8 ms·

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the fact that nerds still use that metaphor surprises me) Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). That asteroid's impact resulted in really unusual circumstances where Earth was barely livable for a long period of time because the sky was globally blackened for years and all large plants died. Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features). If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. (this is not a defense of Big Tech, btw)

rezonant 3y ago
> If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. In an absolute sense, probably nothing can, short of society ending cataclysm. In a shareholder sense, I think we're seeing it happen right now.
- asah 3y ago
  Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list. Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materials more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, very reasonably priced and people love them. The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc. Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular. Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water. Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features. As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor). As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet. Meanwhile, vGoogle owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price. Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)
  - anticorporate 3y ago
    > Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. What you're describing is security, not privacy. Privacy is not determined by how far the data is shared. If Google respected privacy, they would not collect most of the information that they do in the first place.
    - asah 3y ago
      true, but let's not paint the bike shed here: you can have all the best policies, and hackers and inside threats ruin all of it. If I'm going to trust a cloud provider with (say) multimedia, I trust YouTube and Google Photos a lot more than random small providers, who sound good until the next hack.
  - GoogEngMgr2024 3y ago
    Google remains … less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking)… This may have been true in 2009. It is no longer true in 2024.
  - ejiblabahaba 3y ago
    With Cloud, as long as you don't mind solving the same problem multiple times every few years when things you depend on go obsolete, indeed it is a nice experience. A lot of people do mind. I won't belabor the point; Steve Yegge said it better[0]. I think some progress has been made on this front, particularly with bigger customers; but even if Google promised decades of backward compatibility tomorrow, Google's reputation would remain its own worst enemy. Search deterioration has a much longer history than ChatGPT, but nice try. Search is an arms race against a functionally infinite tidal wave of spam, much of which is overwhelming websites beyond Google's control that historically populated Google's top search results. Epistemology is hard, the threshold for financially profitable spam is low, and the cost of sophisticated spam is getting exponentially smaller. And the long-term market solution might be someone like OpenAI thoroughly leap-frogging Google's capabilities. This is a bigger risk than you're making it out to be. As far as privacy... Google makes an attempt to follow applicable laws, and in many cases succeeds, but it still ends up constantly trolled by regulators for money or clout. Even setting aside fines-as-taxes and legislative opprobrium, I still don't think "our panopticon strips you of way less dignity than our competitor's" is something to brag about. If you believe the nature and incentive structure of the panopticon is diabolical, businesses that function as panopticons are fundamentally untrustworthy. It doesn't stop me from using Google products and services, but in a "least bad" sense - I'm happy to switch search, email, phone OS, whatever, provided someone can make a more compelling product. I think a lot of people feel similarly. I could argue that Google's open source contributions are largely market suppression tactics to keep the web innovating in a direction that protect's Google's core revenue. This isn't comprehensively a bad thing, as technologies like Chromium and Android are useful. But "our OSS suppresses markets more effectively than our competitors" isn't something to brag about, and combined with those regulatory trolls above, I see this as a big risk factor. All else aside, Google (and for that matter, most of Big Tech) fundamentally relies on massive volumes of hardware manufactured in Taiwan. This isn't even a black swan, it's a sword of Damocles over the entire industry. [0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
Grimblewald 3y ago
building on the dino thing, we've currently hellbent in creating a new dino age it seems. Hot ass planet high in the CO2 required to create thriving lush jungles.
- LoveMortuus 3y ago
  While humans might not survive, the nature will. Should the worst happen. But I'm optimistic that humanity won't let things get this bad.
  - Grimblewald 3y ago
    or humanity begins changing with its environments, becoming smaller to cope better with the extreme heat and humidity and in a few millions years sentient lizards complain on a forum over a bucket of RFH (rogars fried humanoid) about the terror of global cooling and how it's coming for them all.
    - LoveMortuus 3y ago
      That would be interesting, and then I could say that I'm not just 5 3 (158 cm) but I'm also slightly more evolved. Just kidding ^^
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  There was also much more O2 in the atmosphere. Doubtful that's coming back.
  - sojournerc 3y ago
    Plants do this weird thing and turn CO2 into O2. More CO2 means more plants. The earth is greening with the additional atmospheric carbon. https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth-study-finds/ https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...
    - 3y ago
nostrademons 3y ago
This description actually makes me feel like the metaphor is more apt. The dinosaurs went down because they were large, complex lifeforms that required a vibrant, complex ecosystem to support them. Amidst a fundamental shift to that ecosystem, large complex organisms were the first to go down. This is a general pattern - complex systems are always the first to collapse when there's a shift in the ecosystem, because they have more interdependencies. Mammals emerged from the carnage because they were small and nocturnal and could occupy small & simple ecological niches. The original disruptive innovation. As for what will take them down - all large institutions are failing right now. The public education system. The health care system. The government. The mass media. The immigration system, and general idea of national borders. The zoning / building code / housing system. Childcare. Wouldn't surprise me if we see the financial system, currency, and military go down next. The trigger is part climate change, part demographics, part COVID, and part the loss of trust triggered by the Internet and Big Tech, but all of these are fundamental shifts in the foundations of our society that make our society no longer adapted to the ecological niche it grew up in.
- ynniv 3y ago
  I think you're mistaking popularity with power. Big Tech is less cool, but 7/8ths of humanity are under their umbrella.
- spintin 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    be sure to post again when you next emerge from you backyard bunker
    - spintin 3y ago
      "If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds." - C.S. Lewis
yard2010 3y ago
Excuse me if the dinosaurs couldn't handle an asteroid they did not adapt, lost the race and went extinct, good day. The birds adapted well and they're still thriving. There are no laws to the race of life. Just survive and reproduce. If you failed to do either you're out.
- Tistron 3y ago
  Maybe read something like this: https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-origin-of-birds/ https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-origin-... :)
  - YoshiRulz 3y ago
    also https://xkcd.com/1211/ https://xkcd.com/1211/
picadores 3y ago
Turpor after great feasts and the ability to either winter and scurry under the snow - or move migrate away to greener pastures is what saved the day.
zozbot234 3y ago
> Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features). Conspiracy theory: Birds are not real, they're actually dinosaurs.
agumonkey 3y ago
trivia: you just made me wonder what's the etymology of dinosaur, https://www.etymonline.com/word/dinosaur#etymonline_v_8600 https://www.etymonline.com/word/dinosaur#etymonline_v_8600 says it's from "deinos "terrible" (see dire)". seems that from start, people in the field had this view of crippled genus
- sirsinsalot 3y ago
  It means terror inducing, not bad or substandard
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    I was wondering, but etymonline had many many pejorative meanings for "dire" so I assumed dinosaurs too. But wikipedia says like you.
jbaber 3y ago
You're right that big dinosaurs only lost because they were big, not because they were an evolutionary dead end of some sort. From an anthropocentric point of view, though, they seem very dead end. Despite bipedalism and possible warm bloodedness sometimes, they would never use tools. Down so many taxonomic branches, their arms would shrink away and their jaws become enormous. Nothing to motivate any of those lizards to get big brains -- something anthropos value highly :)
DonHopkins 3y ago
>If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. Another Trump presidency.
ak_111 3y ago
Tangent: I thought you were going to hate the inflection point metaphor (and hence started your post with a pun about it). The point being inflection points mathematically speaking don't usually imply a peak, rather a change in concavity (which might still be increasing). It would be better for people to say something like "...it feels like we reached a high water mark..." to stress they worry about a certain maxima being hit.
- wavemode 3y ago
  Well, you can't change to concave down without eventually either hitting a maximum or another inflection point, right? Could be apt, given that most big tech companies are still growing in strength, for now. Just not as rapidly.
_Algernon_ 3y ago
Just because extinction of a species occurs because of a rare Black Swan event doesn't mean that it isn't evolution. (Large) dinosaurs were in fact an evolutionary dead end when it comes to the threat of large asteroids crashing into the planet.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
naasking 3y ago
> Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). The inability to avert or survive through an extinction level event literally proves that they are an evolutionary dead end. Extinction level events are inevitable. Humanity has the potential to deflect or destroy such asteroids (and other such events), thus we have the potential to not be an evolutionary dead end.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  Ironically, we only have that ability because the dinosaurs all died millions of years ago and we got to use their energy.
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    Two common mistakes regarding oil and gas: 1. it's not goopy, bubbling tar in giant cavernous pools 2. it's not dinosaurs, at least in the sense being discussed here
  - naasking 3y ago
    I wouldn't go that far. Fossil fuels helped for sure, but we still had wood as a renewable resource that would have served until we discovered nuclear power.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      I am pretty sure it would not be possible to launch an industrial revolution with just wood. It isn't dense enough energy wise and there isn't nearly enough of it.
  - nialv7 3y ago
    Common misconception, fossil fuels didn't come from dinosaurs. Oil is mostly from aquatic phytoplankton and zooplankton, and coals are from plants.
pyrale 3y ago
> If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. ...Antitrusteroid, the extinction event that transformed the thriving tech behemoths into Standard Oil.
otikik 3y ago
A global pandemic
pm 3y ago
The characterisation is off (stumbling vs. nimble), but the metaphor is apt. Adapt or die.
gumby 3y ago
The metaphor can work to the degree that the dinosaurs succeeded, and the mammals stayed small (occupying a cockroach-like niche) until a large exogenous disruption upended the system. Of course that isn't what happened to the car companies, or the newspapers, or most once large sectors, and I do actually think that the same gradual, rather than abrupt, decay will happen to these big tech companies. In fact we see it already. I strongly believe there's a Hayflick limit to companies; even GE couldn't fight it indefinitely. Also I disagree with "Dinosaurs ... occupied every [animal] niche on the planet." Don't forget arthropoda or the variety in the sea. But maybe that's just a quibble.
- vanderZwan 3y ago
  Right, it can still work, as other commentors also show with their interpretation. However, I'd say that this is only so because we put in the effort to "patch" the metaphor into something the author didn't really say. Also even then a lot of those comments still miss why I take issue with the "evolutionary dead end" implication, which is that it is presented as evolutionary survivors somehow being inherently better compared to what went extinct. Evolutionary dead ends do exist, but in reality extinction often comes down to (un)lucky circumstances. > But maybe that's just a quibble. Heh, maybe, but the quibble is valid. Quibbling over such details is practically how paleonerds show affection, right?
  - gumby 3y ago
    > Also even then a lot of those comments still miss why I take issue with the "evolutionary dead end" implication, which is that it is presented as evolutionary survivors somehow being inherently better compared to what went extinct. Evolutionary dead ends do exist, but in reality extinction often comes down to (un)lucky circumstances. Yes, it a misunderstanding of evolutio, ascribing some sort of teleology on a inherent process as purposeful as multiplication.

rezonant 3y ago

> If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. In an absolute sense, probably nothing can, short of society ending cataclysm. In a shareholder sense, I think we're seeing it happen right now.

asah 3y ago
Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list. Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materials more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, very reasonably priced and people love them. The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc. Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular. Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water. Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features. As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor). As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet. Meanwhile, vGoogle owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price. Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)
- anticorporate 3y ago
  > Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. What you're describing is security, not privacy. Privacy is not determined by how far the data is shared. If Google respected privacy, they would not collect most of the information that they do in the first place.
  - asah 3y ago
    true, but let's not paint the bike shed here: you can have all the best policies, and hackers and inside threats ruin all of it. If I'm going to trust a cloud provider with (say) multimedia, I trust YouTube and Google Photos a lot more than random small providers, who sound good until the next hack.
- GoogEngMgr2024 3y ago
  Google remains … less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking)… This may have been true in 2009. It is no longer true in 2024.
- ejiblabahaba 3y ago
  With Cloud, as long as you don't mind solving the same problem multiple times every few years when things you depend on go obsolete, indeed it is a nice experience. A lot of people do mind. I won't belabor the point; Steve Yegge said it better[0]. I think some progress has been made on this front, particularly with bigger customers; but even if Google promised decades of backward compatibility tomorrow, Google's reputation would remain its own worst enemy. Search deterioration has a much longer history than ChatGPT, but nice try. Search is an arms race against a functionally infinite tidal wave of spam, much of which is overwhelming websites beyond Google's control that historically populated Google's top search results. Epistemology is hard, the threshold for financially profitable spam is low, and the cost of sophisticated spam is getting exponentially smaller. And the long-term market solution might be someone like OpenAI thoroughly leap-frogging Google's capabilities. This is a bigger risk than you're making it out to be. As far as privacy... Google makes an attempt to follow applicable laws, and in many cases succeeds, but it still ends up constantly trolled by regulators for money or clout. Even setting aside fines-as-taxes and legislative opprobrium, I still don't think "our panopticon strips you of way less dignity than our competitor's" is something to brag about. If you believe the nature and incentive structure of the panopticon is diabolical, businesses that function as panopticons are fundamentally untrustworthy. It doesn't stop me from using Google products and services, but in a "least bad" sense - I'm happy to switch search, email, phone OS, whatever, provided someone can make a more compelling product. I think a lot of people feel similarly. I could argue that Google's open source contributions are largely market suppression tactics to keep the web innovating in a direction that protect's Google's core revenue. This isn't comprehensively a bad thing, as technologies like Chromium and Android are useful. But "our OSS suppresses markets more effectively than our competitors" isn't something to brag about, and combined with those regulatory trolls above, I see this as a big risk factor. All else aside, Google (and for that matter, most of Big Tech) fundamentally relies on massive volumes of hardware manufactured in Taiwan. This isn't even a black swan, it's a sword of Damocles over the entire industry. [0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

Grimblewald 3y ago

building on the dino thing, we've currently hellbent in creating a new dino age it seems. Hot ass planet high in the CO2 required to create thriving lush jungles.

LoveMortuus 3y ago
While humans might not survive, the nature will. Should the worst happen. But I'm optimistic that humanity won't let things get this bad.
- Grimblewald 3y ago
  or humanity begins changing with its environments, becoming smaller to cope better with the extreme heat and humidity and in a few millions years sentient lizards complain on a forum over a bucket of RFH (rogars fried humanoid) about the terror of global cooling and how it's coming for them all.
  - LoveMortuus 3y ago
    That would be interesting, and then I could say that I'm not just 5 3 (158 cm) but I'm also slightly more evolved. Just kidding ^^
paulryanrogers 3y ago
There was also much more O2 in the atmosphere. Doubtful that's coming back.
- sojournerc 3y ago
  Plants do this weird thing and turn CO2 into O2. More CO2 means more plants. The earth is greening with the additional atmospheric carbon. https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth-study-finds/ https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...
  - 3y ago

nostrademons 3y ago

This description actually makes me feel like the metaphor is more apt. The dinosaurs went down because they were large, complex lifeforms that required a vibrant, complex ecosystem to support them. Amidst a fundamental shift to that ecosystem, large complex organisms were the first to go down. This is a general pattern - complex systems are always the first to collapse when there's a shift in the ecosystem, because they have more interdependencies. Mammals emerged from the carnage because they were small and nocturnal and could occupy small & simple ecological niches. The original disruptive innovation. As for what will take them down - all large institutions are failing right now. The public education system. The health care system. The government. The mass media. The immigration system, and general idea of national borders. The zoning / building code / housing system. Childcare. Wouldn't surprise me if we see the financial system, currency, and military go down next. The trigger is part climate change, part demographics, part COVID, and part the loss of trust triggered by the Internet and Big Tech, but all of these are fundamental shifts in the foundations of our society that make our society no longer adapted to the ecological niche it grew up in.

ynniv 3y ago
I think you're mistaking popularity with power. Big Tech is less cool, but 7/8ths of humanity are under their umbrella.
spintin 3y ago
[flagged]
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  be sure to post again when you next emerge from you backyard bunker
  - spintin 3y ago
    "If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds." - C.S. Lewis

yard2010 3y ago

Excuse me if the dinosaurs couldn't handle an asteroid they did not adapt, lost the race and went extinct, good day. The birds adapted well and they're still thriving. There are no laws to the race of life. Just survive and reproduce. If you failed to do either you're out.

Tistron 3y ago
Maybe read something like this: https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-origin-of-birds/ https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-origin-... :)
- YoshiRulz 3y ago
  also https://xkcd.com/1211/ https://xkcd.com/1211/

picadores 3y ago

Turpor after great feasts and the ability to either winter and scurry under the snow - or move migrate away to greener pastures is what saved the day.

zozbot234 3y ago

> Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features). Conspiracy theory: Birds are not real, they're actually dinosaurs.

agumonkey 3y ago

trivia: you just made me wonder what's the etymology of dinosaur, https://www.etymonline.com/word/dinosaur#etymonline_v_8600 https://www.etymonline.com/word/dinosaur#etymonline_v_8600 says it's from "deinos "terrible" (see dire)". seems that from start, people in the field had this view of crippled genus

sirsinsalot 3y ago
It means terror inducing, not bad or substandard
- agumonkey 3y ago
  I was wondering, but etymonline had many many pejorative meanings for "dire" so I assumed dinosaurs too. But wikipedia says like you.

jbaber 3y ago

You're right that big dinosaurs only lost because they were big, not because they were an evolutionary dead end of some sort. From an anthropocentric point of view, though, they seem very dead end. Despite bipedalism and possible warm bloodedness sometimes, they would never use tools. Down so many taxonomic branches, their arms would shrink away and their jaws become enormous. Nothing to motivate any of those lizards to get big brains -- something anthropos value highly :)

DonHopkins 3y ago

>If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. Another Trump presidency.

ak_111 3y ago

Tangent: I thought you were going to hate the inflection point metaphor (and hence started your post with a pun about it). The point being inflection points mathematically speaking don't usually imply a peak, rather a change in concavity (which might still be increasing). It would be better for people to say something like "...it feels like we reached a high water mark..." to stress they worry about a certain maxima being hit.

wavemode 3y ago
Well, you can't change to concave down without eventually either hitting a maximum or another inflection point, right? Could be apt, given that most big tech companies are still growing in strength, for now. Just not as rapidly.

_Algernon_ 3y ago

Just because extinction of a species occurs because of a rare Black Swan event doesn't mean that it isn't evolution. (Large) dinosaurs were in fact an evolutionary dead end when it comes to the threat of large asteroids crashing into the planet.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

naasking 3y ago

> Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). The inability to avert or survive through an extinction level event literally proves that they are an evolutionary dead end. Extinction level events are inevitable. Humanity has the potential to deflect or destroy such asteroids (and other such events), thus we have the potential to not be an evolutionary dead end.

Eisenstein 3y ago
Ironically, we only have that ability because the dinosaurs all died millions of years ago and we got to use their energy.
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  Two common mistakes regarding oil and gas: 1. it's not goopy, bubbling tar in giant cavernous pools 2. it's not dinosaurs, at least in the sense being discussed here
- naasking 3y ago
  I wouldn't go that far. Fossil fuels helped for sure, but we still had wood as a renewable resource that would have served until we discovered nuclear power.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    I am pretty sure it would not be possible to launch an industrial revolution with just wood. It isn't dense enough energy wise and there isn't nearly enough of it.
- nialv7 3y ago
  Common misconception, fossil fuels didn't come from dinosaurs. Oil is mostly from aquatic phytoplankton and zooplankton, and coals are from plants.

pyrale 3y ago

> If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. ...Antitrusteroid, the extinction event that transformed the thriving tech behemoths into Standard Oil.

otikik 3y ago

A global pandemic

pm 3y ago

The characterisation is off (stumbling vs. nimble), but the metaphor is apt. Adapt or die.

gumby 3y ago

The metaphor can work to the degree that the dinosaurs succeeded, and the mammals stayed small (occupying a cockroach-like niche) until a large exogenous disruption upended the system. Of course that isn't what happened to the car companies, or the newspapers, or most once large sectors, and I do actually think that the same gradual, rather than abrupt, decay will happen to these big tech companies. In fact we see it already. I strongly believe there's a Hayflick limit to companies; even GE couldn't fight it indefinitely. Also I disagree with "Dinosaurs ... occupied every [animal] niche on the planet." Don't forget arthropoda or the variety in the sea. But maybe that's just a quibble.

vanderZwan 3y ago
Right, it can still work, as other commentors also show with their interpretation. However, I'd say that this is only so because we put in the effort to "patch" the metaphor into something the author didn't really say. Also even then a lot of those comments still miss why I take issue with the "evolutionary dead end" implication, which is that it is presented as evolutionary survivors somehow being inherently better compared to what went extinct. Evolutionary dead ends do exist, but in reality extinction often comes down to (un)lucky circumstances. > But maybe that's just a quibble. Heh, maybe, but the quibble is valid. Quibbling over such details is practically how paleonerds show affection, right?
- gumby 3y ago
  > Also even then a lot of those comments still miss why I take issue with the "evolutionary dead end" implication, which is that it is presented as evolutionary survivors somehow being inherently better compared to what went extinct. Evolutionary dead ends do exist, but in reality extinction often comes down to (un)lucky circumstances. Yes, it a misunderstanding of evolutio, ascribing some sort of teleology on a inherent process as purposeful as multiplication.