Tech

John Burn-Murdoch writes for Financial Times about the single unifying theory around the decline in fertility.

The number of births fell first and fastest in the areas that received high-speed mobile connectivity earliest. The authors argue that smartphones have transformed how young people spend time with one another, sharply reducing in-person socialising and leading to the collapse in their fertility.

The reason for population decline is hiding in your pocket.

This isn’t at all suprising to me. Marital experience has taught me that it’s hard for a spouse to be as interesting an endless supply of short-form videos.

With the announcement on the A New Social blog that Bridgy Fed — which has been helpful in syndicating my Fediverse posts from Ghost to Bluesky — was bringing longform to the Atmosphere, I found myself wanting to play with some of the current blogging tools running on AT Proto.¹ Unfortunately, even with the aid of a super-smart LLM, I couldn’t get the standard.site integration working. I was either getting errors that I was missing the domain parameter when using my ActivityPub account or a 404 when I was using my domain account. Damned if you do…

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If you live in a first-world country with a sizable knowledge work sector, you might find it hard to escape the subject of AI. That’s probably an understatement. We are saturated with talk of artificial intelligence and, in particular, large language models. The economist Edgar R. Fiedler is quoted as saying, “He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass,” but that hasn’t stopped the proliferation of prognostication on the subject of AI.

Matt Shumar posts his take as an insider working with AI on the Xitter site. He issues a clarion call to those who may not be as close as he is to what is happening in the industry.

I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.

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Okay, I’ll admit it: I love the ambitiousness of 37Signals rolling their own Arch-based Linux distro (called Omarchy) and the obvious enthusiasm CTO David Heinemeier Hansson has for the project. The minimalist distro has now reached what they are calling 2.0 and DHH made another demo video of himself geeking out over the capabilities.

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