I believe one reason that is rarely talked about is that having children later in life makes you more tired than if you had them in your 20s. In the times when people were having more children, they were having them early. We all now how it is easier to shrug off a sleepless night in your 20s than in your 30s. We use that advantage to stay out drinking more when we are young, but it was probably evolved to help stay up at night when children were crying. So I think our cultural child bearing age is now misaligned from our biological adaptations, it feels exhausting to have children in your 30s
After our first, I felt like I gained superpowers (okay, not super, somehowpowers?). Especially with the lack of sleep. Even a month beforehand, that lack of sleep would have wrecked me. I mean, it still did, but somehow I just no longer cared. With my kid in my arms, the lack of sleep just seemed like a thing that was happening, the anxiety or 'wrongness' about not sleeping was gone. My body for sure still felt the effects. But my mind was cleared of the issues surrounding the lack of sleep. There was my child, needing help of some sort or another, and here I was, the parent. End of story. Gone were the thoughts that a lack of sleep would ever stop me from doing what needed to be done for my kid. Weather that be food, or my job, or groceries, or cleaning, whatever. If my kid needed me to get it done, it just got done, all the complaints in my mind about being too tired seemed, well, childish.
I don't want to denigrate any parent. It's a tough thing to do. And it is exhausting. But, at least for me, once I became a parent, I just stopped caring that I was exhausted. When that screaming pooping little money sucker comes toddling over to you with a huge smile on the face after you walk in the room from work or wherever, all those worries and fears just somehow melt away and you just think to yourself how lucky you are to have any of it.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you think you want to have kids, don't let your lack of energy due to age be a factor. Kids give you the energy.
Sure it unified again only in the 19th century, but it has had a great degree of cultural union throughout its entire history. It is actually one of the most homogeneous countries in terms of language, religion and culture. Italians like to think otherwise for some reason.
Sorry for the digression!
As an Italian, I would like to learn how you measured the level of homogeneity of language and culture (on religion I agree with you).
The differences in language and in culture were definitely reduced only in very recent years AFAIK, and still remain noticeable.
About language, you have to consider how many Italians are (still today) effectively bi-lingual, Italian and local dialect, with the latter ranging from very similar to very different from Italian.
All italian dialects derive from a single language, with very low influence from the outside. Most Italian dialects are actually intelligible to an Italian speaker in written form and become difficult to understand only because of pronunciation. Try reading a few Wikipedia articles in different Italian dialects and you'll realize you understand at least 90% of text for all of them, possibly with the only exception of Sardinian.
Additionally, dialects were never the language of higher culture anywhere in Italy, all intellectuals have always used a common language and had a nationwide audience even when the country was politically fractured in many states. Said common language being Latin for many centuries after the fall of the Roman empire and Italian from around year 1500.
Dialects are rarely written, they are spoken and while (obviously) usually someone natively speaking a given dialect can talk with someone from another near region, dialects from the north (say Lombardia or Veneto) are so different from those of the south (say Campania or Sicilia) that they are effectively distinct languages.
The above is the hypothetical case of two unschooled people, as said before most if not all italians are bi-lingual with their own dialect and switch automatically to italian (possibly with some local peculiar forms or accent) that is the common language when talking to some "foreigner".
As you say, italians can usually understand (in written form) a dialect because of the common roots, but for what it matters an Italian with some good Latin knowledge can usually get the overall sense of written text in Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and possibly French.
The unification of language to Italian has been a process that went on for decades, through schooling and later radio and television, when Italy was re-united in the decade 1860-1870 it was a tower of Babel.
Imagine the conversation between a (unschooled) soldier from Friuli attempting to interact with a (as well unschooled) farmer in Sicily in the early years of the unified state.
It should be possible to train an upvote prediction model conditioned on submission title. This could then be used to optimize GPT-3-family models to produce text which had the highest predicted upvote response. It's a couple-weekend project and I'd be surprised if an AI-hobbiest hadn't done it already.
In the trivial case, karma farming bots just keep a database of all Reddit history (it is a public dataset, few hundred gigabytes) and repost the top comments (top threads even) whenever they detect a reposted link (extra points for similarity / reverse image searching)
It’s a project I have on the back burner to analyze Reddit history to check what ratio of comments are actually original, and I’d like to build a link aggregator that sorts by novelty.
I've thought about this too, and the fact that I've not seen such a bot so far is pretty unbelievable. It's not a huge amount of work to code it. Working across the whole of Reddit (or HN for that matter), it would gather an ungodly amount of karma (and awards) in a small amount of time.
