I think what we'll see as AI companies collect more usage data the requirements for knowing what you do will sink lower and lower. Whatever advantage we have now is transient.
Anything with latches above 10 MHz is pretty hard to get to run stable when using wirewrap. The Cray-1 was at its time absolute state-of-the-art. Replicating something like a 486 motherboard, which already had a whole raft of timing tricks to make sure that it all stayed synchronized is really not that easy.
I've spent more than one evening baffled by stuff that should have been trivial at clock speeds a lot lower than that. A 33 MHz clock has a cycle time of 1/33000000 = 33 nano seconds. But the rise time of that clock is much, much shorter, on the order of a few ns. At that sort of slew rate anything becomes an antenna. The backplane of the Cray-1 was set up as transmission lines with two spiral wound wires for each signal, cut exactly to size to make sure the signal arrived at the right moment, and without the bulk of the signal leaking away.
On this circuit board things are - let's put it friendly - a bit less organized than that. So by rights this really shouldn't have worked, the fact that it does absolutely amazes and inspires me.
One thing I like for prototyping with through hole parts is Verowire pen which kind of combines wire wrap with soldering. It uses thin wire in self-fluxing insulation. You can use the pen to wrap a bunch of components that go in series without wasting time for trimming the wire to length. Then you solder over the wraps and bite off the runs that shouldn't be there (e.g. when you wired a diode you remove the wire between its contacts).
Poor methodology or even some bug in an Excel macro at the UN headquarters could well be a reason behind the sudden, synchronous decline of population in all cultures and political systems of this planet.
And like the article suggests it can be deliberate too. Am extremely skeptical of population figures in some parts of former Soviet Union. The official demographic loss figures in WW2 had tripled since 1945 but post-war census figures were never revised. That could easily account for the "demographic collapse" of 1990s.
If you're the neighbor of some country that has a number of natural resources you'd like to get a hold of then you want to do things like formulate battle plans. If you have to make a plan to conquer 10 million people, it's going to be a bit different than one for 5 million people. The 10 million one is going to take longer. And then when you figure out that country is using deception to bolster its population numbers you have to figure where they lied about these numbers. Is it everywhere, is it in the place you want to invade. Is the population actually higher where you want to invade but lower in the rest of the country. Now you have to invest in doing your own general population and capability counts to make sure you don't step 10 feet deep in a 2 foot deep pool.
I doubt this explains the world-wide phenomenon, but regionally sure. I remember in the 90s when studies brought the Nigerian population estimates down this triggered a drop of growth forecasts across sub-Saharan Africa.
Edit: changed world-wife (which sounds interesting demographically) to world-wide
Sure, it is quite far-fetched. However it is extremely uncommon that we experience unified social trends all across the board, from liberal Finland or Japan to North Korea and Taliban-run Afghanistan. Usually there are odd reversals and exceptions here and there; not this time apparently. And we still lack a satisfying theory that could account for fertility decline in every country.
Decline happens also in territories that had been urbanized decades or even centuries ago but had positive fertility rate until 2010s. As I said you can pull a patchy blanket of micro-theories explaining each region but not one theory that accounts for them all.
Generally when people say urbanisation is the cause of fertility decline they mean people moving out of 7 child families at subsistence farms and rice paddies to city factories. Not any developments in Denmark or the Netherlands in last 150 years.
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