous "Agentic AI" (AI 2.0) that can justify these trillions of dollars in physical infrastructure, a massive capital write-down is inevitable

If you're a maintainer, then I suspect whatever you maintain fucking sucks.

I clearly explained the problem- that the quality of LLM-produced output is a function of the money spent to produce it (generally).
This means that the flood of slop PRs are produced by free-to-cheap models. This is only natural.
People who have no idea what they're doing aren't spending $300 for a large commit. They couldn't be bothered to invest the time in learning to code, they sure as fuck aren't going to invest in this.

Meanwhile, over here in real-life, dealing with real problems on maintained things that don't suck, I've got people making quality commits with LLMs on the daily. But they're part of the team, and they're paying real money for those commits.

In short, I think you're probably just full of shit. If you're not, I feel for whatever the fuck it is you maintain. You can't even apply basic logic to a problem.

Or let's put this another way. Show of hands - how many of you "spicy autocorrect" / "stochastic parrot" people had "AI will start mass-solving Erdos problems" on your forecast list a couple years back? Huh, none of you? Fascinating!

Take some time to reassess your priors. And while you do so, understand that, yes, they are doing logic / reasoning.

They weren't discovered by an LLM. They were known conjectures that were proven by an automated solving language that was linked to an LLM.

I'll take "Things That Didn't Happen For $200", Alex.

Only a handful of meaningful proofs have ever been done by automated formal theorem solvers (the Four Colour Theorem being the most noteworthy example - but its proof is so long that humans can't verify it). By contrast, AI tools have been solving Erdos problems en masse. The majority of them just bog-standard commercial models. In case you need help, the only ones on that list that were hybrid (AI / non-AI) in the actual solving phase are:

1) AlphaProof / DeepMind Prover Agent / AlphaProof Nexus
2) Aristotle (Harmonic)
3) Seed Prover / Seed Prover 1.5 (ByteDance)
4) AxiomProver (Axiom Math)

In each of the above, LLMs come up with the lemmas / strategies but then use Monte Carlo search ("brute force") or likewise to investigate what they came up with. These are a minority. In the "AI Standalone" category, these "hybrid" tools made up only ~20% of attempts and successful proofs. Hybrid tools actually made more of a contribution in the "AI Alongside Literature" (related literature found afterward) and even more of the "AI Building On Literature" (related literature known beforehand) categories, which is the opposite of what people like you expect.

And even with the hybrid tools, it's still the AI doing the heavy lifting when it comes to strategy. Non-AI theorem solvers, again, don't have a spectacular record for churning out novel proofs to unsolved problems. Tools like Lean are more about mathematical rigour - a passive environment that requires a driver (a human or AI) to feed it actual strategies, lemmas, and proof steps. And no, you cannot brute force "strategy" in the vast majority of cases, which is, again, why automated theorem solvers don't have much of a track record with unsolved mathematical problems.

Let's take a random example: the disproof of the unit distance conjecture. It was solved purely by a general purpose commercial GPT model, not custom-trained to mathematics, with no external tools. Read what the various mathematicians reviewing / commenting on it have to say (sections #3 and onward). Seriously, don't skip reading them, actually read them. This was one of Erdos's favourite problems. He mentioned it commonly in his lectures. Essentially every mathematician working in complex geometry has thought about this problem. The approach that the model came up with was highly novel approach, based on CM-fields and class field towers.

I know you don't want to accept this reality, but it is the reality, so you better improve your ability to accept it,. The field of mathematics is already doing so.

Dang, link didn't post.

Ah, good 'ol "Model Collapse" theory that people have been pounding on for years now, predicting an imminent collapse in model capabilities. How has that been working out for you?

Except what the US is actually facing, at least in the near term, is just the opposite, a worker shortage.