> Python 3 should be studied for why it didn't work as opposed to a lesson not to do it again.
I'm curious about this in particular. It seems like the Python 2 to 3 transition is a case study in why backwards compatibility is important. Why would you say the lesson isn't necessarily that we should never break backwards compatibility? It seems like it almost could've jeopardized Python's long-term future. From my perspective it held on just long enough to catch a tail wind from the ML boom starting in the mid 2010s.
Because you end up accumulating so much cruft and complexity that the language starts to fold under its own weight.
Often you hear the advice that when using C++ your team should restrict yourself to a handful of features. ...and then it turns out that the next library you need requires one of the features you had blacklisted and now it's part of your codebase.
However, if you don't grow and evolve your language you will be overtaken by languages that do. Your community becomes moribund, and more and more code gets written that pays for the earlier mistakes. So instead of splitting your community, it just starts to atrophy.
Python 2 to 3 was a disaster, so it needs to be studied. I think the lesson was that they waited too long for breaking changes. Perhaps you should never go too many releases without breaking something so the sedentary expectation never forms and people are regularly upgrading. It's what web browsers do. Originally people were saying "it takes us 6 months to validate a web browser for our internal webapps, we can't do that!" ...but they managed and now you don't even know when you upgrade.
Part of the issue is that you can't just generalize it to "breaking changes." Ruby, very similar to Python, underwent a similar break between Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9, but didn't befall the same fate.
The specifics really matter in this kind of analysis.
I beg to differ. Journalists are supposed to do their own investigation and analysis of the people, institutions, and events that they report on. If they just parrot the talking points of executives, then they’re producing advertisements, not journalism.
Fair, but there have never been very many journalists in the world. Between lazy fact checkers and there being more money in sensationalist reporting (My American history classes covered this back in the 1800s, and I have no doubt other history classes of earlier times will as well) there has never been much.
It's hard not to see the development of LLMs as a major stepping stone towards a much more hostile web. Downstream from there, the open web will likely be a wasteland and all interactions will be suspect. There seems like a world where long-running, personalized phishing campaigns could be a reality too.
It's not mentioned in this article, but Geoffrey West's book "Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies" give a fascinating and approachable overview of similar ideas.
One of the ideas presented is the "quantization" of the exponents observed in power laws relating various biometrics. E.g. it's known that the larger a species' average mass, the longer it lives, and that this relationship is expressed as a power law. What West found is that the exponents in many of these relationships are integer multiples of 1/4! This book, and West's research, uncover the origin of that phenomenon, relating it back to the efficient distribution of material throughout the organism (certain branching laws of cardiovascular networks, or phloem in plants, etc.)
It's not hard to see how that could apply to things like cities and companies as well.
Fabulous book. I cannot recommend it strongly enough. It's impossible to unsee the two scaling laws he lays out for cities once you know about them:
Infrastructure scales with 0.85:
"It may not come as such a big surprise to learn that larger cities require fewer gas stations per capita than smaller ones, but what is surprising is that this economy of scale is so systematic: it is approximately the same across all of these countries, obeying the same mathematical scaling law with a similar exponent of around 0.85. What is even more surprising is that other infrastructural quantities associated with transport and supply networks, such as the total length of electrical lines, roads, water and gas lines, all scale in much the same way with approximately the same value of the exponent, namely about 0.85."
- West, Geoffrey. Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies (pp. 272-273).
Social effects scale with 1.15:
"However, of even greater significance was the surprising discovery that the data also reveal that socioeconomic quantities with no analog in biology such as average wages, the number of professional people, the number of patents produced, the amount of crime, the number of restaurants, and the gross urban domestic product (GDP) also scale in a surprisingly regular and systematic fashion, as illustrated in Figures 34–38. Also clearly manifested in these graphs is the equally surprising result that all of the slopes of these various quantities have approximately the same value, clustering around 1.15. Thus these metrics not only scale in an extremely simple fashion following classic power law behavior, but they all do it in approximately the same way with a similar exponent of approximately 1.15 regardless of the urban system."
- (p. 275).
Yes, much of the book after that tries to get to the root of that. I'm still in the middle of that and cannot give a satisfying summary yet. He establishes the numbers based on observation and then looks for explanations
Thanks a bunch for linking this. I had similar ideas doing system architecture, quit my job after seeing those concepts at work and after some years actually started writing a presentation with the city being a single entity for my hometown. Both the article and the book are for sure some reassurance for me i wasn't abstracting into madness ;)
In my city this is kinda easy as the river is 1:1 named to the city, so any links between nature and human culture is faster to process.
Traditional engines proved unfit so i stubbornly continued working on a webgpu one allowing nestable entities for definition of laws across branches / groups in the graph. The graph is handed to compute shaders and calculates the world matrix for the scene tree per frame. Allows for portals too, etc.
Here's a demo of it doing 4D entities to animated 3D and the graph engine building a scaled universe without a fixed reference frame (dono if that's the right word, it just means there are no fixed world units or global grid, it's always derived from your position in the graph): https://krei.se/vid/demofinal.mp4
This is also halted for now as i'll go with Rust instead of TS in the future and handle the main graph logic on a central server handing out only trees to clients (similar to how ARMA and Battlespace works from what i read).
I'm not sure what i will get from the book, but if someone is poking similar ideas i'm always open for dialogue and/or wish you plenty luck and the best on this interesting journey!
Bit of a cliche but a few years ago I came back from a larger than planned acid trip and couldn’t unsee roads as arteries. Nice to see I’m not crazy and smarter people than I have formalised this to some degree :)
"Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a
decline in the global population."
This seems to weaken the entire paper. The only regions poised for continuing population growth into the second half of this century are in sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Afghanistan [1].
Is the premise here that unlimited immigration into other regions from sub-Saharan Africa will sustain their economies (and other ways of life?) as the local populations decline? I'm extremely skeptical of that.
> "Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies
This does appear to be an admission that labor shortages occur due to lack of workers. The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist.
The paper is fundamentally flawed in numerous technical ways also. The most overt is that they are looking at the current state of countries with low fertility rates. The consequences of low fertility lag the onset of low fertility by many decades, but are largely inescapable. Taken to an extreme, if everybody in a country just stopped having children, that country would look, from an economic point of view, excellent for at least a couple of decades.
For a real example, South Korea has a fertility rate of ~0.7 while Japan has a fertility rate of ~1.4. Yet South Korea seems to be doing okayish, while Japan has clearly entered into decline. The reason is because South Korea had a 3+ fertility rate all the way up to 1976, whereas Japan hasn't had a 3+ fertility rate since 1952. Give South Korea a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia. For that matter give Japan a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia - their decline is still just beginning, as they only hit the current lows in the 90s.
> if everybody in a country just stopped having children, that country would look, from an economic point of view, excellent for at least a couple of decades.
There's even a name for this: the demographic dividend. It's the demographic capital gains tax that comes afterwards that bites hard.
It is a major flaw. Birth rate is falling basically everywhere and below replacement (~2.1) even in places people think of as booming in recent history -- India is at 1.98, South America somewhere around 1.8. It's really just portions of Africa that still have TFR above 2.1 and the rates there are declining over time, too. Immigranting your way of a demographic collapse only works if there are lots of births happening somewhere else.
> Roughly speaking, the bottom 70% of the population receives net payments (and services) from the government over their lifetime, while the 70%-90% percentile receives approximately zero net payments, the top 10% pays it all.
Well, maybe if there was more equal income distribution, less overall penalization to those who do not have as many assets, and so on, then it would be more distributed?
I mean, that is basically what is happening anyway, but you have a nation distributing that wealth through social programs, instead of capitalists sharing their take willingly with those who helped them earn it.
Yip, I'm a advocate for capitalism but there's definitely a bug with interest/investments in that earning money makes it even easier to earn money, even if you do absolutely nothing with your life. Just dump everything in a diversified portfolio and you become an infinite money printer when you reach the point of having enough money that all your expanses are small relative to your capital gains.
This issue radically distorts the concept of who is contributing to society and who is living off the contributions of others.
OTOH that same unequal distribution allows investment and patronage in areas that would otherwise go unfunded, ... some of which goes on to create revolutionary technologies that benefit everyone.
I think the topic of an unequal distribution is somewhat different than somebody earning tremendous amounts of money in exchange for doing literally nothing. It can lead to it of course, but I think that even if we put a million people, from birth, on an island with absolutely identical initial conditions - give the islanders a few generations, and there would be people doing dramatically better than others. I don't really see a problem with this.
The point I was making is that tax receipts don't really tell you much of anything about who's contributing to society. For instance farmers tend to be living close to broke and are typical recipients of various assistance programs. By contrast the Waltons have paid more in tax than most people will earn in their lifetime, many times over. Nonetheless, the world wouldn't even notice if the Waltons, and all like them, suddenly disappeared - whereas there'd be a catastrophic effect were the same to happen to even a tiny fraction of farmers.
In a way the current system is sort of like a privatized deflationary system. Your money becomes worth more over time, but only if you're wealthy enough to buy this privilege. For everybody else, inflation makes their money, and frequently their earnings, only decrease over time. And I think this is highly undesirable, even for somebody 100% okay with inequality.
I can't speak to places outside of the Western Anglosphere, because I simply don't have any information about them—but within it, it's abundantly clear (and there have been some recent studies bearing this out) that a major cause of reduced birth rates is lack of economic opportunity among the non-capital-owning classes.
I 100% guarantee you that if we implemented a full UBI today—one that would pay something close to the median individual income, and even if it were only for adults (and thus you got no "bonus" for having extra kids)—once the initial chaos settled down, you'd see those birth rates go up quite a bit. So many people are waiting to have kids until they're financially stable enough...and then they never become so.
I know that one of the big reasons my wife and I didn't have kids in our 20s was because we were concerned about our financial stability (and frankly, we were better off than most of the people that age today—by quite a ways, since we were homeowners).
Having a Scandinavian perspective on this, where birthrates also have fallen a lot recently, I don't think financial stability is the only factor. In my experience ppl here don't wait with having kids so long due to lack of money. With the social safety net we have here, free healthcare and education, paid parental leave etc, you are fine as long as you have a decent job. The reason that ppl wait until they are 35+ to get kids is rather that they want to do other shit first and just stay "young" longer and don't want the responsibility. Having kids is just not that important for ppl so they wait until they are kind of bored of other things and then they are often suddenly too old, or fail to find a good partner, or just don't want the responsibility.
They have actually turned their low birth rates around after a period of low rates. They are a sign that this trend of declining birth rates is not eternal and can be reversed.
The truth is that woman, given a informed choice without societal or religious pressure - would rather not have children. So artificial wombs and AI for raising it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb
Is this a good solution? No. But its a foreseeable feasible one that does not involve slavery. Which, lets not kid ourselves, the migration approach is also. Just outsourced slavery.
Of course, societal status and contract-control functions that were allocating resources and value to woman would have to be reevaluated - as what remains is a faction of the population unwilling to contribute anything but terrorist movements trying to take over because that urge for societal control and fear of non-power is to strong.
No criticism of you, nor do I want to put words in your mouth, but there seems to be a generalisation to 'all woman' in this argument, and from that an unstated assumption that the only way for humanity to preserve itself is something like artificial wombs/coercion etc. Surely another possible scenario is that the people that aren't interested in having children (or the conditions that make people not want to have children) will 'go away' as the population declines, and we will reach a new stable population level? Who can say which one of these is more likely?
> [P]eople that aren't interested in having children will 'go away' as the population declines, and we will reach a new stable population level?
I think this is exactly what we're seeing. This is evolution as a punctuated equilibrium. Nature's last trick "sex feels good (but also leads to babies)" is breaking down in effectiveness on people. Instead, it will be some innate desire to have children that will carry some subpopulation forward. Given the extremely strong selection pressure on (it affects the one life event most determinative of "evolutionary success") this could happen really quickly.
That opens just the next can of worm- with self-selecting for non-rationality in a population. Just letting the thing run its course is basically a eugenics program against rational people. Its basically the enlightenment weeding itself out, which i would find sad, liking the civilization i reside in.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true — people have fewer kids than they desire. Addressing that gap would get us to replacement rate. And obviously, the current rate is significantly non-zero.
It also means some places on earth have to be kept in poverty or even wars. That's the biggest driver moving people out from their homeland. People who live good, peaceful lives are mostly staying where their are.
It might be a valid strategy and a very likely future, but I hope all the "we will just let immigrants in so don't worry about birth rates" people think about the implications here.
If all this sounds unsustainable, it's because it is.
We're essentially legitimizing a pyramid scheme here. Economics and policy are all centered around extraction and share holder value. I've never seen any attention paid to making an industry stable or resilient.
Nearly every issue we face day-to-day is either due to companies holding massive control over our society, or companies degrading services we rely on because profit is no longer increasing.
We're not allowed a stable, peaceful life in a stable climate because someone else needs to get one over on someone else.
We could provide for everyone but we have decided making immaterial numbers go up is #1 priority.
When I ask why can't we have companies that exist in a steady state, the answer is another company will take advantage if the first company doesn't first. Why do we live like this? Is this system truly responsible for our technology and comfort? or is the comfort a side-product that can be produced by a number of other systems?
We're being played for fools. We all know it, but we can't imagine an alternative because they've got us all by the balls controlling our health care and housing.
Yeah, the open borders folks like to paint a rosy picture of, "If we let a bunch of people come here and work cheap, it'll make things better back in their homelands too as they take their training and wages back sometimes." But if that's true, pretty soon they won't have any reason to come here and work cheap, and then the reason the bosses wanted them in the first place is gone.
I don't think they really expect that to happen (and we can observe that it hasn't); it's just a sales pitch.
i don't mean to sound pithy, but some "open borders folks" just fundamentally disagree with the concept of borders (and usually, by extension, the monopoly of violence employed at those borders), regardless of economics.
That does sound like bad news for exploiters, but it sounds like a good thing for people who actually want people to be better off. If open borders means people come, work for cheap, improve their homelands, and eventually stop coming, that sounds like a win-win to me. Are you sure some of the open borders folks aren't thinking like that?
If rich countries' sustanibility depends on poor countries staying poor, it creates a huge incentive for the rich countries to destablize the poor countries and keep them poor.
Just like the US once destablized its southern neighbors to keep them exporting cheap fruits, if the only thing that keeps the US's pension system from exploding is cheap workers from the neighbors, it'd want them to keep exporting cheap labor.
Of course one might argue rich countries will do that anyway so it's not a concern. It's just icing on a poisoned cake.
As total fertility rate continues to rapidly decline due to educated, empowered women having less kids or no kids, wages will rise globally due to reduced labor supply as prime working labor force cohort compresses. To get to that point, domestic economies with surplus labor need to be stoked with investment (Africa and India) to maximize economic potential until the labor supply constraint is reached.
Lots of non-Ukranian Europeans still want to move to the US for example, because there's an idea that in skilled jobs you can make more money in the US.
Likewise, India isn't "kept" in poverty nor is the country at war, but the opportunity for economic prosperity elsewhere is a strong driver for migration. And when India surpasses the US or Europe in economic prospects, the trend will reverse and enterprising people will flock to e.g. Hyderabad and New Delhi.
Economic prosperity, until we do away with capitalism, probably won't ever be homogeneous. Where there's a potential across a circuit the electrons will flow.
So the assumption is that some populations will always reproduce in sufficient numbers and immigrate, and this just goes on forever and everything’s fine? Those other populations never age and decline?
Another is that immigrants into these countries can and will just plug right into the local economy and be adequate substitutes for the economic effects of the local population decline.
There's everything about a country unrelated to economics that isn't even addressed too that will likely have ... big implications for these countries receiving the mass immigration too. These will likely also affect the economy.
That sums up the ideology: That some ethnicities should continuously replace other ethnicities until the latter group has been genetically exterminated.
Even if global population continued to increase forever, that doesn't mean a particular nation would be able to get those immigrants to come fix their demographic woes. It doesn't matter how easy Moldova makes it for people to immigrate, who is choosing to go there over other destinations just as in need of fresh blood? Countries like the US and western Europe maybe can solve their demographic problems with immigration for the next few decades, that doesn't mean that its a generally viable strategy or that it will keep working in a future world when these nations are well past their prime.
Below is the entire paragraph. The first part of the paragraph summarized their research that declining populations do not decline in wealth or productivity; instead their Figure 8 shows increases in Wealth, Research & Development, Human Capital etc. The second part of the paragraph is obtuse and ambiguous wording where they advocate for increased immigration and as far as I could tell had no basis on their actual research.
Our results provide a strong evidence-based counter to the politically motivated claim that declining/slow-growing and ageing populations in any way compromise national economic performance, income distribution, productivity, political stability, well-being, or health of its citizens. In fact, such populations generally have the highest socio-economic performance indicators in the world. This result supports the mounting evidence that smaller populations are in fact beneficial to most of society37, in sharp contrast to the unsubstantiated political rhetoric of ‘baby busts’ and an ensuing economic Armageddon1-5. This is because investing in the health, training, and education of workers — especially older, more experienced workers — increases human capital, making the workforce more productive29. Neither is there a basis for an expected penury of working-age people for countries experiencing low population growth or even decline. Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand70. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population30,37,71-73.
> they occur instead because of inadequate immigration
How did they make that assertion?
In the body of the paper immigration policies were not included as a variable in the data, nor were they a part of the statistical analyses. I couldn't find anything regarding labor movement at all. It feels weird that it was just thrown there in the end.
It is relative, no? If a nation's population decline isn't as high as another, maybe because of immigration, then they have more human resources? Also, humans tend to migrate?
Perhaps you've misread the quote? It and your counter affirm each other.
The quote suggests that there won't be labor shortages in markets that have adequate and adaptive immigration policies, because migration into a country with an aging population is how countries today maintain their labor pools.
That the global population will continue to grow into 2100 supports their assertion that all countries should be more immigration friendly so as to reap the bi-directional benefit of available labor moving into geographies that need workers.
However, if there is one thing we're not lacking, it's crisis zones, where people are desperate to move away from if given half a chance. Given both the current rate of climate change and the current political climate, this is bound to increase, even after the global population peak.
So I suspect that a lack of migrants willing to resettle to unaffected/less affected regions will not be a problem for the next few decades.
It's also extremely exploitative, the premise is actually that we will offload the burden of raising next generations and then effectively steal those that we need to prop up what would naturally be hollowing societies.
Yes, if the process works in the way it's being sold to us, it skims off their smartest, most talented and ambitious people--the people they most need to improve conditions in their own nations.
No one is stealing anything, millions willingly immigrate, they get to live better lives (according to their desires) and the home country gets back increased trade, transfer of capital, tourism, and many other things.
We've banned this account for posting flamebait and ignoring our requests to stop.
Your comment may have been making a good point about the paper, but you can't drop an "also very rapey" in there. That's like tossing a molotov cocktail on your way home from the grocery store. Groceries are fine; firebombs are not.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Social media seems to be moving to images and now even (ultra) short-form video content. Does a hypothetic 40% increase in social media engagement offset a 40% decline in reading in any meaningful way?
There is the fundamental question of how much that number matters (if someone spends more time fly fishing than reading fanfics, should it be "fixed" ?).
But even setting that aside, while YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are the mainstream, Threads and Bluesky came up as new platforms and are text first. They could have let the Twitter paradigm die but chose to heavily invest in that market instead, and it seems to be working, so at least the idea still has legs ?
Interestingly, with current LLM limitations I'd assume text in - text out usage will keep being the focus for a while as well.
Seems so. Or more to the point of how data collected in the UK might reflect this trend (from the article you link): "According to a 2005 BBC report on Pakistani marriage in the United Kingdom, 55% of British Pakistanis marry a first cousin."
AFAIK this is far more common in muslims but not in hindus, jains etc. While growing up I had heard/read that as per the Vedas you can not marry someone with whom you have a common ancestor within 7 generations. [My scientifically minded atheist parents agreed with the idea.] Of course, in practice this isn't always followed but in any arranged marriage such proscriptions would presumably be checked.
The crazy thing is India has ample population to avoid this problem. It's not some isolated tribe or small island community. The reasons have to be social/political.
Disingenuous. Other groups can and do create different cultures that are more tolerant of asking for help, clarification and feedback.