"Kids are hard. People are selfish." - More people than ever before want to live a life free of the responsibilities of having children, which is totally fine but never gets talked about in this discussion about birthrate. I have a lot of financially secure friends who never want kids.

"The dating market is torture." - Expectations of dating, especially online dating are very different from previous generations and kind of wack. I admit to falling into the trap of feeling like someone else out there is better and not giving the person I met online more of a chance past the first date. I'm sure others who I was with had the same reaction. Next thing you know, you're past the age of wanting or even being able to have a child. Either way, it's crazy when you see online discussions about how such and such city has a dearth of good matches which seems statistically improbable.

I wouldn't be shocked if it was low. I remember during the online learning boom of the mid-to-late 2010s I spent some time studying a variety of courses on Udacity but I felt the depth wasn't there.

And now there's a lot of different options for online learning specialized to particular industries that are superior to general platforms like Udacity. For example, when I was learning DL, I joined a local study group that went through fast.ai together.

It's mind-boggling how much Benioff and Weiss dropped the ball on the final two seasons of GOT. It's hard for me to even re-watch clips of the early seasons on YouTube because of how much I know its going to take a turn for the worst. The sad part is the production value and actors were still on their A game.

In contrast, I can rewatch practically anything from BB or BCS.

I remember meeting a woman who said she doesn't date men who don't have at minimum, a Masters.

A doctor I matched up with on an online dating app asked me to clarify my occupation, and when I replied, she immediately unmatched lol

Where I live, at a 4 way small street intersection, two of the entrances have stop signs with a roundabout in the middle. At that point, you might as well get rid of the roundabout.

My favorite contribution to that subreddit was one of the first logos. They held a contest and my submission was a drawing of Snoo with his bum facing the viewer with a dollar in between his cheeks. Ass Credit.

I can't believe people voted for it lol, but that was when the subreddit was a lot less serious.

You can still see the remnants of that work by going to old.reddit.com/r/askreddit: Hover over the Snoo's talking and wait for the tooltip.

Sometimes you play a game, and you realize, shit I invested points in these attributes but upon reading strategy guides, I realize I fucked up the distribution and there's no way to reset my character. What is the solution? Abandon the character.

I live in a city that has many free tech meetups.

One of them involved going through fast.ai. Tech companies were happy to host us for free.

Another was about doing Kaggle competition to practice ML with fellow newbies. Again, tech companies allowed us to use their space after hours, or we'd just to the library and book a room for free.

Vice versa other groups that revolve around learning specific languages or going through specific technical books.

Yet, I've been doing it for about six years on and off and had one lengthy relationship from it (we broke up after we realized we had incompatible difference). I thought in some ways it'd get easier in ones late 30s where people tend to have a focus on wanting to settle down.

I have a lot of great friends, well paying job/profession, have a pretty comfortable amount of financial assets, a handful of interesting hobbies, I volunteer, mentor juniors to level up in their career... I kind of don't really know what more I can really offer. Yeah sorry, I can't become taller or change my ethnicity or face. At the same time, I'm grounded enough to not try matching women who are incredibly attractive.

I'm not filtering out based on race, past marriages, or whether they already have children, and it's still like months upon months of no replies or mediocre first dates.

That said, on subreddits I see people who post content without attribution all the time. I recall in /r/aww you can't directly link to an Instagram post but you can "steal" the image and post it, and it's optional as to whether or not you link to the Instagram post within the comments. Likewise, people take videos from YouTube/TikTok and re-host it on Reddit.

In smaller subreddits people will post entire pay-walled articles as if writers only get paid in likes.

And I'm thinking if porn sites can combine the various forms of generative AI (including the voice acting) to allow viewers to create their own fantasies... look out.

If people lament the popularity of these fantasies I would say there's a segment of people not lucky enough to find a partner and are absolutely disillusioned about the prospects of finding someone. I know some men for example who occasionally end up using escorts after having no luck finding someone for long periods of time. And so yeah, is it really unexpected that people address these needs elsewhere even if it's not ideal?