this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ah yes, computer programming, the leader in biological sciences.

It was not on my bingo card today to witness someone attempt to ascribe legitimacy to intelligent design through application of computer programming concepts but here we are.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's an old creationist ploy. DNA is like a computer program, which implies there must have been a programmer, yadda yadda, just asking questions, wharblgarbl, brave scientists are speaking up and challenging the Darwinist regime.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

A lot of things in programming are in fact evidence of natural selection rather than intelligent design.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

my brain just came up with the shitpost of "intelligent design ~= seeded random" and now you get to suffer from it too

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Calling your own mewling drivel "Programmer Theory" is an A+ dipshit move.

[–] Beryl 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Spoken like someone who doesn't know shit about functional genomics

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

my psychic powers tell me he doesn't know shit about programming either

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the subtitle always makes me laugh in these contexts

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is a delightfully ironic cover ^^, my headcannon is that someone in the distribution pipeline was intentionally taking the piss, surely no one can be that shortsighted; wait ...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I would curse your name, but the video was of such profound vapidity, that it's already gone from my mind ^^ (though a strange desire for mind bleach remains).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

@dgerard @Beryl do any of us, really?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ah, Programmer Theory is just the dumbest shit I hear when engineering meetings lose focus, got it

also, words mean things, Pico Paco e/λ! science absolutely does fucking explain genetic recombination, CS knows how merge functions work, and we even know from cross-discipline information theory that these two things look mathematically nothing like each other!

also, and I almost missed it because this stupid asshole tried to squeeze it in right before an etc: where the fuck is DNA “execution” doing anything resembling a unit test?

fuck me, the more I look back at Pico Paco e/λ‘s posts the more bullshit I spot. git merge (and all other methods of merging code under source control) relies on manual intervention in cases where merge algorithms break (which is incredibly common) and might still produce a non-functional result — it’d be awful at automatically merging DNA strings together! like fuck, the diffs that git merge handles are even line-based, which isn’t a concept that DNA strings have

“another copy that works perfectly with some fidelity” what does this even mean, Pico Paco e/λ, if that is your real name?

and here I was gonna ask Pico Paco e/λ who he thinks is reading the comments in junk DNA, but these posts are fractally wrong

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

You're forgetting that on the internet if someone doesn't know something, then it must be unknowable. "It's basically magic" boils down to "I personally don't know how this works".

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

This has to be a joke, right? Somebody demonstrate seriousness on OP’s part before I craft a sneer, please.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

he would have been tweeting about how science can't explain the mechanical turk

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you just transported my brain to a world where the orange site somehow existed before computing and started making prediction market bets on the mechanical Turk revolutionizing Chess

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"rip chess players"

"10 UX takeaways from the mechanical Turk impact on the chess world"

"stop playing chess and learn how to build mechanical Turks"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

"what I learned from building a chessboard in a weekend"

"chess with matchsticks - I really liked orangeposter42069's weekend chess experiment but wanted to see if I could go even more extreme, [53000 word vomit continues, 3 Medium popover walls + coursebuy griftware on the side]"

"chess with matchsticks may be interesting, but AXESHOEWALLY bars of soap would be more period-appropriate"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Ah yes, the same reason a caterpillar and a bison can produce offspring.

It's not magic, it's just like writing code for a business that has been pushing to production for millions of years, with millions of little scripts always running, fixing little things, fixing the things that fix the things, making sure you don't have a tail, unless for some reason that works out, then sure, you should always have a tail.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This makes total sense to me. The program lines are the really important stuff, and baseball stats and vestigial organs are like REM in BASIC.

10 Don't forget to breathe

20 My name is Pico Paco, e/Lambda

30 Never more than 2 martinis unless I'm at home

REM What my appendix does is ...

40 Heartbeat = ml/beat x VO2 exerted or whatever

REM Rod Carew batted .388 in 1977

50 Use right hand first if possible

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I love the idea of my genome encoding someone else's athletic performance.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

this post gives me the same impression as what @[email protected] mentioned about netcode the other day: some just straight-up :bigthonk: applied with a handful of bits of actual clue, and threading the needle between platformer jump-pads A through Z hoping you get there with a safe landing all the way

I was going to say I didn't even check on this person's profile (simply the e/lambda seemed sketchy), but then I did and ugh I have made mistakes

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Found here:

This is the secret. George opened the debate by acknowledging Yud's intellectual gigantism, comparing him to Sartre and Neechay (have not heard of this one before). "I'm sitting in front of an intellectual giant now" Game recognize game.

And here, bringing the Alabama-school-board energy:

Evolution is observable, we know species change. Evolution by natural selection is marginally observable. We can run experiments in test tubes with bacteria or whatever. Yet we confidently extrapolate these extremely limited observations to the vastly bigger phenomenon 🤔🤔

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

holy (pun not intended) actual fucking shit...

ID is significantly more testable in practice than people admit

hot take but okay

ID is significantly more testable in practice than people admit. For instance, God could have encoded a monkey jpeg in the human DNA. This would be irrefutable evidence of his existence.

I... okay. I'm surprised they didn't take it like half a turn further and go full "obviously since we've derived BYAC from our own code and soon through AGI singularity we're rebirthing god", but, okay.

has to be a jpeg though. pngs not allowed.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

If it were an NFT that would be proof that we'd been designed by an evil demiurge.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait, this isn't a parody?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

If it’s a bit, they’re real committed

[–] to_urcite_ty_kokos 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

But still there are bugs in production 😆

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Works on my machine

[–] dot20 6 points 1 year ago

The code was written for a specific environment and now we are running it in a totally different environment, so what do you expect...

Besides, the goal of the code is basically to keep the swarm alive, it doesn't really do anything about the health of individual nodes

[–] DigitalTraveler42 3 points 1 year ago

I believe they're called tumors and deformities

[–] expatriado 3 points 1 year ago

top of the hour yet no comments. how do you explain that programmer theory?