jononomo

I read the entire article based on the misconception that the title was "At some point, JavaScript not good", which I thought was an amusing title, and also a pithy way to express what I've felt for a long time. So I read and read, expecting to get to the part where the author explains why JavaScript is not good at some point. But it never came.

I spent four years building an in-browser digital ad auction manager in JavaScript that truly bent my mind and that also delivered millions of dollars in ad revenue. You would think I would come away from that experience thinking "I know JavaScript", but I instead I came away thinking "That was hell, I never want to work in JavaScript again".

I worked on that project over the time period when ES6 was introduced and also later transitioned everything to TypeScript. I agree that things got better, but I still think that JavaScript is pathetic.

In what sense is shadcn not framework agnostic?

Why would you hit `5j` when you could just hold `j` down for an extra tenth of a second and then just literally put your finger/cursor on any line you want?

using Vim without using h, k, j, and l for navigation is incomprehensible for me. 20% of the keystrokes that I perform in command mode must belong to that group of four keyboard navigation moves.

In fact, I have Vim mode turned on in all contexts where it is possible -- in my terminal, in any editor I use, etc. It is difficult for me to properly edit text without Vim mode, honestly.

But not using h, k, j, and l would cripple my productivity in command mode. It allows me to zip down 6-8 lines just by holding the j key down for an extra split second, or 6-8 lines up with k key -- and I can control exactly which line to stop on by lifting my finger.

It pains me to think of not having this at my fingertips.

$4800?

No, life is not simply anything that is very complex.

Another example of evolution deleting something instead of creating something. It is bizarre how many examples that people cite demonstrating evolution are actually demonstrating devolution.

Can you think of anything that might distinguish the complexity of life from the complexity of the clouds of Jupiter? Or do you think life is simply a nonsense concept?

I disagree. I think that life is a unique case.

Then falsify my hypothesis by coming up with some plausible materialistic mechanism to account for the existence of life.

You realize that those two ideas are identical, right? RIGHT??

Yes, I bite the bullet on the God of the Gaps. What I object to is materialism of the gaps. At least God has explanatory power. Materialism does not.

No. Biology is unique in the sense that life is the creation of God and is far more complex and awe-inspiring than any other subject.

> It is looking for any change in sequence with a positive payoff

The entire reason I used the example of the combination lock was so that hopefully you would understand situations in which "any change in sequence with a positive payoff" is a nonsense concept. You either get the correct combination or don't get any positive payoff whatsoever.

When you are trying "millions or billions" of genetic variations are being explored at any point in time, as you point out, you are off by so many orders of magnitude in terms of the search space that you need to explore that the problem is intractable.

You may as well tell me that you can guess a random password that I come up with because you have a way to test millions or billions of combinations at a time. That's great, but I can come up with a random password that it would take you from now until the end of the universe to guess even if you guess quadrillions of possibilities at a time because I can create a password that would require you to test 10^84 possibilities.

So you believe in a "force" that creates life?

There are single proteins that need to "evolve" somehow, but they need to arrive at a very particular shape, and extremely near misses offer no feedback information and are just as good as dead.

But the combinations of amino acid sequences they would have to search through in order to find the correct shape is so large that it is greater by several orders of magnitude than the sum total number of all the organisms that have ever lived on Earth since the beginning of time (which is about 10^40, I think).

So your claim that "evolution just tries so many billions of options, man" just doesn't hold water.

There was a time, back during the 1960s, I'm told, when mathematicians in the academy would openly mock evolutionary biologists for their lack of understanding of statistics. But then political correctness took over or something.

The thermostat was ultimately designed by a mind that has objectives. That is why it tries to control the temperature.

Natural Selection is not the interesting part, though. Natural Selection is the boring part. Obviously a working system will be selected over one that doesn't work.

The interesting question is where the working system that Natural Selection was able to select came from in the first place.

Cracks me up how everyone seems to think this is the result of randomness and not of intelligent design.

People looked down on gambling in the old days not because the casinos were run by organized crime but because there was an understanding that gambling was motivated by greed and often caused people to waste a lot of time and lose all their money and there was no upside to it for society.

You think it is "fun" but actually it is "despair"

If you went back a full generation you would notice a very different attitude in society toward gambling. It used to really be frowned upon.

My mother, who was born in 1935, will not even buy a entry for a church fundraising raffle because that is "gambling" and she was raised by good Presbyterian teetotalers who absolutely did not approve of gambling in any form whatsoever.

A bit of that attitude leached off on me as well, but I have noticed that it is almost completely vanished from American culture.

Gambling used to be something that whole swaths of society looked upon with absolute contempt as nothing but an unmitigated vice.

Not at all. I'm just pointing out that freedom of speech is more important than anything else on Earth.

It is important to remember that freedom of speech is more important than having a functioning society of a healthy populace.

My workout buddy at the Y related the following story to me this morning:

Yesterday his 11-year-old daughter was without her phone because she was being punished for something or other. They did various activities throughout the day and my buddy noticed that his daughter was noticeably happier and more engaged than she usually was -- he mentioned looking at ferrets at the mall and playing a card game, etc.

He said that had she had her phone with her then there is no way she would have been as interested and engaged in the world as she was that day and that she would have been smiling and laughing less and just been generally less happy overall.

But, nevertheless, she continually begged for her phone back throughout the day.

He had noticed this pattern over time, my buddy said, and it was like you could just give her the phone and then watch her become withdrawn, sad, and angry, or you could take the phone away and watch her become smiling, happy, and engaged but then also beg to have her phone back so that she could be withdrawn, sad and angry.

Just for more context, she was adopted out of the foster care system about five years ago and she seems to need to create a lot of drama at school for some reason.

Do you remember the dot com boom of the late 90s, though?

I have been a standardized test coach and I can assure you that standardized tests are not as coachable as people think they are. Students plateau pretty quickly and you simply can't move their scores higher.

Are you still under 40?

Yes. There was a conference on this in 2016: https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-seek-to-update-evo...

You can also read my other comment on this topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37014923