I find myself using LLMs mostly to jump start into working and "saving" the energy that I need to start working on a new task. Whether the LLM produces something good or not, I am now in the middle of work.
It works best if I'm not already exhausted because a that point LLMs output just confuse me with a lot of text and code.
Having done IVF with my wife I think this is the most underrated fertility advice available today.
I don't understand why governments of countries with increasing average age and low birth rate don't pay for this for all women. This is one the best pro-family policies that can be implemented.
> This is one the best pro-family policies that can be implemented
Hard disagree on that. You're coming from an angle of someone who wanted to have kids and do it in a mathematically optimal way. A lot of people see egg freezing as a way to delay having kids until they're older, which can become a disincentive to raising families when they're young and healthy enough to do it. If you want a pro-family policy, you should be spending the money on people with families and their children, not on a tool that is used to delay having children in common use.
Another huge problem with this proposal is that freezing eggs is only a small part of the cost. The cost of IVF later in life could push into six figures depending on how many rounds are needed. If we're talking about pro-family policies that can cost upwards of $50,000 to $100,000 per family, there are many more effective places to spend that like on childcare options.
IVF in Italy is included in universal health care already, regardless of age.
If the government is going to pay for IVF for 40 years old women it would be cheaper if those women had eggs frozen at 20 because overall you would succeed with fewer embryo transfers.
Of course that's not the only policy needed, we need affordable house for families, schools, decent parental leave for both parents.
Most 19 year olds probably wouldn't opt into injecting themselves twice a day for weeks and dealing with the side effects of the injections, then the subsequent extraction procedures (likely for multiple rounds) even if it was paid for. Which is reasonable, considering most women who want children will have them without IVF and don't need to go through any of that.
To be clear: I agree that it's not great policy to pressure women into doing this (which, arguably, making egg-freezing free would tend to do), bodily autonomy concerns chief among them. It's also not great policy to withhold this as an option from poor women while allowing rich ones access to it (the status quo). The third option would be to ban it, but that has obvious problems too most notably that womens' reproductive health is already surveilled and politicized enough without adding another new crime to police for around it. Allowing it in certain circumstances (a "medical waiver" or similar) just reproduces that same issues as banning it, and would probably be just a waystation on the way to a full ban.
I've yet to see a good proposal for how to regulate or handle this as a society, so my best guess is that we keep the status quo (it's expensive so only rich people can do it) for the foreseeable future UNLESS it becomes some kind of culture war issue for MAGA, which seems honestly pretty likely. Presumably they would want to ban it, but allow exceptions for certain cases that amount to "but is the patient a married white woman with acceptable politics?" in a more legally palatable form.
I went through it with my wife too and expecting a 19 y/o women to go through the IVF process as an insurance policy is a bit insane to me. In our modern, western society, this is age is still solidly childhood with not much definitive thoughts of future family, marriage, etc.
Governments need to make COL more affordable, birth rate will go up naturally
It is crazy but it’s also quite true. People eschew true adult responsibility for much longer these days. It’s a macro trend.
I know there’s a lot of “whys” but not getting married, not having kids, living with parents, etc all compound to remaining a child in some sense and this is continuing well into the 20s and even 30s for a large portion of the demographic.
When it comes to 19 y/o women the fact most internet people would find it gross that 1) highly fertile and 2) desired by old men - is a reality. We tell old men these women are too young yet also won’t admit it’s because they are in some sense still children.
but as someone in my 30s, it’s kind of true…looking back.
I can only speak as a man. I spent my late teens thinking with my penis instead of my brain. Things worked out well for me by pure luck.
Most teens have no real experience with “real” relationships or what makes a great life partner. This is CRUCIAL when parenting. They’re also not thinking about a stable career so they can actually support a baby. Never mind the money…most jobs in the U.S. have garbage health insurance, unless your employer is great.
Many people THINK they know what their life should look like. Then again most teens think they have life figured out lol. A tale as old as time…
I would say mid 20s is an ideal time from a maturity perspective. The best time depends on the person obviously. You can’t plan falling in love. :)
At least with people in my circle of the US, it feels like there's an increasing infantilizing of people (frequently themselves, I'm a bit guilty of this), particularly in regards to things like marriage and raising a family. Yet, by 19 you'll have either made decisions for yourself or someone else has for you, that will likely put you on track for your entire future career direction (education, interests, college choice, maybe even enlisted in the military).
You don't need to have given "definitive thought" to your entire future to not be a child anymore.
We definitely need better COL but I'm not convinced it's is the main factor for low birth rates as most countries living in poverty have very high birth rates. I think its a cultural difference that values earlier marriage and heavy family involvement in raising children which, the latter, reduces the stress of having to parent by yourself.
I think there’s a middle ground where in the US many people would be having kids around 30 if they could afford it. Our recent past reflects that. Even the number of kids have been reduced as the cost has become too high, so it’s not parenthood or responsibility alone people are avoiding. Comparing to poverty situations introduces a whole plethora of variables. Kids are seen more as assets than liabilities, as they will care for you in old age and/or can contribute to the household after the first dozen or so years. This is not really a comparison to the rich nations.
That money is better invested in providing affordable family housing. Even if IVF is available no one is going to actually have kids if you do nothing to make it economically sustainable to start a family.
Do we really want to rely on IVF to solve the fact that people can only afford a family home once they're well into their 40s? It's insanity if you ask me.
We, in the US, don't even have universal day care, or hundreds of other sensible things that would make child-rearing easy/less expensive. Jumping straight to "let's cover expensive IVF programs" is... well a big leap.
Because (1) it's not risk free, (2) it is painful, (3) it is quite costly over the longer term (4) you wouldn't want a 'pro-family' government to have access to a mountain of unfertilized eggs.
At least with people fighting with infertility, they want to have children, so helping them have children is more straightforward list of actions than convincing people who don't want kids to have them.
Perhaps the situation has gotten better since I looked a few years ago, but my experience is the Debezium project doesn’t really guarantee exactly-once delivery. Meaning that if row A is replaced by row B, you might see (A, -1), (A, -1), (B, +1), if for example Debezium was restarted at precisely the wrong time. Then if you’re using this stream to try to keep track of what’s in the database, you will think you have negatively many copies of A.
It sounds silly, but caused enormous headaches and problems for the project I was working on (Materialize), one of whose main use cases is creating incrementally maintained live materialized views on top of replicated Postgres (or MySql) data.
Debezium published this doc on Exactly-once delivery with their most recent 3.3.0 version. They dont support it natively, but say it can be achieved via Kafka Connect
You could probably achieve something similar with the NATS Jetstream sink as well, which has similar capabilities - though I think it doesnt have quite the same guarantees.
I switched to using Debezium a few months ago, after a Golang alternative to Debezium + Kafka Connect - ConduitIO - went defunct. I should have been using Debezium all along, as it is clearly the most mature, most stable option in the space, with the best prospects for long-term survival. Highly recommended, even if it is JVM (though they're currently doing some interesting stuff with Quarkus and GraalVM that might lead to a jvm-free binary at some point)
Debezium generally produces each change event exactly once if there are no unclean connector shut-downs. If that's not the case, I'd consider this a bug which ought to be fixed.
They can happen, yes, although this should be a rather rare event (the most common reason would be misconfiguration, such as a K8s pod with too low memory limits). That said, work towards exactly-once has been done [1], utilizing the support for EOS in Kafka Connect (KIP-618).
In particular for Postgres, consumers can detect and reject duplicates really easy though, by tracking a watermark for the {Commit LSN / Event LSN} tuple which is monotonically increasing. So a consumer just needs to compare the value for that tuple from the incoming event to the highest event it has received before. If the incoming value is lower, the event must be a duplicate. We added support for exposing this via the `source.sequence` field a while back upon request by the Materialize team btw.
> They can happen, yes, although this should be a rather rare event
For our use case, it didn't matter if it was rare or not: the fact that it could happen at all meant we needed to be robust to it, which basically meant storing the entire database in memory.
> We added support for exposing this via the `source.sequence` field a while back upon request by the Materialize team btw.
Yes, I helped work on this! I'm not sure whether Materialize is still using it (it's been years since I've thought about MZ/Debezium integration) but it was helpful, thanks.
Does it handle the things that the post mentions about the ever-growing WAL, and the fact that some listeners can go offline and need to get back old messages (eg if Kafka crashes?)
Robustness is a key design goal of Debezium. It supports heart beating to address WAL growth issues (wrote about that issue at [1]). If Kafka crashes (or Debezium itself), it will resume consuming the replication slot from where it left off before (applying at-least once semantics, i.e. there can be duplicates in case of an unclean shut-down).
Naturally, if the consumer is down, WAL retained for that replication slot continues to grow until it comes back up again, hence monitoring is key (or the slot gets invalidated at a certain threshold, it will restart with a new initial snapshot).
> Captain Holt: Well, this is a total waste of time.
Sergeant Jeffords: Sure, but you can still have fun, even if you're wasting time.
Captain Holt: That's absurd. Productivity is what makes things fun. That's why humans go to work.
Sergeant Jeffords: It is?
WeBuilt, the general contractor, is one of the biggest building companies in the world. They even built a part of Panama Channel expansion.
Why do you think that they are mafiosi?
Personally I don't know if this bridge would be useful or not, but I think that refuse to building it just because mafia risk it's a stupid reason. Italy has a strong law and control system to prevent that and I remembered exactly the same argument about Bologna-Firenze high speed train tunnel and highways that after almost 20 years are successful infrastructures.
Ndrangheta is a huge criminal organization with ties to politics and a lot of economic power and it is based in Calabria.
The current government actively proposed special antimafia rules for checking contractors and subcontractors for the bridge which, IMHO, reinforce the idea that it is a gift to mafia. Luckily the proposal was rejected by the president https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/strait-bridge-no-derogation-a...
Location: Italy, Europe
Remote: Yes
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Technologies: C# / .NET, Azure, IAC with Bicep, SQL, Cosmos DB, Kubernetes
Résumé/CV: https://davidelettieri.it/Davide%20Lettieri.pdf
Email: davide.lettieri(at)gmail.com
Backend developer with 12+ years of experience on .NET mostly building APIs, minor experience with frontend (typescript) and python, used to remote work with international distributed teams, good experience on Azure (networking, databases, aks and more), always keen on doing whatever the team needs. I'm looking for IC positions, happy to switch technology stack, open to occasional travel.
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