I find it completely unsurprising. Many animal species construct shelters/nests using available materials such as sticks, leaves, mud, etc. Humans are smart, so they do it more creatively, but no doubt our less-intelligent ancestors constructed shelters of some sort.
> Considering beavers make wooden structures for their own benefit and survival
It's more like they have a compulsion to stack wood where they hear running water. The implication here is intention and a cognizance of purpose, which is not unheard of in the animal kingdom but is fairly rare.
We don’t know that it’s purely compulsion, do we? Perhaps they know that still pools of water are best for survival so they’re motivated to prevent water from running away. The level of compulsion could be more sophisticated than we imagine. This seems to be true with many mammals. Not long ago in North America, it wasn’t uncommon to think of dogs as meat-headed automatons. Today it’s common to recognize that they have emotions and personalities much like we do, and there’s little evidence to suggest otherwise. I’m not convinced beavers are like giant fruit flies trying to plug holes.
We have similar compulsions too. Humans have an instinct to seek shelter, for example. You might say "well thats because we are taught this etc etc" but at the same time, all great apes shelter, our hominid ancestors sheltered, we shelter today, there is clearly an instinct to shelter even if we have these conscious thoughts around it. I bet if you had a perfectly feral human and had them in a clearing in a rain storm, they would try and find some shelter from it in the forest without being taught any wilderness survival basics.
This is the reasoning model for modern empiricists:
1. Make a baseless a-priori claim that mistakes what we have evidence of to be the bounded set of what is:
'We have not discovered any social mechanisms in beavers to transmit knowledge across time and space' is transfigurated into 'No social mechanisms exist in beavers to transmit knowledge'
Similarly, having not yet discovered a single reason for my wife to be upset with me, I must recognize that she doesn't have any.
2. Invent a false dichotomy, with one option being totally absurd, the other being your pet theory.
3. Settle on your preconceived notion.
Is it ever possible to transmit knowledge, or anything for that matter not across time and space?
I think a great use case for this technology could be to preserve dying languages. I'm sure a lot of work has already gone into preserving the written form of these languages, but training models on data sets of native speakers could be a way to preserve pronunciation.
I've been hesitant to buy one just because it seems like the screen is subpar. The OLED Switch screen is beautiful, and I'd really like to see something like that in the Steam Deck before purchasing it.
The screen is "good enough" IMO. I definitely like the OLED screen better, but everything behind the screen is well worth it. This has to be my favorite tech gadget of the past several years.
They really thought through things in terms of usability. If you really want to use it as a Linux machine to do certain things, it's there for you. If you're buying it for a kid to play PC games on, it's just as suitable.
Its a meh ips but fortunately u can use a plugin to increase the saturation to make it look better and closer to the bright colors of the OLED. Power of the Linux huh
I'm optimistic that the Deck will just have more "mod parts" later on, maybe including a better screen. It's so repair-friendly you can buy hall effect joysticks made for the Deck and switch them out.
With the abundance of repurposed displays by Waveshare and co., maybe someone will some day come up with a better display module?
BOTW has the controls issue too, absolutely— its scheme is a bit of an oddball compared to other modern over-the-shoulder action adventure games, and that's made it hard for me to jump back in after a period of playing more conventional games like AC, Spider-Man, God of War, etc.
The story though? Lol, BOTW has none. You just show up and chase whatever catches your fancy while the princess hangs out at the castle doing all the work keeping the monster at bay.
I so wanted to like the Witcher, but the controls were absolutely nuts. Actually maybe not that bad (ahem, Outer Wilds). But for a casual gamer they were not intuitive and were extremely forgettable. Plus you couldn't easily go back to the little training dojo.
Good controls and quick review/tutorial seem to be overlooked opportunities for improvement that would dramatically lower the bar for casual gamers who want to play more games but quickly get frustrated by any kind of friction.
("Previously on" or self-evident state is increasingly dead even in TV/series so I guess it's not surprising it's disappearing from games too.)
Are you talking about The Witcher 1? That game had whack controls for sure, and all in all I'd say isn't worth playing.
TW2 and TW3 are some of my favourite games though and IMO had fairly straightforward controls. I do think I switched between playing with controller and keyboard + mouse though, so it may be worth trying controller in the 2nd/3rd games if you hadn't done that.
I played W1 and W3 several times and had no problems with the controls, but I was never able to accommodate with W2 controls, so I never played more than 15 minutes at a time, with many attempts. It was kb + mouse.
I've seen this many times and completely agree. Nearly every issue that I've had managing teams that hasn't easily resolved with communication has come down to ego. I'd go so far as to say that weeding out ego during the hiring process is the most effective thing you can do.
This sounds like you are exactly the manager the article is about: who will not identify poor performance for what it is, and reframes it as an ego/communication/other character problem (usually on the part of the high performer).
This leads to a highly-agreeable, low-performance team.
You have to hire people that don't have big egos, and are also high performers. Some people will obviously be higher performers than others but without egos communication works. If someone is not performing well, everyone should feel open and trusted enough to communicate about it and find a resolution.
If you hire even one person with a big ego communication breaks down and you are in for a really bad time. Pretty much every high performance team knows this and put a lot of effort at weeding these people out.
A lot of it is also setting a good example once you've made the hire through your team and company culture. Hopefully when someone joins the team they will see how others communicate and carry themselves and it will rub off on them. Everyone should have enough respect and trust in everyone else not to have a huge ego even if they might have had one at their previous job where people treated one another poorly.
> It is possible to be disagreeable in a constructive way, combined with a “disagree-and-commit” attitude where the team’s success is the priority.
Disagreement is absolutely key to making a team work. Disagreeing with humility, and trusting others to take disagreement without having their egos involved, is what is needed. Being overly agreeable happens when you don't trust the other person to take your disagreement without ego.
It is possible to be disagreeable in a constructive way, combined with a “disagree-and-commit” attitude where the team’s success is the priority.
However, I agree with you that it is also possible for a bunch of high performing individuals to have toxic personalities and to form a totally dysfunctional team.
Sounds like the effects when a company is blessed with good business for a long time but fails to adapt to upcoming required changed. I have experienced such places and it's real horror to change this situation.
I've used 1Password for the better part of a decade, but I've slowly been weaning off of it. I'm in the Apple ecosystem, and have switched to using keychain for all my passwords.
I was pretty unhappy when 1Password switched to a subscription model, which is partially why I chose to leave.
1Password's mobile experience also isn't great, especially when compared to iOS's native keychain syncing abilities.
All in all, I'm fairly bearish on 1Password for the personal use case. If you're not in the Apple ecosystem, Google has similar capabilities. If you want to be agnostic, then there are free alternatives as well.
I'm sure those are valid use cases. It's just not something I've ever needed in 10 years of 1PW. Keychain covers passwords and credit cards, which are all I need it for.
I may be wrong, but don't taxes at large scale predate Rome by millennia? We have thousands of examples of Babylon's detailed record keeping for taxes, for instance.
We do something very similar to what's laid out here. One note on the On-Call stream though. We've found that On-Call can become a catch-all, and force engineers to work in domains they have no familiarity with. It hasn't worked very well for us.
On-call stream in the context of TFA doesn’t imply carry a pager. It’s a first line of defense role to protect rest of the team from any kinds of interruptions during daily feature development.
We’ve also tried it and as parent describes it can be a bit problematic as you often have domain specific experts within the team, who are the best to solve particular issues, especially as fires often should be put out quickly.
What you need to do in such case is to check if you can accept a slightly longer fire, refrain yourself from interrupting the expert and see the situation as a learning experience. Often debugging something is the best way to learn.
Not necessarily. Before the great filter, there's the jump to multi-cellular life. As far as we know, the symbioses with mitochondria bacteria only happened once, and is the progenesis of all multi-cellular life on earth.
So single-celled life may not be terribly uncommon throughout the cosmos.
> Before the great filter, there's the jump to multi-cellular life.
Well, the filter may exist prior to the jump to multi-cellular life. Finding early life on Mars would necessarily be bad because we would now be able to mostly eliminate that possibility, which means that the probability that the filter is ahead of us increases.
I disagree.
While finding dead life on other planets decreases the probability of some filters, it also increases the probability of other filters.
For example, if we go to every planet in the solar system and see evidence of extinct multi-cellular life, but no sapient life, this would suggest that the filter is indeed behind us, and not in front of us.
I don't think this is right. It moves the filter forward from "no life" to "no intelligent life" (If we have a TON of examples – remember, we are also a data point. so even if we find 200 planets with dead multicellular life, we still have 1/200 making it to spacefaring — that's a huge % when extrapolated out to a galactic scale! It's a large enough % that I don't even find this to be a meaningful prior adjustment).
It also adds no information as to which, if any, filters are in front of us. How would "lot of dead fish" help us understand "do civilizations destroy themselves with nuclear weapons"?
I agree with the first part, but not the second. Agreed it would rule out some early filters. But for the second part, the ratio doesn't go to 1 in 200. That's not how the anthropic principle works. You're already assuming that the Earth is extraordinary oh, so you can't just put it in the data set. Instead you would look at 199 out of 199 planets where sapient life capable of making an observation failed to develop.
Agreed that it provides no data on future filters ahead of us
> Agreed that it provides no data on future filters ahead of us
This was my instinct, too, after reading both of your posts, but on reflection I think that it's unlikely to be no information.
If we instead found 199 examples of extinct complex life (say, fossilized rodent-like creatures), instead of extinct simple life, we all probably agree that this would increase the odds of the filter being in front of us.
Now, imagine gradually changing the example from extinct complex life (rodent-type creatures) and going down to extinct simple life. At what point in this thought experiment does it become "no data"?
I guess I agree that discovering extinct life is information about probabilistic filters in earths future. I
But, it does have to be weighed against the newly observed data supporting filters humans have already past.
To take your example, as we keep finding rodent fossils, we become more confident that a filter exists between rat and rocket-men. As we go from 0 planets with rodent fossils to 1 trillion planets, the probability that this is the filter keeps going up.
That is to say, we are not only decreasing the chance of pre-rat filters, but simultaneously increasing the chance that the filter is in the rat stage.
