https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

oops fixed

Sure, it’s not a surprising finding since the environment is a stable selection pressure driving evolution. It’s still nice to have these studies to confirm our intuition on the subject.

That’s still interaction with the environment though, what this research shows is that even without any such interaction the structures form. So, they’re not shaped by the environment, but are a type of firmware that’s encoded within the genes.

There has been a theory that the weights for the neural connections get mostly shaped by the environment, but this research shows that there’s effectively firmware wiring that will emerge without any external stimulus.

I agree with your point on infinite recursion, and that is precisely why intelligent design is not a useful framework. It is a thought terminating cliche that provides the illusion of an answer without the substance of one.

Saying a designer did it, doesn’t explaining anything, and just pushes the explanation back to a theoretically complex designer who in turn needs its own explanation. This halts all scientific inquiry. If we treat junk DNA or physical constants as mysterious designs, we stop looking for their mechanical functions. It is far better to sit with the discomfort of the unknown than to embrace a pseudo answer that shuts down investigation.

Indeed, and another point to consider is that it’s highly unlikely we’d observe a civilization at our level of development. Life on Earth appears around 4.5 billion years ago. Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago. Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago. Writing is invented around 5500 years ago.

Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.

So, after millions of years of life on Earth no technological development happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It’s worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.

Now let’s take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they’re designed to look like noise. Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don’t go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.

So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small. The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.

I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We’re likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space, we’re adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that’s most likely to be prolific in space. Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be might we consider to be geological scales. Such beings might consider what we view as real time akin to the way we look at continental drift. We’re aware that it’s happening, but it’s of little interest to use on day to day basis. It’s quite possible that advanced civilizations become solipsistic and care little for the outside universe.

For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don’t recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.

What the article talks about is that a study pointed out a long-term climate process involving algae. As the planet warms, it can lead to larger and more frequent algal blooms in the oceans due to warmer waters and increased nutrients. When these algae die, they sink and sequester carbon in deep-sea sediments, effectively removing it from the atmosphere for a very long time. Their research suggests that the process would take thousands of years to result in significant global cooling. It’s an extremely slow, natural feedback loop. The researchers emphasize that it operates on a timeline that is completely irrelevant to our current, human-caused climate crisis.

But hey, why read the actual article when you can just throw a tantrum like a child.

huh?

what you mean?

What’s more, Antonson and his colleagues found that the woodpeckers exhaled forcefully with each strike, akin to how professional tennis players grunt when they hit a ball. The birds likely do so because the breathing technique stabilizes the core, Antonson tells Popular Science’s Laura Baisas, increasing the power of each strike for both the birds and the human athletes.

It’s so lovely to see how the mask has finally fallen off and we get to see the EU as the totalitarian regime that it really is.

I’m perfectly calm and nobody is upset here. I’m simply explaining to you that your argument does not make sense. If you want to look at negative sides of the trade-off then come up with some arguments that make logical sense. It’s quite telling that you start making personal attacks when you can’t actually address the points being made.

I genuinely don’t know what you’re arguing anymore, because your logic is completely backwards. You’re blaming the GPL for “enshitification” and bloat, which is utterly nonsensical. The license has fuck all to do with how lean or bloated a piece of software is, that’s a result of developer priorities and corporate roadmaps. The GPL’s entire purpose is to enforce freedom, and a key part of that freedom is the right to fork a project and strip out the bloat yourself if the main version goes off the rails. You then admit that corporate contributions are valuable, but your proposed solution is to letting them keep their work proprietary which is the very thing that accelerates enshitification. You’re arguing that to stop companies from making software worse, we should give them a free pass to take public labor, build their own walled gardens, and contribute nothing back. That’s just corporate apologia that encourages the exact freeloading the GPL was designed to prevent. Your entire point is a self-contradictory mess.

What I’m saying is that you could make an architecture similar to M1 which would have the same benefits of being fast and energy efficient, and slap a tailored Linux distro on top of it that just work out of the box. As a dev, I’d buy a decently built laptop like that in a second.

No, GPL does not force companies to do that. It forces companies to make their source code available. There is zero requirement that it has to be contributed to the original project, nor do the maintainers of the project have to accept changes they don’t want. You’re completely misrepresenting the how GPL works here.

Centralization, bloating, and GPL are all tangential ideas that bear no direct relation to each other. A centralized project does not necessarily become bloated, nor does GPL play any role in whether a project is centralized or not.

GPL because abstract freedoms are meaningless. The goal should be to ensure that the code stays open and that corps aren’t freeloading of it.

I’m really amazed that it’s been half a decade now and nobody has made a comparable SoC using ARM or RISCV tailored to Linux.

Completely agree, MacOS is turning into a dumpster fire. They keep adding features nobody asked for, and making the whole thing more bloated and flaky in the process.

Oh that’s pretty awesome, I’d be interested to see this approach applied for coding agents as well. You could make a language that focuses on specifying a formal contract the agent has to fill, and then you could have LLM and evaluator converge on a solution.