I’m going to hazard a guess it’s a combination of falling budget and an over reliance on autocorrect. If it’s like other industries, they’re trying to get more articles out with fewer people.

I know that I often have an atrocious number of typos - but some are entirely the fault of autocorrect either changing a correct word to something else or correcting a typo to a word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence. I’m hoping that the next generation will improve this.

If anything a now - not typo at least indicates that it was written by a human. LLM errors generally don’t involve that sort of thing.

That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

No, because he’s actually quite mad and belongs nowhere near any kind of power. I can see his conspiracy theories appealing to the Q type, but most of them are going to go for Trump. He’s polling this highly because he’s an unknown. As more people start paying attention to who he actually is, he will be the Herman Cain of the race.

He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.

It strikes me as exactly the kind of engineering call that Elon has tended to make, time after time. With zero training in an area, he gets a solution in his head crufted up from some set of pre-existing notions or points of view and then pushes to have them implemented. He will also go on to fire anyone who disagrees with him. I spoke with an engineer who worked on the gull wing doors, which the team had objected to, and not only did he force them through, he burst in on one of the finalization meetings where they had finally reached a design consensus and insisted they change the hinge. Given similar reports on his behavior regarding other products (including especially twitter), I have no reason to disbelieve this person.

I kind of close with that thought. A “good idea” in evolutionary biology is one that leads to reproductive success. Obviously, it’s possible to have so much reproductive success that you overrun the carrying capacity of your environment. That doesn’t happen as often when we’re looking at them in their natural environments - because species and environments co-evolve, and so each adaptation has time to be matched by other adaptations.

It’s always tempting to look backward through time and interpret a direct causal development from the bow and arrow to industrial manufacturing and spaceflight. But we can see by looking at all of the different societies and cultures around us that any particular path isn’t dictated by the human brain per se. The Yanomami and the Yoruba are populated with people exactly as intelligent as in any other human society. They are adaptable and clever, but never developed mass manufacturing or rocket technology. There are countless other civilizations that arose, gained a high degree of sophistication and power, and then disappeared while others have survived.

I do not believe in free will. That means I believe in strict causality. If you wanted to argue that the development of modern western political economies are a direct result of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment itself was a direct result of the world of ideas that came before it, you’d find a sympathetic ear (although I do believe that determinism is different from predictability, and that this complex system we call our society is more complex than any individual just as a human is more complex and less predictable than an ant).

In any case, it’s possible the “lethal mutation” that might lead to our demise (along with a good swath of the rest of life on earth) might have been a techno-cultural mutation rather than a biological one.

Those are very good questions. First, I was distinguishing between multiple types of intelligence, rather than ranking them. However, there are several aspects of human intelligence that we’d probably be justified in saying something like “By these metrics, humans are more intelligent than any other species on the planet.” Those include the sophistication of technology, the amount and complexity of of information exchanged between persons, the ability to learn, and so on. Other animals can learn through accident or experimentation and adopt a new behavior. Some even exhibit social learning, as when a troop of baboons learned to wash their food by observing the matriarch, who had discovered it on her own. Most other species have languages, whether vocal, visual, or chemical. But most learning occurs over evolutionary time rather than at the individual level, and most of those languages are fairly hard coded.

The answer is definitely yes for the second question, with the eusocial animals like ants and bees being the obvious examples. The queen is not the “brain” of the colony. She is more like the reproductive organ. The brain emerges from of all the ants collectively interacting with each other and the environment. I agree with EO Wilson that humans are also eusocial, and so by extension carry out collective computation - information processing and learning - at the social level using what we might think of as an emergent brain layered on top of your individual brains.

Evolutionary biologist here. I think it’s highly unlikely.

It has taken about 4 billion years for intelligent life to have appeared on our planet (if you include the earth forming part), or 3.5 billion years (if you include when life first formed) to get our first “intelligent life.” By intelligent life here, I’m talking about technology in tool using and civilization building, to be clear. It’s a label I’d apply to our many of our ancestral and most closely related species. I believe much of life on earth is intelligent to the point of having things like theory of mind (the knowledge that one is a thinking individual interacting with other thinking individuals), including some birds and octopuses. The birds and octopuses part is important because it means that ToM evolved multiple times independently. That means that a) it’s a “good idea” (it has potentially significant adaptive value) and b) it’s possible to discover it along multiple pathways. Take eyes for example. Last time I looked, we believe eyes have evolved independently at least 24 times. They also exist at every stage of complexity and in a very wide variety of forms, and even something as as simple as being able to tell light from darkness has value.

However, in that 3.5 billion year history, intelligent life evolved exactly once, from a single line of descent. Intelligence such as ours is obviously a good idea. We went from being relatively unremarkable hominids to being the dominant life form on the planet, for better and for worse. Evolution is not moving all species to intelligence. Humans aren’t the point of evolution, any more than sharks or jellyfish are the point of evolution.

When such a manifestly good idea only evolves once, from a single line, the conclusion is that it’s pretty difficult to evolve. It might require a chain of preliminary mutations, or a particular environment. Being hominids, for example, we can make tools and carry fire, which dolphins and octopuses cannot. Of course, there are other hominids out there who do not do those things, and they’ve been around for millions of years. Depending on where you want to start the clock, they’ve been around for about ten times longer than modern humans - about 400k years, give or take. And the technology and civilization part has only been around for the last tenth of that, and has to evolve along its own, non-biological selection - and even those things differ wildly between different places and cultures. And even will all that, it’s become increasingly obvious that this might be a terminal mutation as the very drivers of our short term success may lead to our extinction.

I believe that extra-solar life probably exists. Whether it exists as bacterial mats or multicellular life, whether it’s discovered its own form of photosynthesis or has some other way of gathering life from its environment, whether it draws a distinction between its informational (eg, dna) and physical components - I have ideas but obviously no data.

In any case, that’s why I don’t believe that anyone has ever seen an extraterrestrial-origin ufo. I don’t believe the universe ever was nor will ever be teeming with civilizations.

All of that said, though, we’re dealing with an n of 1. We can make the best inferences possible based on what we can observe, but I would be delighted to be proven wrong tomorrow. I’m a sci fi nerd - I want there to be aliens. Even the discovery of a bacterial mat would revolutionize biology.

I have a 3p app that still seems to be working. I don’t log in, so I only read occasionally, but I have to say that the number of upvotes seem much higher than when I was using the site. I was a very active user who quit during the exodus (when Apollo went dark), but I don’t remember the number of upvotes being regularly in the thousands to tens of thousands.

It makes me wonder whether they’re artificially boosting traffic ahead of the IPO, to be honest. I mean, if they are, it probably would have leaked by now - but it still feels like it doesn’t line up with the third party traffic reports.

In any case, I think that going public is just going to increase the pressure for monetization, and Spez has already said how much he admires what Elon did with Twitter, so I think we know where it’s heading. It’s really just waiting for a replacement. Whether lemmy can be it or not is yet to be determined, but the enshittification has started and the migration will come as soon as someone drops a couple of billion building a service and app that’s a real substitute for the casual users.

Thanks!

I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.

That was amazing! I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve seen this.

“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”

The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.

Personally, I do think of viruses as a form of life, and although it’s not universally held by any means, I think there’s a growing consensus around the idea.

That’s probably as minimalistic as I would go, though. I mean, you can make a similar argument to some extent about prions, but prions are too close to being “just chemistry” for me.

Viruses on the other hand cooperate and compete in complex ecosystems, which in my opinion magnifies the complexity of a virus as an element of a complex adaptive system. They don’t have a metabolism as such (which is why so many don’t consider them living), but their ability to conduct theft of resources of more complex and obviously living systems makes me push them to group of living things.

One of the nearest things about biology is that there’s always an exception to the rules and examples, and the simplifications we make when teaching bio 101 are really best learned as rules of thumb. Things like what a “gene” really is, the operation of selection, and even what constitutes a “species” can lead to some really interesting discussions.

Theoretical biologist here. I’m going to push back on that just a bit. I think that you might have mentioned Selfish Gene, too. That was not the best book even at the time of publication (most biologists had a number of problems with it oversimplifying in a way that’s probably similar to what anthropologists think about Guns Germs and Steel). It also has been getting worse the more we learn.

Evolution acts on the phenotype, not the genotype. It affects the gene makeup of the population through differential reproduction rates. “Fitness” can be measured as a value relative to the rest of the population specifically by using the number of offspring. So what I’m saying here is that all factors that affect phenotype, whether genes or other factors, affect evolution.

So, of course genes are important. But you have epigenetic factors, too. link here You also have extensive non-coding regions that regulate transcription. You have rna editing. And so on.

If you’re interested, I would highly recommend a book called How Life Works by Phillip Ball. It was just published in November and is an outstanding summary of how much our understanding of life has evolved (heh) in the last 20 years or so.

I can give you my impression and that of the people I spoke to about it. I’m coming from the perspective of a theoretical biologist who was heavily involved with computational models of complex systems - particularly ones with biological foundations. I worked with simulations ranging from molecular cell biology up to ecosystems.

I don’t want this to sound dismissive, but CA are cartoonishly simple versions of complex systems. Once you get past illustrating the idea that simple rules can give rise to complex behaviors, that they’re Turing complete, and that there are neat and interesting phenomena that can arise, I think you’re pretty much done. They’re not going to show you anything about the evolutionary dynamics that drive carcinogenesis. They’re not going to let you explore the chemistry that might have given rise to the origin of life. They’re not going to let you model how opinions and behaviors cascade on social networks.

Topics like emergence are core to complexity theory, but CA can only illustrate that it exists, and it does so in such an abstract way that it doesn’t really translate into an understanding of how emergence is grounded in real world systems.

Wolfram’s problem, in my opinion, is that he was largely disconnected from the complex adaptive systems community, and for some reason didn’t realize we had largely moved on. I don’t know anyone in the CAS community that thought his work was groundbreaking.

I do have to say that Robert Sapolsky seems to have found his work interesting, and I am very deeply interested in Sapolsky’s work. But he’s a neurobiologist, not a complexity scientist, and he doesn’t draw a concrete connection between Wolfram’s work and his own, other than the generic connection that complex systems can arise from simple rules. That’s something we’ve known since Conway and Lorenz.

My mind is open to counter arguments, but that was my impression and as far as I could tell, the same was true of my colleagues. I think that the general academic reception to his book bears this analysis out. It’s like if someone wrote a comprehensive book about all kinds of Prisoner’s Dilemma models long after we’ve moved on from PD to modeling more complex and accurate depictions of cooperative versus competing interactions. Students should absolutely study PD, and they should study CA. It’s just not something you want to hang your academic hat on at this point.

Mathematica, on the other hand, is pretty neat.

He absolutely did not invent CA. His book was published well after it had become an established modeling technique. Conway’s game of life was published in 1970. Complexity theory modeling had moved well past CA by the time Wolfram’s book came out, to the point that most of us didn’t know why he bothered writing it, much less thought it would revolutionize science.

“No stupid questions” is intended to be a topic, not a challenge.

Yup! I really love the whole story there. It was sort of like the space race but with tall masted ships and pirates and such.

I mean, you also had the slave trade, but if you blithely ignore the discomforting parts of history, reading about it can be fun.

There were so many problems with monitoring time. Even today I always dread it a bit. While we’ve tried to at least move the issues from the mechanistic to the philosophical, we still run into things like the Y2K and the 2038 problems. Hell, I remember running into an issue with calculating leap years and such as an undergrad.

I like to think that, if nothing else, it gives me a greater appreciation for Discworld.

So I got scooped on the whole candle thing, which I really wanted to go with. Instead, I’m going to pivot and say that accurate timekeeping - day or night - was actually driven by the needs of navigation. 

You could get a pretty good idea of when it was based on the position of the sun and stars, as long as you knew where you were. The opposite is also true - you could figure out where you were, as long as you knew what time it was (and had the appropriate charts/data). The problem was that, while sailing around the world, ships often didn’t know either one.

For rough purposes, people used things like candles. In some cases, monks would recite specific prayers at a given cadence to keep track of time overnight and so know when to wake the others. These methods, as well as later inventions like the pendulum clock that used a known time component to drive watch mechanisms, were all but useless for navigation due to inaccuracies. They were good enough in the 1200s to let the monks know when to pray, though.