lisper

> it's equally likely that mitochondria's precursors were self interested parasites or predators

That is in no way at odds with what I said.

> I am talking about the specific and highly unusual behavior of crawling inside of a much larger animal's mouth and trusting it not to eat you.

OK.

> Cleaner fish are highly intelligent[1]

Yes.

> and it appears that this intelligence is necessary

Manifestly not, at least not in general.

> for their niche:

That is an open question. Just because an unintelligent cleaner fish hasn't evolved doesn't mean it couldn't.

Cooperation and symbiosis are very general survival strategies. They apear at all levels of the biological abstraction hierarchy, all the way down to mitochondria, which are almost certainly descended from what was once an independent organism. In fact, even a genome itself can be seen as a collection of mutually cooperating replicators. No intelligence is required for cooperation to evolve. It's a straightforward consequence of game theory.

Well, at least the author is honest about it:

> The title of this post is an intentional clickbait.

Unfortunately, that's where the honesty ends.

> It's NOT OK to compare floating-points using epsilons.

> So, are epsilons good or bad? Usually bad, but sometimes okay.

So which is it? Emphatically NOT OK, or sometimes okay?

Just put a parachute on the asteroid.

;-)

Want to bet?

It worked for me. ;-)

> it's impossible for a dumb person to pretend they're smart.

Unfortunately, that's not true. It's actually pretty easy to convince dumb people that you're smart, and so even dumb people can learn that skill. Myriad successful careers and even entire industries have been built on that foundation.

Nope. Came close, though Apollo 10 came closer. But there's a reason that Apollo 11 is the one everyone remembers.

Because we are not going back to the moon. A flyby is going to the moon in the same way that driving by the Anaheim exit on I-5 is going to Disneyland.

> I didn't read that as saying anything about your character

I didn't take it that way, I just wanted to make sure there was no misunderstanding. This is an emotionally charged topic.

Thank you. But he was two months shy of his 90th birthday and, except for struggles with osteoarthritis and Parkinson's, he had a good run. I'm sad that he's gone, but it's not like it took anyone by surprise. And I'm glad that his suffering, which towards the end was not insignificant (though he was very stoic about it), is over.

The last week has actually been pretty (ahem) interesting in a lot of ways. I should probably write a blog post about it.

> There is, however, ALWAYS money for the colorful glossy brochures

OMG, so much this! One of the things that happened after the acquisition is that they changed the phones to play a marketing pitch whenever you were on hold. (They even did this on the resident's phones!) One of the things the pitch said was that the place featured "chef-inspired meals" which was about as disconnected as you could possibly get from what I knew first-hand to be reality. It was one of the most bald-faced lies I have ever heard in my life, and it really steamed my clams because I knew there was nothing I could do about it.

> There’s lots of markets that are okay-ish notwithstanding scummy people.

It is not at all clear to me that there are "lots" of such markets, but that is neither here nor there. A prerequisite for an okay-ish market is that buyers need to be able to choose not to buy, and when you have literal limited mobility it becomes very difficult to walk away from your housing and care provider, either literally or figuratively.

To be fair, my mother had cancer and my father had Parkinson's, and that was a much bigger factor in their ultimate quality of life than any deficiencies in the retirement home they found themselves in. So I don't mean "thankfully" in the sense that "thankfully they died prematurely so they didn't have to suffer under their home's new management", I mean it, "Thankfully the natural course of their lives timed their deaths so that they were minimally affected by the new management."

But yeah, it kinda sucks, and not just for the residents who are still there. It sucks for the rank-and-file staff as well, most of whom still really care about their clients, but who now have to answer to people who absolutely do not care about anything other than money.

That was my parents' original plan. But they were in denial about how much preparation would be needed to make that happen. They lived in a split-level house and my father had severe osteoarthritis in his knees. It's actually a miracle that he didn't fall and break his neck going up and down the stairs. But one day he fell in the shower and could not get back up, and that was the beginning of the end.

My parents ended up being forced by circumstances to move into a retirement home about five years ago. Fortunately, the place turned out to be run by people who mostly cared about their clients and so my parents' lives were basically OK, except that the food sucked (which AFAICT is par for the course at retirement homes). But a few months ago the place was acquired by a different company, which is trying to squeeze out higher profits. Staffing and services are being cut, and prices are going up. Even the food got worse, which I didn't think was even possible. The response when someone complains is, "If you don't like it you are free to leave."

Yeah, right. My barely mobile 90-year-old parents, one of whom has Parkinson's, are just going to pack up and go. They know perfectly well that they have a captive audience.

Thankfully, my mother died before the acquisition, and my father died last week, only a few months after the acquisition, so I don't have to deal with this any more. But caveat emptor: if you ever go into a retirement home, think about what will happen if they change ownership. Even if it looks great, or even acceptable, now, there is no guarantee that it will still be great, or even acceptable, tomorrow, unless you somehow manage to negotiate such a guarantee. I have no idea what a contract provision like that would even look like. But I am going to be facing this problem myself some day, so I'd love to hear ideas.

What is stopping them?

The old version of “line up and wait” was “taxi into position and hold”. “Hold short of runway” is still in use but means something different.

NFTs are an attempt to recreate this dynamic in the digital world.

> why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?

Cue the smug Lisp weenies.

So the results are in, and I haven't actually noticed much of a change. Last night I went to sleep after 11 and woke up at 5:30. So apparently night shift by itself doesn't have much of an impact one way or the other, at least not in a week.

Parts of it once were, yes.

Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles. Up until about ten years ago I was a night owl, rarely falling asleep before midnight and rarely waking up before 8. Then I started getting serious about light hygiene and using night shift and now I'm a serious day person, rarely staying awake after 11 and rarely waking up after 7. But the real clincher is that when I travel I don't change the time zone on my computer (because it screws up my calendar). But my sleep cycle continues to track my home time zone for a very long time. I life in California, but at the moment I'm in Hawaii. I've been here three weeks so far. At home I'd fall asleep around 11 and wake up around 7, but here I'm getting sleepy at 9 and waking up at 5.

My wife, on the other hand, is a hard-core night owl even with night shift. So apparently there is a lot of individual variation.

This article has inspired me to do a control experiment by switching night shift off. Check back here in a week or so for the results.

> Plank units are not physical limits on reality itself

We don't actually know that. They might be. Planck units are what happens when GR meets QM and we just don't know yet what happens there.

But as a heuristic, they probably put pretty good bounds on what we can reasonably expect to be technologically achievable before humans go extinct.

Planck units are physical limits. The Planck mass is the limit of the mass of an elementary particle before it would form a black hole.

I have to confess I have not actually done the math.

:-)

Maybe. It's not clear whether these are fundamental limits or merely technological ones. Reversible (i.e. infinitely efficient) computing is theoretically possible.