How far in advance is it worth looking at any macro economic trends?
I think you can automatically discount any article looking 10 years or more out, they have neither the incentive nor the talent to make any reasonable prediction.
On top of that, the timeless aspects of the world and human nature aren't news worthy - so anything remotely predictable doesn't get said.
this isnt a macro-economic trend, this is demographics which are extremely easy to predict more than 10 years into the future considering we know how many people are alive today and what age they are
You don't think that variables like climate change, global thermonuclear war, the development of artificial wombs, pharmacutical life extension, stem cell organs etc... are enough monkey wrenches to make predictions like they unreliable?
What independent variables are they accounting for? Cultures and attitudes change, birth rates change, legal frameworks change, immigration and emigration trends change, EVERY variable that feeds into the base value of "population count" over time also changes dramatically over time.
"Consider another figure that should haunt leaders: 1.7. That is the number of children that, on average, Chinese women of child-bearing age call ideal. China’s ideal is one of the world’s lowest, far below the number given in Japan or South Korea. Chinese women born after 1995 want the fewest of all: 48.3% of them told the Chinese General Social Survey of 2021 that they desire one or no children. There is growing evidence that such attitudes are powerfully shaped by how people, and those around them, experienced the one-child policy."
Seems fairly straightforward to predict based on a total fertility rate of 1-1.05 (2022-current) and forwarding looking social/cultural cues. TFR won't get to 0, but based on all available evidence across the world, it isn't going back up either.
> TFR won't get to 0, but based on all available evidence across the world, it isn't going back up either.
It is going back up, it's just very unclear on which timescale. Will it go back to the replacement rate in 20, 50, 100, 1000 years?
Cultures/genes which favor procreation will ... procreate, and become more and more represented. It's possible that in a 1000 years, most of the world will be from orthodox jews / amish / conservative muslims etc. at which point the TFR will be back up.
And this is when we leave it to the nature. China as an autoritarian state has a lot of tools at their disposal. They can make motherhood more desirable.
My take is if women can control how many children to have fertility drops down to replacement rate. If women have to give up autonomy when they have children they'll go lower than that. That's China, Japan, and Korea.
> That’s for the world population on relatively short time frames (20 to 30 years in the future)
That's one generation. Population models are generally pretty good for two, so out to ~2075 from today. World models are easier because you don't have to model immigration.
You can certainly ask a model what happens if we keep present rates what will the future look like? Are you suggesting that this sort of question is not relevant?
There's nothing outrageous about predicting that a country with a very low fertility rate will experience population decline over time. The point of these predictions is to consider the consequences of maintaining current policies.
I mean that it appears that octopus “cognition” — dangerously a word we control and can easily twist to only apply to us — is almost necessarily more complex than human cognition, if for no other reason than they seem to have distributed their “thinking” — another dangerously solipsistic word — into their arms and out into their body, well away from merely their brains.
This looks awesome - might I suggest splitting the headlines on the homepage into a punchy title and subtitle? The wordiness of them makes it difficult for me to parse them for the topic quickly
Thanks! We got a couple different formats available, check out the top stories format which is close to what you suggest. Would love to hear your thoughts on it! We’re considering making that the default.
It's not perfect, but it's tolerable, and not unlike some real-world calls where there's a slight delay. There are some "Hmm ..." and "well ..." scripted in as well to make it feels natural if there is a long response.
I'm currently working on an interface for google calendar @ https://calendarcompanion.io
My next feature is integrating the functionality with telegram, it's hard to predict the value of these features in the moment - but I do think this could be an extremely interesting "iPhone" moment for technology.
Just like how the iPhone reduced everything to a single button press, we can now squeeze the functionality of some pretty complicated apps into natural language through text - and as the response time of LLM's improves it will become a short conversation for things that used to dazzle new users! Exciting times!
As for the stack, I have Supabase and Typescript on the frontend, python on the backend and k3's as a cluster for my apps (can recommend this if you want to get devops-y on a budget). Next time, I'll just go pure Typescript since python really doesn't add much working this far away from the base models.
