> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
I doubt most people wouldn't even think that this is a thing they can wish for or that this is even within realm of possibility.
It has to be explicitly named as an option - as, I'm afraid, people have forgotten that you can have "nice things".
Also I feel rather uncomfortable every time somebody purports to be representitive of or know that "most people" want.
> I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases.
It emphasizes neither!
What you've described is a mass grave.
Quite literally so. If you killed all living humans (8.3billion), the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them all in one place isn't quite large indeed!
Plus, humans on earth are affected by gravity, so any arrangement of them cubic squares instead of square miles is highly unintuitive, unusual and unnatural to begin with.
This doesn't say anything about habitable or fertile farmable area (measured in km^2, not in km^3) of the planet, or the number of people (that you've conveniently reduced by taking a square root of - twice! by packing them into a tightly packed cube)
For example, if you took 8 billion people and made them hold hands with each other tightly packed (0.5m per person) it would wrap the circumference of earth 100 times.
Now this actually says something about size of the earth!
If you divy up the land surface of earth by population, you get a rather small parcel of land, something to tune of 140m x 140m (this includes deserts and other mostly uninhabitable lands!)
Arable land would be a much smaller parcel of land still!
If you measure human land use in terms of arable land and living space per person, instead of mass-grave metrics the planet Earth is pretty much squarely over-populated and is very much stretching of what is sustainable.
I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd. That's a land the length of about 1.5 football fields, in both directions, for each and every person. So for a small family of 4 people, that'd be nearly 3 football fields of space, in all directions, just for themselves. And there's enough space on Earth for literally everybody to have this, including newborn babies as they are part of the population we're counting.
Now factor in larger families and the fact that some people voluntarily will want to live in close quarters (even given a free choice of all options), and you get many football fields of space, again in all directions, for every single person. This is just absolutely massive. And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.
And, as mentioned already, arable lands have nothing to do with population distribution. As you pack people into smaller quarters, you use up just as much arable land, if not more (due to minimizing decentralization possibilities), than you do with wider distribution.
> I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd.
I actually went into google maps/satellite of some very familiar places to me, and drew out a 140m x 140m meter squares just to get a feel how much it is. It's very much a small plot of land.
I rounded up, the actual plot of land given 8.3bil pop is closer to 134m x 134m.
Mind you, 134m x 134m per person IF you include all land area (so deserts, permafrost, high mountains and various unlivable areas), so in practice, it would be significantly less, so 95m squared give or take depending on what you consider "livable".
Of these 134m x 134m arable/fertile land would be only like 10% if I recall correctly.
And arable/fertile land is - ultimately - the bottle neck.
This does not in any shape or form emphasize "how few of people there are on Earth". Quite the opposite actually.
And every new person just makes that small parcel of land ever smaller.
> And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.
And what happens to be the population density of Sahara Desert?
Plus, do you live or want to live in a desert yourself? No? Well then...
Nobody wants to live in "close quarters" in insanely polluted, noisy overpopulated shitholes like Dhaka, Mumbai or Karachi or deserts. Just so you know... people there never had a choice and were just spawned there.
Planet is overpopulated, the overpopulation is simply not evenly distributed. Mind you, as recently as 1950s your plot of land would be 3x larger, when pop of planet was "mere" 2.5bil.
Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent of it's oil reserves to make miracles happen in the middle of the desert.
At current oil consumption rates in the world, the total world oil reserves will last mere 47 years.
Then either some "magical transformation" will happen, or lots of people will end up poured in that square death cube of yours.
And only the fraction of people left alive in Saudi Arabia will go back to riding cammels instead of their sports cars and jeeps.
Betting that a "magical transformation" will happen in 47years is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Unfortunately people aren't really wired for long term planning and reason backwards from the conclusions in their mind as starting point instead.
Rather than derive conclusions from the observable, quantifiable and measurable - even if those conclusions end up being less than pretty.
I don't think you're discussing this in good faith. 134m^2 is well over 4 acres of land for a single person! That's larger than a typical small suburban subdivision for a single person. A minimal immediate family size for a sustainable society is 4 people. That's 16+ acres for every single family, which is just massive. And the overwhelming majority of the Earth's land is perfectly acceptable for habitation. I suspect you think the opposite of arable is inhospitable. It is not. Arable is a very specific definition of land, which land can be turned into through irrigation and other basic technologies. It's not a sort of fixed quality metric.
I'm not really following what point you're trying to make with the example cities. People move to urban areas for economic opportunities. It's thanks to the internet that deurbanization is becoming a more viable reality for more people, vaguely analogous to how vehicles enabled it at a different time in the past. Saudi Arabia existed before oil, so to speak, and will exist afterwards. Part of the reason you find them invested in basically everything stateside, to the chagrin of many, is because they're working to create a more sustainable economy. The nice thing about countries under defacto dictatorship type rules is the ability to carry out longer-term plans, even if they may sometimes be misguided. [1]
> I don't think you're discussing this in good faith. 134m^2 is well over 4 acres of land for a single person!
134m is a distance you can walk in a minute and a half. And you're already in somebody elses land.
The only way you can present this as some sort of large plot of land is if you take some already overpopulated suburban area as a reference point where houses are lined up like boxes right next to another. And that's your only point of reference and you can't even fathom anything else.
Subtracting the uninhabitable land from it, you basically get less than a mere hectare.
Accusing others of acting in bad faith is game everyone can play.
And it's very easy to do so since you're arguing how easily deserts, oceans or permafrost are habitable "if you really want to" (its just basic technology!) - when in truth it's achieved by pissing away one-time generational oil money to make it rain in the middle of the desert - no less.
Party which will most likely wrap up with mass starvation (globally) when the pumps run dry (47 more years of this! give or take!)
No sane person arguing in good faith would make arguments like this:
"Well, planet isn't overpopulated, there's still a lot of room in the desert! oh, you can inhabit the oceans and permafrsot too! You could live on top of the Himalayas (you don't, but you could!) Oh, the sky is the limit! Oh, yes!"
You aren't actually interested in truth, you're simply really, really want to and are programmed to multiply, and are working backwards (rationalizing) how actually planet isn't at all overpopulated or resource constrained, etc. That's what's actually happening. It's textbook.
Your ever-widening definition of "uninhabitable" includes vast areas of the world that are already habitated by millions, if not billions, of people. That is arguing in bad faith. And you're trying to argue that having more than a football field squared, for every person to live in - all by their selves, is a 'small parcel.' That is arguing in bad faith. And now you're adding child-like strawmen on top, which is once again - arguing in bad faith.
And I still have no idea why you think oil running out has any role in your argument at all. I completely agree it'll run out eventually, possibly within our lifetimes. It's unlikely to lead to anything particularly catastrophic as once reserves do start declining (keep in mind proven reserves have been increasing faster than production for decades), the price of oil will steadily rise, and it'll create some solid economic incentives to comfortably transition to other energy sources.
It constitutes something to the tune of 9% of Earths land mass.
And it's already inhabited by millions if not billions of people? Really? Is Sahara-Desert habitable also?
Not the tiny parcels next to an Oasis, not people that live next to Nile.
But actual-effin-desert habitable? And billions live there - right chock in the middle of desert?
Interesting, very interesting indeed!
> And I still have no idea why you think oil running out has any role in your argument at all.
Oddly enough, your argument that earth isn't overpopulated, because there's still "a lot of
room left in the desert, look at Saudis, UAE, Quatar!" hinges on Oil!
Your proof that deserts are habitable is basically - taking Saudis, UAE, Qatar - as an example.
Which is true, if you have infinite-money-hack, you abso-effin-lutely can man make it rain
in the middle of desert (or middle of the ocean on a megayacht), ACs, green-patios, lambos, pools, artificial islands, giga-turbo-mega-towers and the most opulent displays of wealth!
Except it's not infinite money hack at all. It's very much 47years of partying left type of finite.
> And now you're adding child-like strawmen on top, which is once again - arguing in bad faith.
Dude, your whole opening statement was how few people on earth there are or how large the earth is by comparing it to a mass grave.
Your whole argumentation is childish-wishfull thinking or an indoctrinated adult who just isn't very bright, saying you're arguing in bad faith would be putting it very kindly.
That being said, this conversation is obviously over.
"Yet more than one billion people, one-sixth of the Earth's population, live in desert regions." [1] Add in the extreme drylands and you're up to more than 2 billion. This was just as true prior to oil, and will be just as true afterwards.
You've yet to manage to compose anything like an argument and are left trying to reduce multiple football fields of space for every person on this planet down to something that might be considered small. But the reality is you can't, because it's fundamentally false. If we started this discussion without the context of what has already transpired and I asked you what you thought a 'small' lot of land would be for each person, it's obviously not going to be 4 acres, nor anywhere even remotely close to that size.
So all you're left with is bad faith arguments, child like ad hominem, strawmen, and essentially an ongoing displays of argumentative fallacies, which is what people resort to when they have an argument they want to make, but are unable to do so on a factual or logical basis.
What do you think American Empire is all about if not controlling the oil rich countries in middle east, as well as extremely oil rich countries like Venezuela?
The only failing here is that America has decaying, hallowed out industrial base where it can't just cheaply mass produce and replenish hi-end rockets and tech to take care of business-as-usual quickly, because everything down to raw materials is just so expensive.
I mean something undeniably WILL happen as the world has roughly 47 years left at current consumption rate of oil.
Whether what's going to happen will be whatever it is you're imagining is completely different story entirely.
Needless to say, If you have a largely deindustrialized country you can't really make any sort of transition happen yourself anyway, not at the grand scale and speed necessary for this endeavour.
Does that make those 47 years irrelevant - just because they will end?
There's no contradiction there. It just makes these last-remaining fossil fuels even more valuable.
Moreover oil use hasn't ramped down, nor is it getting replaced in any substantial way. I suspect people have no slightest clue just how reliant the modern world is on fossil fuels outside of it's use in cars.
> how can anyone justify the United States of America and Israel attacking ANY country?
Every military action will have an on-paper "justification". It's kind of irrelevant frankly.
But to cut bullshit, it really isn't that complicated.
Venezuela is an extremely oil rich country. Countries in the middle-east region, including Iran are very oil rich.
And that's in large part why US (by this point firmly decaying petrostate propped by petrodollar) is constantly there "meddling" and ensuring all the oil is continuously bought using US dollars.
That is wholly sufficient to explain things.
Every other cartoonish-evil justification "Iran wants to build nukes to bomb US, etc" is largely bullshit (why, for example, Iran doesn't want to nuke.... say Germany or France? hmmm.....)
You're presuming that if they had a choice, they wouldn't accept it.
The reality is that chinese goverment is - overall - delivering results.
People will accept things that bring good outcomes.
There's also upsides from the surveilence and the way things are done in China which makes it way more resilient from outside influence and disruptive bad actors.
Now I don't want the same things in my country, but it suits China to some extent.
For quite a while i was thinking how we're in the phase one: mountains of unmaintainable garbage code being generated... and once the shit hits the fan, some maintainability ceiling gets reached - "the real programmers" will be summoned to clean up and deal with this shit.
Now I've come to realize the error in my ways, this is probably not going to happen.
What will happen is instead is that the ones doing the "shuffling of shit" is just going to also be agents themselves. Prompted by a more senior slop-grammer specialized in orchestrating "shuffling of shit".
This task was famously incredibly difficult back when we had people producing unmaintainable mountains of millions of lines of code, to the point where shipping anything sizable in a working state on time without last minute scope reductions is nearly unheard of.
I can't imagine using AI to add another one to two zeroes to the lines of code counter would help reach the goal post.
Testing to ensure the product works as expected is more than half of the product development labor if you want a quality product. This includes time spends on things like the mandatory "anti-harassment" training any competent HR is forcing you to once in a while even though not related to product delivery (or so I hope - some should be fired for the problems you are causing by not living that training)
LLMs can write a lot of code. they can even write a comprehensive test suite for that code. However they can't tell you if it doesn't work because of some interaction with something else you didn't think about. They can't tell you that all race conditions are really fixed (despite being somewhat good at tracking them down when known). They can't tell you that the program doesn't work because it doesn't do something critical that nobody thought to write into the requirements until you noticed it was missing.
> once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!
The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
You acknowledge the stats about mental health and loneliness and how prevalent that is, and yet you will roll a dice on (other persons behalf) with glee - with high odds of subjecting your child to it.
Natural selection truly is a sight to behold, where peoples brains get disabled and they lose their ability to think when it comes to procreation, because those that do think get selected out of the gene pool.
On the one hand, I like blunt descriptions like yours - the reasons why loving a romantic partner, sex, and caring for children feels good is because that makes the species (or your genes more specifically) continue to exist.
The optimism that some people seem to have about their children weirds me out, too: They will probably end up being pretty normal people. Probably more or less like their parents.
But all of that being bad depends on whether you think that life is mostly suffering and should rather be avoided. It's not what I think. If you think that life is mostly good, then giving life is a good thing.
The issue is - fundamentally - whether you think life is "mostly good" isn't based on measurement.
Lets say you had a device that could accurately quantify and measure how much pain/suffering and joy/pleasure you experience.
Lets say that number comes out to 70% pain&suffering and 30% joy.
Is life mostly good?
Lets say 70% of people say that the ratio sucks, and 30% of people says it is a good thing.
After a couple of generations, the only people that exist are mainly the ones that think 70 units of pain vs 30 units of joy is "good life" and continue procreating producing offspring that are selected for the same qualitites.
Lets say environment changes, and life is 90 units of pain vs 10 units of joy. Given some time, the only people that exist think this life is a "good thing". They still feel pain mind you, but think the trade-off is worth it.
If you don't think the trade-off is worth it, you get selected out of the gene pool.
Now you can take this thought experiment to extremes, 9999 units of pain and 1 unit of joy, etc.
This life would also end up being a "good thing", because natural selection optimizes for procreation and survival, and not for "quality of life", "joy/enjoyement", etc.
70% pain and 30% joy is derived 5 workdays and 2 days of rest, as a starting point.
I'm afraid there isn't any thinking involved in any of this, it's just hard survival instincts selected by natural selection. The people that think that having children now (for whatever reasons) isn't a good idea wont exist anymore, and only people that "think" it is a good idea and end up doing it. This isn't based on objective measurement of pain/pleasure (it's almost irrelevant).
> The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
The future belongs to those who show up. I do wonder what percentage of antinatalism is simply mate/fertility suppression. The rest being "mad at God for the crime of being", of course.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way.
Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past.
People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc.
That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works.
The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse.
The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out.
Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.
i think those stats show the opposite. They had higher fertility rate when things were worse, but women mostly didnt have a choice. Now they're better but still bad, and women do have a choice - so they are choosing not to, judging by the collapsed birth rate.
Just my experience but I have never found the medical industry useful for health. I have found they mostly tinker with feedback loops to give the illusion of health.
Eating right, exercise, supplementation of the things I am missing from my diet, clean air, avoiding chronic stressful situations and people are the only things I have found to benefit me. But that's just my own anecdotal experience. (n=1)
At minimum medical industry is good for providing various measurements regarding the state of your health and environment. This can get quite pricey quite fast.
Depending on MCU, you can chain DMA transfers together, so you can have many small writes without extra CPU involvement per DMA transfer. DMA channels are a limited resource however.
There's quite a few ways to do this, you can do a DMA transfer per horizontal/vertical screen line (not enough memory for a fullscreen buffer, but usually enough memory for 2 fullscreen lines), with an interrupt which fills in the next line to be transfered, etc.
> displays are rarely more than 8 bit
Backing memory in these color TFT SPI displays is often 18bits per pixel, often transfered as RGB565 (2bytes) per pixel.
For SSD1306 its 1bit per pixel, and even the weakest MCUs usually have enough memory for a second buffer.
All this is completely ass-backwards thinking though.
The crucial question is - does the end-user/customer want to see smooth lines or prefers "hacker-man" TUI aesthetics.
I'd say you generally speaking users want normal smooth lines graph instead of hackerman aesthetics.
So preferring implementation simplicity (TUI) might be another case where substandard programmers prioritize their convenience over the end-user needs/preferences.
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I doubt most people wouldn't even think that this is a thing they can wish for or that this is even within realm of possibility.
It has to be explicitly named as an option - as, I'm afraid, people have forgotten that you can have "nice things".
Also I feel rather uncomfortable every time somebody purports to be representitive of or know that "most people" want.