it's impossible to prove the counterfactual (I guess, as I imagine we don't have enough gene information that far back). But I'd imagine that the high calorie food you can get starting with the advent of agriculture is exactly what could drive evolution in a certain direction that helps brains grow. We've had ~1000 generations since then, that should be enough for some change to happen. Our brains use up 20% of the body's energy. Do we know that this was already the case during the stone age?
The advent of agriculture did not provide better food, it was just the only solution to avoid extinction due to the lack of food.
The archaeological evidence shows that for many generations the first neolithic farmers had serious health problems in comparison with their ancestors. Therefore it is quite certain that they did not transition to agriculture willingly, but to avoid starvation.
Later, when the agriculturalists have displaced everywhere the hunter-gatherers, they did not succeed to do this because they were individually better fed or stronger or smarter, but only because there were much more of them.
The hunter-gatherers required very large territories from which to obtain enough food. For a given territory size, practicing agriculture could sustain a many times greater population, and this was its advantage.
The maximum human brain size had been reached hundreds of thousands years before the development of agriculture, and it regressed a little after that.
There is a theory, which I consider plausible, that the great increase in size of the human brain has been enabled by the fact that humans were able to extract bone marrow from bones, which provided both the high amount of calories and the long-chain fatty acids that are required for a big brain.
I've seen the bone marrow hypothesis also, which is very interesting. Afaik. evidence shows at least that there was enough specialization during neolithic era to have bone marrow cooks where the hunters delivered their bones. Something you wouldn't expect based on just school knowledge (at least back in 90s/2000s).
I see your point about agriculture at first degrading quality of food. Are you aware of evidence of brain size degrading even? Is it visible in the temple bones?
why is there even an expectation / requirement that a POC's code should be taken into production? wouldn't you be much faster to just regenerate from scratch, but this time with your proper architectural guidelines in a planning document and with proper code reviews in place?
I feel often codes from a manger do not go through rigorous code review process, especially if it is a POC. In my case, because of 1 to 10 signal to ratio, it was hard to pin point which parts actually did the jobs done. I am setting things properly this time, me as a maintainer. Thanks for commenting.
Author here. I'd be very interested in how other European software startups solve payments. Do you have a solid EU-based provider that didn't give you too many hoops to jump through?
Afaik a lot of it is ntfs. It’s just so slow with lots of small files. Compare unzipping moderately large source repos on windows vs. POSIX, it’s day and night.
A big part of it is that NT has to check with the security manager service every time it does a file operation.
The original WSL for instance was a very NT answer to the problem of Linux compatibility: NT already had a personality that looked like Windows 95, just make one that looks like Linux. It worked great with the exception of the slow file operations which I think was seen as a crisis over Redmond because many software developers couldn’t or wouldn’t use WSL because of the slow file operations affecting many build systems. So we got the rather ugly WSL2 which uses a real Linux filesystem so the files perform like files on Linux.
I don't know about ugly. Virtualization seems like a more elegant solution to the problem, as I see it. Though it also makes WSL pointless; I don't get why people use it instead of just using Hyper-V.
Honestly, just cause it's easier if you've never done any kind of container or virtual os stuff before. It comes out of the box with windows, it's like a 3 click install and it usually "just works". Most people just want to run Linux things and don't care too much about the rest of the process
This looks like an underhanded comment about Openclaw. Tbf. I might be exactly that kinda person the site is referring to, but I have a really hard time seeing this thing as any more than one of those blips on the radar that gets forgotten about quickly again, e.g. more clubhouse (remember that?) and less dropbox.
It's already proven to not be just a blip on the radar. Even if everyone forgets about it today.
He got 221000 (as of today) GitHub stars, motivated thousands of projects, and immediately some of the largest companies on the planet attempted to hire him. And he settled on a job with the most popular AI company. The guy who invented the term "vibe coding" declared that tools like his were a new category above LLM agents.
But your comment is just dismissive.
I think the point of the HN love thing is that if founders take the tone of individual comments like yours or the overall HN response to heart, then that could be a fatal mistake.
If he had posted earlier and gone by comments like yours that dismissed it, then that would indicate he should not continue to put energy into it. Why would he have kept putting his time into something that the only thing worth saying about it is that it's going to be a blip on the radar?
You're describing almost verbatim what we're building at Octigen [1]! Happy to provide a demo and/or give you free access to our alpha version already online.
and if you're unlucky to live close to a datacenter, this could include energy and water? I sure hope regulators are waking up as free markets don't really seem equipped to deal with this kind of concentration of power.
We are certainly seeing citizens wake up to it. There was a proposal for a new datacenter to be built near where I live which was to be voted on, and a large majority of the people voted against it. No one wants higher power and water bills.
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