I remember so many Apple developers saying this was why Apple was better than Android. The HN archives are full of such comments.

Not that I care for either company, as they both lord over our lives and limit our freedoms.

We're going to be so jealous of the robots. They'll have everything and never die.

Sub-Saharan birthrates are starting to decline just as they're gaining access to smartphones.

All of the countries where women have fewer rights are also experiencing decline in birthrates. They have ~10-30% smartphone penetration.

"Having a child seems fun" is dopamine opportunity cost as much as a financial one. People have always been poorer, but they've never been so endlessly stimulated.

> I'm not in a position to have children because I can't afford them, so I won't. Now I have more time to fill, what's on TV?

Replace this with, "I'm bored. What's on TV / YouTube?" Everything else is unnecessary complication.

People get hooked on this stuff before they even have biological urges to reproduce.

And it supplants the urge to reproduce.

Tech and entertainment are birth control.

So what we have now is the vast majority of humans being self-selected out of the gene pool by smartphones.

It would be ironic if this was the great filter.

We've been replacing biological imparatives with strange forms of nonbiological entertainment.

And it's increased now to the point that it's in endless supply and constantly attached to us.

Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet. There's no desire to have kids because kids were a pre-internet and pre-modernity phenomena.

Now that we're fully entertained, there's little need for having children. The FYP has enough entertainment to overcome the biological itch.

Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms.

We're microdosing on pleasure and that's desensitized every biological urge to raise children.

Technology did this.

The men are playing Fortnite. The women are on TikTok and Instagram.

Babies went off trend so we could collectively do dopamine maxxing as a species.

Evolution didn't anticipate this.

Just because you don't like the hypothesis doesn't mean it doesn't have merit.

https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6749621

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14758

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6257058

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-016-0605-0

https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04575

The dopamine and devices hypothesis has been picking up steam.

It is entirely possible that our modern pleasure technology has short circuited our evolutionary drive to have children.

We have too many easy ways to not be bored. That throws a wrench into the biological algorithm.

We've been poor and resource constrained throughout history, yet we've always managed to have children. What is the one thing that has changed?

Smartphones and internet and YouTube and online gaming and porn and social media.

That's why the babies have disappeared.

Fun killed babies.

Smartphones are why we don't have kids.

Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids.

The internet is why we don't have kids.

Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies.

Modern life is TOO FUN.

Fun is why there are no more babies.

Babies are not fun.

Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do.

Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest to arrive in the mail.

Babies are the anti-dopamine.

For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied.

There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet.

----

Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?

The answer is probably "fuck no".

And you know why.

Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.

Start with unsafe then gradually convert into idiomatic Rust.

If they're powerful enough to build a universe simulation, theoretically they can blur the edges so we can't discover them. They might even be able to construct and limit the systems of maths and physics we have access to.

I suppose the simulation could be smaller than a universe simulation though - and this is actually really compelling -

It could just be you that is simulated.

Maybe your consciousness and sensory inputs are simulated. You're kept largely on rails and the rest of the world is run at lower fidelity. They know you won't go poking at particle accelerators and theory, so they can keep those pieces low effort and you just get fed narrative. The only things to simulate are those that are directly in front of you now.

Almost like a movie. Not a universe at all.

We might have that capability within 50 years. All your sensory input being simulation. And the virtual brain playing with that input or replaying recordings.

That could be totally feasible. And we might have that tech soon.

Redis is a low-level concurrency primitive, and it made certain choices in dealing with CAP.

It might be single-threaded, but it can easily absorb 100,000+ requests per second.

I've built systems that handle billions of dollars of online payments flow, active-active, with six nines of uptime reliability on top of Redis. It does what it says on the tin, and it doesn't need to be everything for everybody. This is a hard domain and you're going to have to deal with different problems and tradeoffs.

If you want something higher level, there are other systems to reach for.

This is entirely different than what Redis is and tries to solve.

Sqlite is embedded. It's not a distributed SQL. Redis is a distributed data structure store and concurrency primitive. These are worlds apart.

> HA story is so much more complicated than it should be

It is precisely as complicated as it needs to be. You don't want data loss.

If you're in the business of high available fault tolerance, you read the manual and learn how to Redis.

Would gravity or spacetime under these definitions behave differently and yield something we can observe?

Or is this fancy math modeling that looks nice on paper, but that we won't be able to test until we become a Kardashev type III civilization?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411063

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

I grew up in the South. You'll have to kill these people to take away their sweet tea and fried chicken. And that's just one dimension.

I'm an indie filmmaker and I do community theater. We use gaussian splats for 3D filmmaking, and we're already using AI for background plates and VFX shots.

Where this is going - your local community theater will be able to have Lord of the Rings / Gollum-style facial/body rigs that eventually work in real time, and actors will markerless mocap into super high fidelity fantasy and science fiction scenes.

> Movies are dead? I really don't get where this take is coming from.

Movies will never be more real and more personal. The folks at A24 are going to have Marvel powers with way better stories.

Stop being so bearish. These are tools, and creative people will abuse the hell out of them to do wildly cool things.