I've been hearing "they'll be better in a few months/years" for a few years now.

But hasn’t the ecosystem as a whole been getting better? Maybe or maybe not on the models specifically, but ChatGPT came out and it could do some simple coding stuff. Then came Claude which could do some more coding stuff. Then Cursor and Cline, then reasoning models, then Claude Code, then MCPs, then agents, then…

If we’re simply measuring model benchmarks, I don’t know if they’re much better than a few years ago… but if we’re looking at how applicable the tools are, I would say we’re leaps and bounds beyond where we were.

I find it fascinating that your reaction to that situation is to double down while my reaction would be to kill it with fire.

You can always just slow down for 30 seconds if you're not sure.

Collapse-hits... hadn't thought about those in years. Brought back some trauma.

For people who have reasonable browsers (i.e. you can install extensions) you can already live in this world. For example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

Yeah, the only way I would ever do DNA sequencing is anonymously...

Because of public family trees potentially linking a genome to a family, no dna is fully anonymous these days.

The DNA itself is not "anonymous", but I would do it without giving my real name, address, etc. They could know who the DNA is related to, but not gain more information than that.

Even better would be to swap identity with someone else who wants to get sequenced...

They would be able to pinpoint your identity (e.g. "this person is the son of both X and Y, and we know who X and Y are").

And what would that gain them? "X and Y had a son"?

They know who X and Y are, and also know the identity of their son (you), so that gains them your unique DNA sequence, identified as yours specifically.

Yeah, I think you're missing the whole point of the "anonymously" part. :-)

How do you plan to do it anonymously, considering what you now know?:

1. There are already multiple database containing both your parents, you, and a linkage between you and them indicating parentage. So, prior knowledge: Alice and Bob are parents of Charlie.

2. If Charlie's parents have taken a DNA test, there already exists a database linking their DNA to their name. So, prior knowledge: Alice's DNA belongs to Alice, Bob's DNA belongs to Bob.

3. If Charlie takes a DNA test totally anonymously and perfectly untraceably, it will still show up as, child of Alice and Bob's DNA. So, knowledge now includes: Charlie's (anonymous) DNA is the son of Alice and Bob's DNA

4. From these pieces of information, it is trivial to de-anonymize Charlie's DNA, linking it to Charlie's identity: the only person it could belong to is the son of Alice and Bob, and the son of Alice and Bob is already known from point 1.

Ah, I see what you're saying!

I think in my case I'm just not that concerned by the hypothetical because my parents haven't done sequencing/genetic screening and also aren't likely to. I guess the main question is how far out in my family tree I have to think about that. (Also has implications for my descendants, I suppose...)

I'd recommend Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

I feel the Wikipedia article is pretty clear. It refers to a repeated pattern of changes in births, deaths, technological change, and industrialization. The pattern can be seen in many countries, with various timing-offsets and rates.

It has nothing to do with any particular ethnicity. Insofar as "immigration" comes into play, it refers to economic demand for labor as the population-bump people exit the labor pool.

I'm trying to figure out what changes the OP claimed are being driven by this. Birth-rate-over-time changes happen everywhere and have throughout history, but apparently this is now driving major change?

I initially read the top-of-thread HN comment as:

1. Stross is trying to tie many events to a change from fossil fuels to solar power, but stronger drivers lie elsewhere.

2. It's better-explained by population dynamics, involving medical technology, mortality and longevity, contraceptives, the shifting balance of workers to retirees, etc.

3. [Charitable-reading effort increases here] These trends involved are old and multi-generational, arguably going back to the industrial revolution. As a casual way to show a very-long-ago datapoint, there are arguments/research about a secularizing France's odd population slump back in the 1700s, which predates the widespread use of fossil fuels.

> Birth-rate-over-time changes happen everywhere and have throughout history

If you look at a world population chart (logarithmic scale, naturally) [0] it becomes clear something in the last few hundred years caused a deviation from the old trend.

Stross might argue the trigger was fossil-fuels, others would argue the trigger was a change in human-capital from medicine/nutrition, perhaps a third group would argue both are inextricably intertwined.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_gro...

I think he means declining birth rates? They were low during the French Third Republic and didn’t recover until WW2 iirc

Here's an actual article, which you can find by following the DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp6699 -- unfortunately not open access, so it's not feasible for me to check if anything in the HN link is actually true, or just LLM guesses.

Flagged -- image and text produced by generative AI. Not a real article.

Troubling. Dozens of HN readers upvoted this. Does this mean people are blindly upvoting "sciencey"-sounding stuff, or did some of them actually read it and were fooled by the AI-generated content?

If HN can be fooled by it, and genAI is in its infancy, it's going to get real bad in the future.

Indeed. See the tags at the end of the page.

The Google Doc was a better and easier read than the LLM output. If you don't have the time, unpolished stuff in your own voice is just fine.

(The LLM output was more or less unreadable for me, but your original was very easy to follow and was to-the-point.)