People are willing to lose a small but predictable amount of money to avoid occasionally and unpredictably losing a massive amount of money. The former is a loss they can plan for and absorb. The latter might kill their business.
Traders are often happy to take the other side of that trade because they can trade against many counterparties, collect a small premium from each one, and try to ensure their counterparties won’t all fail in a correlated way.
The hard part of porting to a different platform is usually not the instruction set. It’s the OS and system abstractions.
For example, if you have a program that just does raw math and pointer arithmetic and data structure manipulation —- that is, pure computation — then porting it to a different CPU might well be trivial. Just recompile. As long as your language toolchain supports it, this will Just Work.
But if your program works with the filesystem and sockets and threads, then it’s less likely to work. This is the promise of POSIX: if your program uses only what’s offered by the POSIX standard and uses those functions correctly, then it’s supposed to work on any POSIX-compliant system. Just recompile.
But if your program has a GUI, or does 3D graphics, or uses special methods for high-performance networking, or accesses gyroscopes or accelerometers or touch sensors, well then you have to do work to port. And notice that this work isn’t about which CPU instruction to use. It’s about figuring out —- deciding —- what the right thing to do is, for your app, given a slightly different set of available system capabilities.
Weird, my browser somehow doesn’t render the title as “T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97 Degrees whichever unit doesn’t kill the dinosaur”. It just leaves that last part out, making it even shorter than “F”.
> evolution is selecting for survival of the species, not the individual
This is very wrong. Evolution is selecting for the total reproductive fitness of genes, and to a slightly lesser extent, individuals. There’s no mechanism that helps the process of evolution select for the survival or reproduction of the species. See any recent textbook on evolutionary biology, or read Dawkins, or even Darwin. I don’t know where you got this idea but it’s exactly wrong.
> There’s no mechanism that helps the process of evolution select for the survival or reproduction of the species
The "mechanism" is just the process of evolution itself, and how it plays out in practice, e.g. via punctuated equilibrium.
Over shorter timespans the gene pool of a breeding population incrementally drifts according to the success of individual genetics, but then once in a while, over multiple generations, something in the environment (disease, food, competition, etc) may change quickly and the gene pool as a whole, not just that of individuals, is thereby tested, with accumulations of previously benign changes sometimes suddenly becoming critical. In this way evolution is acting on the entire gene pool - of the species or more correctly of that interbreeding sub-population.
Success in evolution, the ability of the species as a whole to adapt and compete, also requires genetic diversity, not only to avoid inbreeding, but also to provide species level resilience, and species level ability to quickly adapt. e.g. It seems that the success of sexual reproduction is because it is a way to "game the game" by increasing genetic diversity and therefore improve along these axis of resilience and fast adaptation.
There are also social species, such as ourselves, where the social group becomes port of the individuals environment, and genetics best-fitted-to-the-environment becomes a group dynamic.
Nothing about evolution feels sensible or right: and the vast majority of people have severe misunderstandings about how it works (for example the Darwin awards are highly misleading). Even science reporting is often highly misleading[0]. Intuition is not trustworthy for this topic, and neither is our ambient knowledge.
and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation[1] that protects against it, one of the fastest cases of natural selection ever documented in humans
* there is one ancestor with a gene that protects against kuru.
* children and mothers without that ancestor often die from kuru
* children of that ancestor have a much higher chance of survival
* eventually everyone is a child of that ancestor
* any children of that ancestor that didn't get the protective gene also eventually die out
The gene is selected for. There are no population effects.
The key part in the paper is where they mention adult men with the gene, because they are measuring the counterfactual of the many males that died because they didn't have that gene (males that ate brains as young kids but then died because they didn't have the gene from that ancestor).
The paper is hard to understand in part because of the confounding effects of males not eating the brains. Plus the confounder of stopping cannibalism in 1960.
The idea of "Group selection" is fundamentally wrong - regardless of how sensible the belief feels. Anybody using the words "group selection" is indicating their belief system, and they usually then have biased narratives to 'support' their belief.
[0] horrifically incorrect sciencedaily link in Wikipedia.
Fundamentally evolution is selecting for genes, not individuals, and there is no 1:1 relationship between genes and individuals.
Let's say that everyone has a skin color gene that makes them either red or blue. And a new predator turns up that only eats blue things. To you this is a tale about individuals, while it seems that an equally valid, and frankly preferable, view is this this isn't about individuals - it's about being red or blue and is a species level effect.
I suspect the underlying issue is that we are all terrible at unthreading cause from effect.
Words matter. Talking about "species level" is misleading because talking about an effect (blue phenotype) distracts us from the cause (a gene for blue).
And evolution is confusingly another step removed: the red survives because the blue did not.
Most of us struggle to see the counterfactual absence of a something.
The blue "species" never exists - our brains want to find groups and patterns. Our words mislead us.
The same thing is alluded to in the paper: the deaths of people without the gene is what is driving the gene to spread (through reproductive success of those that didn't die).
Reproduction is what matters (which death or sickness may interfere with).
Even the paper is confusing because it talks about 50 year old women (measuring survival bias; not whether they are expected to pass on genes at 50).
Not even close. Evolutionary selection pressures don't usually act directly on genetics. Perhaps you are incorrectly attempting to rely on intuition, and over-simplistic phrases like selection pressures. Intuition is incredibly misleading with evolution.
Your pink and blue example is actually a great model to work from. Think about the genes and the expression of those genes, and then think about what is being selected if all the blue animals are eaten.
Or think about what would happen if there was a mountain range, and pink animals were eaten on one side and blue ones were eaten on the other side.
Or think about what if one of the blue fathers has pink polka dots that gave it a 10% better chance of survival.
Always concentrate on watching that genes are passed on by reproduction - getting eaten doesn't have to be a problem if reproduction has already occurred (unless parental investment is needed or you get complicated like kin selection).
I am not a biologist. But 'The Selfish Gene' is one of my favourite books because of the concepts within. Unfortunately I think Dawkins went off the deep end later (with what I thought was religious zeal). The Extended Phenotype is even harder to read, but also worthwhile.
It is a fun topic because many phrases about evolution seem misleadingly about death rather than reproduction. And the meaning of the word evolution is absolutely twisted in everyday conversation. Ignoring the troubles with bible bashers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest - "fittest" has an unobvious meaning.
It’s important for you to hear that this kind of syntax thing really, really doesn’t matter that much. Having this kind of complaint about languages is a sign that you haven’t worked on compilers or learned about the field of programming language theory. Which is fine! But worth knowing that there are more interesting and important things to argue about.
Aspects of language design that are way more important are: the semantics, including type system, memory model, concurrency model, module system and so on; tooling; performance; FFI and OS interface; and lots of other things.
The reason these things matter more than surface-level syntax stuff is that they change what kinds of problems you can solve with the language, and what tradeoffs you’ll accept if you use it.
Of course, hyperpalatable syntax can be a factor in a language’s success, like Python. But at this point it’s Python’s ecosystem that perpetuates its dominance, and if they made some syntax changes it wouldn’t change that by much.
In response to GP post, it's a valid concerns to programmers (to some extend to machine in form of AI/LLM code generation cost see ref [1]), and certainly we have nice things in programming language as D language aptly shows.
>Aspects of language design that are way more important are: the semantics, including type system, memory model, concurrency model, module system and so on; tooling; performance; FFI and OS interface; and lots of other things.
D have pretty much all of aspects of your main concerns and being much better than Rust and Go [1].
[1] Language Plasticity is More Important Than Ever:
Scraping would be costly in this world: scrapers would have to spend tokens in order to get the webpage.
But, in this world, the website owner would receive tokens that they can then use to do whatever they want, including paying for servers and bandwidth. This is the sense in which the cycles aren’t wasted: the website owner now has cash to spend.
Effectively, both scrapers and ordinary users would be paying for the privilege of getting website bytes.
This also solves the problem of having to wait for your phone to solve the challenge while you’re browsing: you can buy or mine some tokens ahead of time and pay them as soon as challenged. So can the scrapers, but because they’re accessing enormous numbers of pages it’s hopefully prohibitively expensive for them.
I agree! I came to the comment section to say exactly this. In any cache hierarchy you want to put colder content in cheaper but slower storage. Here, compression is the cheaper but slower form of storage.
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