- 4 days
Declining social and economic conditions affect birthrates more than this.
- 3 days
Its a combination of factors and the role AI plays in self care is one of them.
- 4 days
That’s hard to say, at this point. A cheap, always available and completely sycophantic AI seems like it would be hard for a lot of people to resist.
What is clear, is that contraceptives existing is responsible for almost all of the decline since historical times.
- 4 days
Well, we can agree that these AI companions are like drugs. But mentally and physically healthy people statistically tend to resist consuming them. So if these virtual soul mates are so popular, then it clearly shows existence of problems in society.
So, government basically tries to cure the symptoms of a problem rather than curing the causes.
- 4 days
People driving themselves towards reclusivity will reduce social conditions with permanence. Its a good policy.
- 4 days
The point they’re making is this is like banning being wet while the Titanic is sinking, so that you can prevent the Titanic from sinking with this new rule.
- 4 days
Well thats a bad point to try to make. This policy is small and narrow, its not a replacement for improving human conditions economically, and its not trying to be. Its more like a car with slashed tires and a stolen radio. This policy replaces the radio, which isnt the biggest problem, but its still good to fix
- HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish6 days
It’s definitely not healthy, but this isn’t going to fix the birth rate.
- 6 days
This probably won’t fix anything, but hopefully stops it from contributing to the issue further down the line
…meme
- 6 days
It’s clearly not a healthy thing to exist.
It is the worst of para social relationships, amped up by 100x. And is only going to get more exploitative.
But just on a level of building up the skills to have a relationship, it’s training kids to expect someone who always says yes, always affirms them, will never challenge them to grow…
Relationships are hard. You have to learn to love people and how to do that, and you have to learn to not be selfish, which is the opposite of what LLMs tend to encourage.
- 4 days
And is only going to get more exploitative.
Oh shit, if you came to see this as an actual loved one, adding a paywall would be legal kidnapping for ransom.
Most importantly, you have to love imperfect people. And confront that you are imperfect as well. And thats ok!
- 6 days
AI girl/boyfriends are fucking addictions latching onto people vulnerbilities.
This ban is nothing but good, but no one thing will fix child birth rates, nor the reason for the addiction in the first place, I’ll agree with that.
- Elting@piefed.socialEnglish6 days
It is funny to me that china can pretend not to be a capitalist nation while displaying every symptom of capitalism.
- 6 days
You can argue that you have capitalism if transactions are happening. Which means the word kind of looses it’s meaning because it’s so broad.
But people will often define it on how much market control the state displays.
You can then argue that China has market control on key aspects of important sectors. Which they do, but still with an approach, that they have private companies with government subsidies.
But most of all, the need for distance to the world capitalism is more a marketing thing. Unless they believe that capitalism is just a tool to achieve socialism, which also can be true.
- Elting@piefed.socialEnglish6 days
I would argue a capitalist nation is any one that allows the conversion of natural resources into private (not personal) property by law, and facilitates the exploitation of those resources through a market.
- drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish5 days
What you’re describing is dirigism at best. They have billionaires bro. They’re capitalist.
Bernie Sanders is more economically left wing than that and he doesn’t even describe himself as a socialist.
Sanders literally describes himself as a democratic socialist but sure.
- OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish6 days
And wasn’t China very recently concerned about their birthrate being too high? One Child Policy?
Now they’re already concerned about their birth rate being too low?
- 4 days
They were wrong, and they know it, but also nobody’s allowed to say that. Ditto for a bunch of other Mao policies.
- 6 days
The one-child policy was abolished in 2015, but birth rates have continued to decline after that. They currently have one of the world’s lowest fertility rates.
It’s crazy, like overpopulation, stress, and pollution mean people don’t want kids or something.
- 5 days
Well yes, but also no. I think it was only really heavily policed in the 70s and early 80s then was lifted so regional and rural could have a second child (wiki says by '84 the single child policy only impacted 35% of the population). Still goes to show by forcibly dropping birthrates how much it destroys future planning
- 4 days
Still goes to show by forcibly dropping birthrates how much it destroys future planning.
Looking at all the other countries, it may not have had an impact on future birthrates at all.
- 4 days
Yeah true regarding birthrates… but I think it probably catapulted median age
This website states that in 1960 median age was around 20 (comparable internationally), median age in 2025 was 42( international was 31)
- 4 days
Looking at all the other countries, it may not have had an impact on future birthrates at all.
Yes, and if they didn’t have the policy in the past, then today’s birth rates would be even more devastating for the demographic
Is that your take on the matter? How is wanting yo promote real human relationships between teenagers a bad thing?
- 5 days
I’d say that’s more like trying to solve mental illness by making it illegal to exploit and profit from it
6 dayshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
Erewhon: or, Over the Range (/ˈɛr.ɛ.hwɒn/, ERR-eh-hwon)[2] is a utopian novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published in 1872,[3] set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.[4]
In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness. As a result, citizens are imprisoned for offenses like physical ailments, misfortune, or ugliness while those who commit conventional crimes like fraud or theft are seen more sympathetically as exhibiting symptoms of moral afflictions and prescribed sessions with a “straightener” (essentially a psychologist) for treatment.[5]
So I guess you’re pretty fine with the pedo/misogynist/nazi/bullying shit happening on Discord servers.
- 6 days
“You hate hotdogs? YOU MUST LOVE BURGERS THEN”
What are you even trying to say?
- 6 days
I’m pretty sure AI partners are not the primary reason people don’t have human partners. The issues are systematic and root very deeply. While I do think AI partners are a very toxic and dangerous way out of this, I highly doubt they were the reason people were single in the first place.
I’m pretty sure alcohol is not the primary reason people don’t drive responsibly. The issues are systematic and root very deeply. While I do think driving while drunk is a very toxic and dangerous way out of this, I highly doubt they were the reason people were ebrious in the first place.
- lad@programming.devEnglish5 days
You’re joking, but people drive under influence not because alcohol exists, but because they have issues with self-control and responsibility.
So you do prove a point while trying to oppose it, imo
No, my point is you don’t stop repressing drunk drivers because there are more rooted issues that lead them to drink.
You probably joking, but that actually a thing in China and was a thing in USSR
- 6 days
It says that it was proposed… We propose a lot of bills that never pass here in the US. I’m not sure how China’s laws are setup but Wikipedia doesn’t say that it was ever implemented.
this kinda ties in with Tom Murphy’s recent blog post
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2026/06/the-smartphone-hypothesis/
You know what else fixes the birth rate? Making life less shitty and giving people enough money to be able to raise children.
In the meantime, negative birth rate is just self-correction of asshole dictatorships. Can’t make money line go up if birth line go down.
Sperm counts are tanking worldwide while PFAS chems are being legalized and clean energy projects are shut down in favor of fossil fuels. Nature doesn’t gaf, and will correct the unhealthy scenario. Humans are not the fittest if they destroy their own species by toxifying the environment. There’s only so much we can do with a sperm count of zero. Even in a handmaid’s tale scenario, a multiple of zero is zero.
- 6 days
At least if more people ended up doing this on their own hardware with open source software, it would cut off a lot of the opportunities it presents for companies to abuse people’s privacy and manipulate them.
- 4 days
Not your hardware, not your girlfriend. Cloud AI only love you for your money.
- kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish6 days
Yup. At this point, the only sensible model is harm reduction. I’m not happy about where we are, but we do need to be realistic about it.
- 6 days
“over addiction”
You just chose to read the headline and thought the main reason was child birth. Which is a very concerning fact for alot of societies.
- 4 days
Many moons ago I was too, since women became pikcy looking for the Brad Pitt. Not anymore, not.
- 6 days
There’s a lot of problems with this, and declining birth rates of the most invasive species on Earth isn’t one of them.
- faintwhenfree@lemmus.orgEnglish6 days
Bro think about Chinese economy please. Economy needs to survive bro… Let go of your imaginery girl bro… Treating your actual girlfriend like human is not mandatory bro… Do it for patriotism bro…
- SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish5 days
That sucks. Everybody should be able to find happiness. Not everyone has the looks, wealth, opportunity, or charisma to find a lover.
- SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish4 days
Even if that was the case, so fucking what? Why is it your business how people find happiness in life?
Considering how you treat strangers, it is better to spend time with AI, than the likes of you.
- 4 days
We live in a big global community. If you shut yourself out of it, that harms every single person.
- SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish4 days
Dunno, as of yet. I am very picky, and my roleplaying sessions with AI hasn’t gone on long enough.
0000
It requires significant hardware to use local AI, and Qwen 3.6 at 35b isn’t quite good enough to understand the lore and characters. Odds are that once I have added VRAM & RAM to my PC, I can run a big enough model to have enough quality to feel good for me.
Unfortunately, I will likely have to wait for America’s AI bubble to have popped, before I can afford enough RDIMM RAM to run Kimi and other large Euro-Chinese open models. I probably won’t ever use American anymore, as their closed models have too many guardrails and likely would align with the Trump Regime in the coming years.
- 4 days
If you’re coding up a custom system, Try adding a 9b model that dose RAG searches with chromadb and outputs a memory summary that feeds into the main models context window. You can ingest old messages, web pages, character info, or whatever text. Qwen 3.6 35b is the first local model I ran that seems to be good enough to be useful if it has some infrastructure around it, and smart enough to not die on a tool call(usually).
Add in DDGS search and a web page scrape tool that adds to the RAG system, let it loop a few times and its actually quite useful, even if it takes 5-10 minutes to get an output. After that it’s all tweaking what is and isn’t in in context.
Also, try not to go too insane.
- 4 days
What kind of token rate do you get if you try to run them in swap space?
- SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish4 days
Never tried that. I worry about the damage and lifespan reduction that could cause to my SSD drives. If we go vanilla, I get the following performance on my PC:
000000
Generating (2562 / 8192 tokens) (EOS token triggered! ID:248046) [11:17:40] CtxLimit:2656/32768, Init:0.10s, Processed:94 in 0.83s (113.12T/s), Generated:2562/8192 in 47.51s (53.92T/s), Total:48.44s
000000
This is via the KoboldCPP backend. Things are much faster than they used to be, a year ago this would have taken at least 10 minutes. This is a 35b MOE model.
Specs-wise, my machine is…
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7965WX - STR5 workstation CPU ($1,500, used)
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32gb of RDIMM DDR5 5600 ($600, used)
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RTX 4090
0000000
Within a few weeks, I will have the machine worked on to fix a teething issue and to add at least a second GPU. My machine has device enumeration issues, which I believe to be caused by the PCIe SATA card. I am figuring that eliminating all non-motherboard SATA devices from the build will end the issue that I am having.
In this case, the computer can have 20+ minute boots, with bootloops or getting stuck. This only happens with booting, Windows is just fine. I consulted with my local AI about the patterns and error messages I was seeing, we eventually homed in on likely points of contention for the system.
This also lines up a prior experience with a SATA card some 15ish years ago. Silly me for expecting a modern SATA card to not suck.
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- 4 days
It should be said that while that exists (try dating while quadriplegic), there’s a lot more people out there who actually could find someone, but think they can’t.
Still, China likes to ban things almost for it’s own sake, and this is an example.
I kind of think everywhere probably should, that’s probably the strangest thing it’s like falling in love with a microwave.
- 6 days
I think a lot of world problems would be solved if these things were encouraged instead. If someone needs their romantic partner to be a mindless sycophant, I would rather them have that with a machine than try to abuse a human person into serving them as would be more traditional. More children being born in situations other than exploitation and manipulation could only be a good thing.
- 6 days
You need to think of human beings as less binary good and binary evil.
- 5 days
I’m sure people who abuse their family members have plenty of good qualities as well. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to what I said.
- 5 days
And for every 1 monster you remove from society by locking them in an AI mind prison, you’ll ruin the lives of a hundred innocent people.
- 6 days
This is the same logic used for child sex dolls and other material consumed by paedophiles
- 6 days
Yeah, sure.
And I wouldn’t be so pissed at Epstein and Trump and the rest of the pedophile class if they were just trafficking sex dolls.
