I am unsure how this note proves life has been busy recently. As to the rest I'll accept that the note makes "alive" a fairly high probability.

Do we have a solid date for when GenX will be considered old and out of touch?

Veggies wasn't a euphemism?

Just think how many truth claims will be able to be validated and replicated between minds via rely instances. That may have a larger total impact on the population of earth 100+ years from now than my 6 kids.

(I say "may" my kids are terrific of course. As their father I have say that by contractual obligation.)

I feel like I should make a few disclaimers. All the big numbers like 25+ grandkids indicating "success" are just mathematical realities, not value claims. I do not equate genetic evolutionary success with personal success.

This is implicit in my claims that people need ideas that replicate in their offspring that in turn encourage them to have and educate offspring in turn. For humans it is the ideas themselves that are important to replicate. We still need the biological substrate, but the replication of ideas is still something that people without children can participate in.

Also 25 is just needed to guarantee personal lineage. For someone content to "do their part" in replicating society as a whole into the future replacement level is fine. So 5-ish grandkids.

The general point being that we don't need to return to some sort of snobbish oligarchy of big families looking down on people who can't have kids or who came to the ideas too late. We still need the meme makers!

They did, but because large families were common, that wasn't the evolutionary pressure. In all cases, then and now, evolutionary success looks like many descendants. It isn't exactly that because you may give rise to a clan of morons that is over fitting a narrow niche that will go away. Think Dodos etc. But number of far future descendants is a decent proxy.

For humans, we live long enough to aid and abet two generations so the best we can do is count grandchildren.

The evolutionary pressure of the age is whatever is keeping you from having 25+ grandchildren. In the past everyone kind of assumed children were a blessing because if you didn't have them your farm would start falling apart as you got creaky in the joints. So that wasn't the limiting factor.

It was things like disease resistance and hygiene. There have been lots of them many simultaneous. For humans a large number have less to do with physical health and more with our ability to cooperate. Learning to read and write has been big the last few hundred years. With computers it is now essential. I suspect learning to code is a partial pressure as is the ability to touch grass. But the biggest is the most obvious but also most contentious. Birth-control. We now have to come up with reasons to conceive rather than have it be a thing that just kinda happens. Most people don't have articulated reasons and well that is like having poor hygiene in crowded European cities. You just aren't going to have many surviving descendents.

Lol, that would be nice!

But funnily enough, poor societies tend to have larger families simply because the need is more obvious.

Learn the lesson or face social decline!

We are simply at an interesting time where we have the evolutionary pressure of affluence. People no longer need big families to survive the immediate future so the short-term cost-benefit analysis favors small families. But large families are still required for long term survival.

Thus the current evolution is in the ideas that can be passed down successfully over repeated generations to encourage cooperation with nature so to speak.

We are currently at around 5% of the population making an attempt to survive the evolutionary bottle-neck. While there will be many competing belief systems that result in large families, not all will replicate to their offspring. For example children tend to reject most forms of fundamentalism.

But some will replicate and the population is growing in those cohorts. I just kinda hope it is enough upward pressure to stave off the coming collapse of all the less successful ideas. The good news is that very little of it is genetic, people who want to jump on the train can find people with lots of grandchildren and study their memes.

Big families have always been great by definition, they don't need permission.

The main problem with public transportation is that it doesn't work for families. You might successfully wrangle your allotted 1.2 kids through a maze of stops and transfers without acquiring every communicable disease available, but you aren't going to do it with anything like a family necessary for a thriving society.

Yes. They advocated for electric cars because they thought they could get us to all share Segways parked outside our 200sq ft apartments.

It didn't take them long to get angry about electric cars being awesome instead. "Not like that! Stop having fun. This isn't the communal centralized transportation misery we were hoping for!"

I am not talking about base load. I am talking about peaker plants. They are more expensive to run because they aren't on continuously. Batteries are far more efficient at shaving peaks without requiring excess capacity. You do need more batteries for renewables because of their intermittent nature. But it is true that you are going to build some of that storage anyway to save money on maintaining peaker plants.

That is actually what the majority of battery installations have gone to so far.

Lol 6 isn't huge. It is baseline. For instance if every child wants to be able to use the phrase "my brothers and sisters" 6 is the minimum number where that is possible.

It is not, however, a guarantee.

Furthermore if you want to be reasonably sure that your surname will survive every generation of your family needs to have at least 5 kids. 95% likelihood.

This is equivalent to estimating the survival of your genome since you only pass half of it.

Yes I do. We are at a point where solar farm owners pay a marketing firm to go door-to-door in my neighborhood trying to convince me to pay less money for electricity simply by changing the way I am billed.

Why would they pay to get less money and increase billing complexity incurring further costs in doing so?

Because they accepted State subsidies to build it out and now have to prove utilization to the state or face penalties. It dumb on top of stupid. Doubly dumb because installing solar is actually super cheap. The main hurdles are the expense of permitting and opposition from....

... environmental groups.

Lol, my entire philosophy is based on being very very pro-life. I have 9 siblings, 6 kids, and 60 nieces and nephews.

Also, I erm, trust my calculations over yours. Not saying you should do the same. I live in my brain and you in yours. But I don't need to convince you. We have an energy rich future ahead and you'll be consuming solar energy, same as everyone else since that is what will be on the grid.

If it isn't net positive, we'll eventually run out of stored energy as you put it.

But it is untrue that you don't get more out than you put in. For solar anyway. I don't follow the wind industry as closely as I follow solar because I find it uninteresting in the long run.

I've never really been a terribly aggressive driver, but I've other mitigating factors.

1. I didn't have a kid till I was 33.

2. Didn't have a van till 35

3. It was the wife's daily driver for several years first.

4. I homeschool most of my kids so until last year I never really drove it except to the 3 miles to church on Sunday.

So by now I am old and over it before I ever had a chance to get started.

Also my wife's daily driver now does 0-60 in 4.8 seconds. If I want to drive aggressively, I take the Model Y.

Some of that is true. But they do produce many times their energy cost over their lifetime. Energy ROI is only about a year or two. If you are in a northern climate then maybe 5-6 years. But they are going to last 30.

The only real arguments are time-shifting and maintainance.

But those arguments have to be balanced against comparisons to fossil fuels and nuclear. Both also have maintenance costs that are double solar's

Then there are peak demand problems. You have to overbuild by 50-100% if you can't timeshift. You can actually save money by closing half you power plants and building batteries. This is also exactly what you need for renewables.

I hate the green propaganda as well. But you are starting to see a shift in their propaganda, not because wind and solar don't work, but because they work too well and smart engineers have noticed.

The human haters are upset that the miserable future of tiny homes and golf carts is turning into stupid fast sports cars and plentiful energy. They've started to turn against electric cars and solar. They make new propaganda about habitat destruction and pollution, but as always they just want people to die.

I am all grateful for the carbon economy but it is silly to claim wind and solar do not break-even. If that were the case they would not be being installed at an insane rate.

They are currently the cheapest to install capacity. Yes some of it is due to artificial demand via subsidies but that doesn't explain china going wild with them.

I must.

If the last century has taught us anything, its that you aren't going to be allowed to travel the galaxy without one.

It's that lovely back-to-school season + kids being sick. I honestly have no idea how real parents do this.

Wordle 1,516 4/6

⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛

🟨🟨⬛⬛⬛

🟨⬛🟨🟨🟩

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

What on earth is that?

It is more than bloat, it is lossy. It is like making wishes to a malicious genie.

Them: "I want to be happy for the rest of my life."

Genie: delivers a lethal dose of morphine.

After enough abstraction, we no longer know what we are asking the machine to do. It may be what we intended, or it may not. Most of the time it isn't exactly what we intended, but is close enough.

Close enough is great, until you switch timezones, or character encodings, or a zillion assumptions that you had no idea were implicit in the request you made.

I did not know that.

Language is magic. If you want to be a magician, learn to write.

It is just the latest promise of expressive programming that interprets developer intent. This is the ethos behind languages like Cobol, Basic, Smalltalk, and Ruby.

When it doesn't work, we package it into a framework like Rails or Zend or Flask.

We build plugin architectures that use XML or JSON so non-programmers can play too.

But the truth is, we are trying to apply logic operators to structured data with crystalized sand. You can't get sand to do what you want unless you understand what it is you want. It is possible to build tools to manage some of the complexity, but if used by people who don't understand them, you just get more complexity without getting more functionality.

👍🏻 Glad to hear it. This may prompt me to start my "tasks completed in 2025" list.

I am still confused, but that is more or less a continual state of being.

"Wanted: Crusty libertarian from rural Maine, skilled at welding and or splitting wood, to drive Korean starlets, who should probably still be with their parents, around the DC Metro area. Strong views on government a must."

No it isn't. The energy spent on mining is gone. I can't run a vacuum cleaner off a Bitcoin. Batteries store energy, Bitcoin is only a vote on how to spend energy in the future.

The disconnect is obvious every time the price of Bitcoin changes.

Thankfully I can not say that.

Yes. I was just telling my wife how different the conversation is on Nostr. Uncensored and politically incorrect, but also somehow restrained and measured while being deeper. Almost as if people aren't afraid to be themselves and also don't have to be jerks to get noticed.

Me: "Oh look a video about cars! I like cars."

Them: "Yes car videos that turn into people dying in car accidents!"

Me: scrolling away as fast as possible.

Them: "We see you paused on a video of people dying in car accidents, here are more videos of people dying you sick bastard."

Also Them: "And drones! Everyone likes drones, here are soldiers being killed by drones."

Soo you are bringing in an inscrutable algorithm that pushes horrifying videos on me?

- Gondor

I think the only money they ever got from me was whatever their iTunes cut was for a few episodes of "Jump City Seattle"

Wordle 1,511 4/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛

🟨⬛🟨⬛⬛

⬛🟨🟨⬛⬛

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

That isn't a picture of grok.

This is a normal thing to think about so it compresses well.

Same, I went with less likely, thinking surely the other has been used by now.

Wordle 1,508 4/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛

🟨⬛🟩🟨🟨

🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩