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Comment by hollowturtle | Hacker News Reader

Why should we throw away decades of development in determistic algorithms? Why tech people mentions "geneticists"? I would never select an algorithm with a "good" flying trait for making an airplane works, that's nuts

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But you have selected an algorithm with a "good" flying trait already for making airplanes. Just with another avenue to get to it versus pure random generation. The evolution of the bird has came up with another algorithm for example, where they use flapping wings instead of thrust from engines. Even among airplane development, a lot was learned by studying birds, which are the result of a random walk algorithm.

No there is no selection and no traits to pick, it's the culmination of research and human engineering. An airplan is a complex system that needs serious engineering. You can study birs but up till a certain point, if you like it go doing bird watching, but it's everything except engineering

>it's the culmination of research and human engineering.

And how is this different than the process of natural selection? More fit ideas win out relative to less fit and are iterated upon.

First of all natural selection doesn't happen per se, nor is controlled by some inherent mechanism, it's the by product of many factors external and internal. So the comparison is just wrong. Human engineering is an interative process not a selection. And if we want to call it selection, even though it is a stretch, we're controlling it, we the master of puppets, natural selection is anything but a controlled process. We don't select a more resistant wing, we engineer the wing with a high bending tolerance, again it's an iterative process

We do select for a more resistant wing. How did we determine that this wing is more resistant? We modeled its bending tolerance and selected this particular design against other designs that had worse evaluated results for bending tolerance.

And that, my friend, is just engineering, like I said above it's an iterative process. There is no "natural selection" from random shaped wings

First, how did we model the bending tolerance if everything is just randomness?

Second, there are other algorithms that constructively find a solution and don't work at all like genetic algorithms, such as mathematical solvers.

Third, sometimes, a design is also simply thought up by a human, based on their own professional skills and past experience.

Yes, and it was an intentional process.

Natural selectiom:

- is not an intentional process

- does not find "the strongest the fittest the fastest etc."

By that logic, everything humans do is per definition result of natural selection. Everything is a sphere if you zoom out far enough.

However your starting definition was more limited. it was specifically about "creating candidates at random, then just picking the one that performs best" - and that's definitely not how airplanes are designed.

(It's not even how LLMs work, in fact)

Great rule of business: sell a solution that causes more problems, requiring the purchase of more solutions.

Customers are tired of getting piles of shit, look at the Windows situation

Or don't sell the solution. When you have monopolies, regulatory capture, and endless mountains of money, you can more or less do what you'd like.

That's a lie, people will eventually find a way out, it was always like that, being it open source or by innovating and eventually leave the unable to innovate tech giants dying. We have Linux and this year will be the most exciting for the Linux desktop given how bad the Windows situation is

Only been hearing that for twenty years and these tech giants are bigger than they’ve ever been.

I remember when people said Open Office was going to be the default because it was open source, etc etc etc. It never happened. Got forked. Still irrelevant.

I said "being it open source or by innovating" eg Google innovated and killed many, also contributed a lot to open source. Android is a Linux success, ChromeOS too. Now Google stinks and it is not innovating anymore, except for when other companies, like OpenAI, come for their lunch. Google was caught off guard but eventually catching up. Sooner or later, big tech gets eaten by next big tech. I agree if we stop innovating that would never happen, like Open Office is the worst example you could have picked

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