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>a [jumbled] mess of wires and logic gates that somehow works to do computation You could create this situation explicitly using FPGAs. >no concept of "abstra
by javajosh 5y ago
>a [jumbled] mess of wires and logic gates that somehow works to do computation
You could create this situation explicitly using FPGAs.
>no concept of "abstraction", adherence to standards or even a logical, coherent design
There's no concept of abstraction, but there is remarkable consistency in the genetic code for all that. The fact that these tiny machines are understandable at all is remarkable. Our biosphere is effectively a single process with an uptime of ~4 billion years, including the ability to recover from meteor strikes that killed off 99% of species, multiple times (albeit with different species!)
- medstrom 5y agoNone of the mass extinctions killed 99%. The worst one, the Permian-Triassic extinction event, killed 83% of genera. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_ev...
- labster 5y agoWait until 2100. We’ll have 99% of species gone, and we don’t even have to change what we’re doing.
- Enginerrrd 5y agoCan you provide a source for that assertion? It sounds unlikely to be true, but I'd like to know if it's true.
- labster 5y agoSource is my depression, sense of powerlessness about the future, and listening to too much Bernie talking about what the 1% is going to do to the 99%. Logically, I know this can’t be worse than the K-T boundary, where a whole continent of forests simultaneously caught fire, and a hypercane formed over the Yucatán. On the first day. But it sure feels that bad. We live in a world people flip out because one wolf was reintroduced to a broken ecosystem yet no one gives a shit about the million people a year who die from fossil fuel air pollution. That one’s real: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/fossil-fuel-combustion-kills-more-than-1-million-people-every-year-study-says/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/fossil-fuel-combusti...
- oarabbus_ 5y agoHumans today enjoy higher standards of living, increased access to food, water, medication, and shelter than any other time period in human history. There can high levels of inequality, yet this can still be true.