If we want to express ourselves using exponents, consider that 1000 years (1×10^3) and 9000 years (9×10^3) would be of the same "degree" of ancestry, while 100,000 years (1×10^5) would be of completely different (exponential) significance.
I think it might be more useful to look at the author's claim from the other side of the lense. We do carry around barely useful traits, like resistance to toxins that we seldom come in contact with. We can assume that carrying such traits is cheap. If resistance to tetrodotoxin was one such cheap trait, it might have been more prevalent, but it's not so, it could be inferred that it's expensive. Or at least, not cheap.
This is another case of a huge fallacy humans seem endlessly afflicted with: The Root Cause Fallacy.
You are assuming there is but one cause for development and/or loss of resistance.
There may not be much pressure to develop resistance to tetrodotoxin for most species. Simultaneously there might be a higher metabolic cost to retaining it for some species but not for others. It is also possible that resistance with low cost is very rarely lost which is why we carry resistance to toxins we don't often see but population bottlenecks in ancestral lines can cause loss of a trait to propagate - even by accident. And much like Vitamin C loss if it doesn't matter the loss sticks. We should not forget that there are multiple resistance mechanisms as well: an immune system generally primed to fight certain common causes of mortality can, entirely by accident, also be primed to recognize and destroy certain proteins conferring resistance to some toxins and not others.
I have barely scratched the surface above. The random walk of evolution and its constant hoarding tendencies should make everyone skeptical simplistic mechanisms of action as well as "just so" explanations of evolutionary history.
FWIW most things are multi-causal. I previously made the same argument about house prices. People who claim it is caused by foreign money, low interest rates, restrictive zoning, etc all want their pet theory to be The One True Reason. In reality the market is complex and many of the proposed causes are merely contributing factors.
I made no assumptions. As I pointed out to another commenter, you might be in too much of a haste to play at being a contrarian. It might be more useful to pay closer attention to what you're objecting to.
Evolutionary game theory demonstrates that evolution is a matter of fitness payoffs. If cost of a trait increases, fitness is reduced. The prevalence of a trait in a fit population is indicative that, at best, the trait increases fitness, at worst, it doesn't hinder it. In both cases, the genes tend to be passed on and the game is allowed to continue. When carrying the trait becomes costly, there's pressure to get rid of it (through the usual evolutionary means).
The above model encompasses all the unnecessary specificity you tried to bring into the matter. If you object to it, address your concerns to the scientists that are leading us all astray.
For now, let's circle right back to the author's original argument. Absence of an actually useful trait to increase fitness (i.e. protecting ones from certain food sources and others from predators) might be indicative of a hefty tax to pay for carrying it.
Isn’t evolutionary game theory a behavioural model from the 1970s? Not that it’s not interesting; I don’t see the relevance here. Maybe it’s just your condescending tone.
(No offense, I hope you don’t realize how you are coming across, or that if you do this comment will trigger some introspection)
That resistance to toxins we don't encounter often enough to constitute selective pressure, we carry around only if it's the accidental byproduct of another selected-for trait. Otherwise entropy would take care of it, sooner or later. Parent is right, evolution doesn't pay an annual subscription fee for some service which was useful in the past and might come in handy in the future.
You may just be trying to disagree with the author for sport.
> we carry around only...
Not true. We can carry resistance to some ancestral pressure which isn't part of the current environment.
> sooner or later...
Yes, sooner when it's costly, later when it's less so, through normal evolutionary pressure (entropy and all).
The point is, most species at time T do carry traits that aren't that useful to them anymore. The costlier ones yield enough negative fitness points in evolutionary game theory to rid the gene pool of them quicker. It brings us right back to the author's original argument.
It would be interesting to see how toxic these newts would remain if the garter snakes were eradicated. If this was indeed a costly trait, we should see a drop in toxicity over a long period of time (possibly evolutionary time). To rule out coincidence, you could follow multiple lineages as they speciated.
In fact, looking at related newts whose ancestors were toxic (assuming the trait is not novel in these ones) would give us some idea as well.
In the context of TFA, are you sure it's not GP who's arguing for sport? Maybe this clarifies the issue: one way to reword the root (critical) comment is "of course there is a cost, since entropy is always exacting a price". There's constant upkeep necessary for any trait if it is to be preserved. It points out a glaring blind-spot in the article.
It’s funny how often this sort of thing comes up. I’ve always felt that “biology” as a field was unique in the way that it is often taught. Bio 101, etc. - most of undergraduate biology - is often taught with this sort of sweeping worship of the process of evolution in a way that leads to it transcending rational thought. Natural selection is very real, and it’s also
such a sorry excuse for an evolutionary algorithm :D
It’s been a long time since my first bio classes so I can’t remember the way I was first taught it, but I do remember all more advanced bio literally being told to unlearn what we had already been taught.
It’s not some binary thing but degrees of adaptation.
People can handle significantly more of a wide range of plant toxins like theobromine and caffeine (both found in chocolate) which harm more pure predators like dogs in very low doses, but where rare for out imitate ancestors.
Cattle, deer etc however can handle many of those at much higher doses.
> like resistance to toxins that we seldom come in contact with.
Is that because resistance to those toxins was strongly selected for in humans, or because the source of those toxins did not strongly select for effectiveness in humans?
> I would hesitate now to recommend any path into it except the top-school CS degree route. Sure, there will be exceptions, but you will have a vastly easier time if you follow that path.
And how is this useful to someone who can't get into these top schools because life is happening? Also, your outlook seems very unrealistic to me.
This is software development we're talking about, not medicine, not mechanical engineering. To be a top tier software developer, you need access to a decent computer and good resources to learn. The two boxes have never been easier to check. Add to that the excellent guidance of curricula like OSSU, TeachYourselfCS, and others like them, if you have the mind for it and a bit of discipline, your skills will be as sharp as any top school graduate's. "Self-taught" today isn't the same game as what it was 20 years ago. You can make yourself incredibly valuable on your own.
Now, getting a degree in CS and teaching yourself CS are different goals. The first is a pursuit of recognition for a skill that you may or may not have, and along the way, perhaps you've obtained a truly valuable education for which you're also grateful. The latter is a self-directed pure pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and skill. Regardless of your path, these are the real gems companies are after, and if you truly have them, you will NOT be invisible in this domain. They're rare commodities in the real world, regardless of how you get there.
Getting hired in software has always been about showing that you can build software. There's no danger of this changing. Sure, it may mean different things to different companies, but that's always what it's been about. Some want people that can crack algo problems, some want hackers, some want makers with a portfolio, some want tech wizards that understand the stack up and down. No matter, you can opt in to any of the above outside of academia and make a space for yourself.
> And how is this useful to someone who can't get into these top schools because life is happening? Also, your outlook seems very unrealistic to me.
If you can't go to school because of life, chances are you can't self-study because of life as self-studying is harder.
> This is software development we're talking about, not medicine, not mechanical engineering.
Software development in many ways has more competition than those fields that have entry level positions in more rural areas.
> To be a top tier software developer, you need access to a decent computer and good resources to learn.
No, not to be a top tier software developer.
> Add to that the excellent guidance of curricula like OSSU, TeachYourselfCS, and others like them,
Someone who want to become a software developer shouldn't prioritize studying CS.
> if you have the mind for it and a bit of discipline, your skills will be as sharp as any top school graduate's
It will be many times as hard reaching that level yourself.
> Regardless of your path, these are the real gems companies are after, and if you truly have them, you will NOT be invisible in this domain.
Little to no indication that this is true. More like companies might still hire someone they need if they pass all the recruiters and tests favouring the traditional path.
> Getting hired in software has always been about showing that you can build software.
Always has been a academic, military and business field. That is why hackers happened in the first place.
Almost every partner and the founders have an elite or close to elite education. Something only around 1% of the population have, yet they make up all of the people. That is in an untraditional firm which literally runs Hacker News.
I think you might have it backward. Luck here implies starting with exactly the same work ethic and abilities as millions of other people that all hope to one day see their numbers come up in the lottery of limited opportunities. It's not to say that successful people start off as lazy slackers as you say, but if you were to observe one such lazy slacker who's made a half-assed effort at building something that even just accidentally turned out to be a success, you might see that rare modicum of validation fuel them enough that the motivation transforms them into a workhorse. Often time, when the biography is written, lines are slightly redrawn to project the post-success persona back a few years pre-success. A completely different recounting of history thus ensues. Usually one where there was blood, sweat, and fire involved to get to that first ticket.
so you've moved the goalposts even further now and speculate that succesful people started out as slackers, got lucky, and that luck made them work harder
as an Asian, it amazes me how far Americans and Europeans will go to avoid a hard days work
Do you have an official written policy for customers that forget to cancel? It could be as simple as "in case you forget to cancel and are later charged, please email us". You could then add a mention to every renewal email. If the policy is not official, but you're already open to reimburse someone that emails you, then make it official. Why have it as a discretionary unspoken rule that lets your customer guess as to the outcome of them asking for a favor.
Understanding exactly why before applying is not bad advice. But it takes time and can quickly become impractical when you're already pressed for it (like say, a small team startup already lacking a designer). In many cases it's better to just copy the closest thing to what you aspire to become, even if you don't quite yet grasp the details of why they originally made those decisions. All that can be figured out later for your own situation.
Because regardless of what we're talking about, a bubble around a thing is still a lie. The faster one bursts, the faster truth lays bare and one can make an actually informed decision. LLMs are here to stay and have probably already found a growing place in our lives. But much energy is currently spent speculating about their future significance. The bubble is about downplaying those are just speculations, while inflating the perception of their importance in our current or upcoming reality.
> In English speaking countries (even in Europe) those are often considered weird, alternative or "arthouse".
It's not that dubbing can generally be considered weird in a particular culture, it's that it's just really shitty in English. I'm fluent in English and French. I'd also hardly had any experience with dubbed content at all when I started sampling Netflix's foreign offering. When I started, I picked English. It was really off-putting. I was ready to rule out dubbing altogether, then on a whim I tried the French (from France) dubbing and the difference is incredible. So, I think some countries just have more experience doing this kind of work. Americans don't seem to have it, aside from animation that is.
You think you waste brain cycles on semicolons? Do touch typists make a conscious effort to "remember" where all the keys are? When you read, do you go letter by letter to make sense of words and sentences?
Your brain is an incredibly efficient tool. You should trust it more.
Brain cycles are still being used even if you're not conscious of them. So yes, some part of your has to spend cycles to remember to type that semicolon, and to even remember where the semicolon is on the keyboard, and in fact to remember how strong a signal has to be sent to the finger muscles to move the pinky to the right location and press the key.
In principle, this effort should even be measurable in calories (though it may be hard to distinguish from the noise of everything else you're thinking).
Perhaps I should have originally been clearer, but I have no clue what these "brain cycles" that keep being mentioned are. If it's some kind of CPU analogy, brains and CPUs are nowhere near analogous in how they work. The brain is an extremely complex system, whose mechanisms we're far from understanding fully and whose activities are mostly unconscious and subconscious processes.
In the context of our discussion, energy expenditure is not really the relevant feature. The more useful "index" would be the "perceived (i.e. conscious) cognitive workload". One is addressed with caloric intake, the other has more explicit psychological ramifications.
It may have been presumptuous of me, but cognitive workload is what I thought GP really meant by "brain cycle" and that's what I was addressing.
The point I was trying to convey is that the brain is very good at moving chunks of work away from conscious processes to subconscious ones (i.e. away from perceived load) through various optimizations. Usually, exposing the brain to deliberate and repetitive tasks will tend to develop certain tacit skills (subconscious shortcuts).
Another subtler point, was that an easy mistake when evaluating how much cognitive work a tacit skill actually demands, is to appreciate it from the perspective of someone who lacks said skill.
I'm a long time i3, tmux, vim/nvim user. You can see a pattern. When I write code, I typically have a bunch of i3 and/or tmux windows open with dedicated tools ready to execute the necessary commands. Linters, compilers, containers, http clients, db clients, REPLs, log viewers, doc viewers, notes, tests, etc. All nicely organized and readily accessible a few finger taps away.
For the longest time I've only used a dumb variant of autocomplete that is scoped to only suggest names found in files that were loaded in the current editor session. It's not context aware like an LSP would be. It may sound bizarre, but I never really felt that I missed much. C-P/C-N, scroll one or two items away and most times I get what I want. If I needed to use an unfamiliar feature, I'd open my past notes or the docs and skim through them, or I'd reach for the REPL. But working like this, I think you also develop some extra awareness and other tacit optimizations that reduce the need to do this sort of things often. You remember many small details, you develop a knack for taking notes, you get efficient at using external tools, you learn to quickly access docs from REPLs, that sort of things. Someone else mentioned code organization in a comment. That's definitely a big deal.
I've often been fascinated by the approach of transforming the editor to integrate all the things for which I have separate tools. So I decided to try it out for a few months (Neovim has some powerful plugins). I ended up keeping some of the suggestions, mostly the ones that aid in navigating the file system within the editor and finding files (e.g. Telescope). But I think my LSP experience has been one of the most distracting programming experience I've ever had. Perhaps if I'd given it more time, I might have gotten use to it. But it felt less productive for really marginal gains.
I think describing my experience can bring to light that some of us prefer working depth-first, while others are comfortable breadth-first.
The "real-time" nature of the warnings and suggestions was inappropriate for me. It felt like trying to write an essay and being told to worry about form and grammar, while I'm still developing my thoughts. Laying down the foundations of what I'm trying to express and meanwhile things popping up in my face completely out of context. By context here I mean at the wrong time. I'm currently laying down the structure of my thoughts and I see the editor issuing warnings about syntax or wrong imports. Please, this is not the time. Let me think. Stop distracting me. I'm ok to not have it right on the first try. When I run the damn thing, you can complain all you want. Don't worry, I'll understand what you want and will fix it. Right now I need to think. This is not grammar time.
The fix for the above was to configure the LSP to be mostly silent and on-demand. But then there wasn't much difference to using it externally to the editor.
