azakai

50 ms·

601.
by azakai 10y ago
The secular opposition is significant as well (as summarized in e.g. Pinker's The Blank Slate [1]). I don't think we can say either the religious or secular one is clearly larger than the other. [1] https://en.wikipedia
602.
by azakai 10y ago
Darwin discovered the mechanism of natural selection, "survival of the fittest". That requires traits to be heritable, passed from parents to children. Mendel discovered how that works in practice, and in particular, that it was a
603.
by azakai 10y ago
To be fair to Darwin, he proposed another mechanism as well, sexual selection. Also, his two mechanisms were revolutionary at the time, and many decades later remain the most important factors in our understanding of evolution. Yes, the gen
604.
by azakai 10y ago
Depends what you mean by "created in our body by our body." Your body begins with a single human cell, then divides and grows. All those cells have your human DNA. But at some point bacterial cells also appear as part of your body
605.
by azakai 10y ago
> Darwin had not published his ideas, because he was afraid of a backlash. And he had good cause to be worried. Many initial responses were very negative. And although consensus shifted to firm agreement with him, a small but strong oppo
606.
by azakai 10y ago
Yes, some other ideas have been shown valid too, in some specific cases, including aspects of Lamarck's thinking. But I think it's worth stressing that the primary force that drives evolution is still very clearly natural selectio
607.
by azakai 10y ago
Evolution in the sense that Darwin meant it - natural selection - does depend on some specific details of life. Namely, there must be variation in the species, the variation must be heritable, and there must be something that causes some of
608.
by azakai 10y ago
That's not quite right. Yes, on the one hand his discovery wasn't from nowhere. But it was still a breakthrough - there were multiple theories of evolution in circulation, but most we now know were simply wrong (e.g. Lamarck'
609.
by azakai 10y ago
Interesting, but do those holes and such survive the 11,000 years we are talking about here (as opposed to 2,000)? That's so much time it's hard to even imagine. Aside from gradual erosion and settling, wouldn't one major ear
610.
by azakai 10y ago
It's the only permanent one that has remains we can find. But if they built somewhat-permanent structures using only wood and other perishable materials, wouldn't there be no trace of those?
611.
by azakai 10y ago
Sadly it is more complicated - but the document in the link was written before a bunch of problems were found (with things like unreachable code, which is indeed trickier in stack machines than ASTs). (Those problems and their solutions hav
612.
by azakai 10y ago
Yes, the s-expression format has become awkward. There are differences between the s-expression format in the test suite, what browsers will show, and what tools support. You can think of the old s-expression format as a language that compi
613.
by azakai 10y ago
Oh I see, sorry for misunderstanding. Yeah, I think it would have been nice to have text format input support in browsers, but the decision was against that. But you do have other options than emitting binary wasm yourself. You can use a co
614.
by azakai 10y ago
If you want to compile the code as-is, then wabt is the most straightforward tool for that (specifically wast2wasm). If you want to also optimize the code, then binaryen can do both (wasm-opt to optimize, wasm-as to convert to binary). Sinc
615.
by azakai 10y ago
Currently no major browser has significant components implemented in a safe language like Rust. And while there are some efforts towards granular parallelism in existing major browsers, none really took a "start from scratch and get it
616.
by azakai 10y ago
PDF.js worked in my experience too, but it's the usual problem with a massively complex format like PDFs - getting 80% or 90% is feasible, and PDF.js does that great, but getting to 100% - things like forms, etc. - is very, very hard.
617.
by azakai 10y ago
A reasonable theory, but as a minor note most evolutionary biologists wouldn't focus on group survival. Group selection remains controversial. But your point still stands, and has clear parallels in other cases, like sickle-cell anem
618.
by azakai 10y ago
That does support non-genetic factors to some extent, but the existence of such twins matters less than their frequency, because twins don't always have identical DNA (mutations can occur after they separate).
619.
by azakai 10y ago
That's not the same as being cool. Yes, Chrome is extremely popular among that age group, but many popular things aren't cool. For example, the Big Bang Theory is something very popular but even the fans wouldn't say it'
620.
by azakai 10y ago
You ask what causes consciousness and how it emerges, which presupposes something before consciousness - something that can cause it and it can emerge from. Most likely you intend the physical world. Why is consciousness in need of being ex
621.
by azakai 10y ago
Killing millions of people is horrible, but taking away the privacy of billions is terrifying as well. And while obviously murder is worse than stalking, we don't really know where things will end up. We are in uncharted territory with
622.
by azakai 10y ago
Age discrimination and not hiring "overqualified" people are overlapping problems. Older people can often be described as overqualified. It's also unclear whether being overqualified is actually a problem, which you assumed a
623.
by azakai 10y ago
> educated population, business growth, tremendous financial gains for existing property owners. What exactly is he worried about? Traffic? He's probably worried about skyrocketing rent, and overall increases in the cost of living i
624.
by azakai 10y ago
Similar arguments are made when the close ties between the government and say Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street giants are discussed. There is a revolving door there too. Even the most forgiving interpretation of the facts implies that Go
625.
by azakai 10y ago
> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal We don't know that, and probably will never know. The problem is that those societies left little that we can use to learn about them. Our main source of information
626.
by azakai 10y ago
That would be illegal according to this law, I think.
627.
by azakai 10y ago
> The performance/bandwidth benefits of less shitty ads can be had by simply disabling flash and using an ad blocker, and otherwise average people just aren't going to care to switch. I think the point is that average people wo
628.
by azakai 10y ago
Just to add to that, "invented" might give the wrong idea. "Revival" is more accurate. It wasn't used in the day to day, and making it useful that way took some work. But it wasn't invented from nothing. In par
629.
by azakai 10y ago
All JS engines make different tradeoffs, so they are better at some things compared to other engines. For example, Chakra has had full asm.js optimization support for a long time now, while v8 still doesn't (but it's coming). We n
630.
by azakai 10y ago
> This is part of the inspiration for LLVM, or Low Level Virtual Machine, which is a kind of "abstract assembly" that looks vaguely like machine code but is platform-independent. LLVM is not platform-independent. LLVM IR has ba

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