All living beings have been evolving for the same amount of time.

I suspect the more significant difference here is the selection pressures. Take a good look at any part of a bird and you'll see millions of years of selection for reduced weight. The cost of weight is just so much greater when you're flying. Interesting too that bats tend to have lower neuron counts than say rodents. Did dinosaurs have a more weight efficient brain before flight, or were they forced to shrink before re-evolving that complexity in a smaller package?

Most of our mammal ancestors between us and dinosaur times had likely had extremely short lifespans as well, often shorter than the ancestors of modern songbirds.

> This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.

There's no indication that this is what the OP meant. If the OP meant that, they'd be saying that birds evolved faster, not that they had an ancestor that evolved a very long time ago, which is a meaningless statement.

I agree one should interpret what people say charitably, but there's a difference between that and just pretending that someone made a totally different claim in order to make a nonsense statement seem less silly.

Of course, it gets more complicated when you also consider susceptibility to mutations.

It's unclear what you're saying or how it responds to the OP and his critics.

If birds and primates today belong to equally long evolutionary lineages, then they have both had the same amount of time to adapt.

Now, speciation is what makes things interesting, because species diversify the subjects of adaptation. So, if we say some bird species has been around for longer than the human species, then you can say that that bird species has been subjected to adaptation pressures for longer (though this, too, is too simplistic; adaptation pressures are not uniformly distributed).

This, of course, starts getting into philosophical questions about the notion of "species". Modern biology has a poor grasp of what it means to be a species. The biological literature alone contains about 20 different operating definitions. To reconcile evolution with the notion of species, some have argued that all or almost all living things belong to a single species, but we're actually seeing a resurgence of functionalist/teleological notions in biology today, because it turns out you cannot explain or classify living things without such notions.

If the lineage that led to humans had fewer reproductive cycles that fit within a given time frame, then the faster reproducing animals and the animals that generated more offspring had more time to evolve because evolution is primarily driven through reproduction cycles and how many offspring you have (when there’s selection pressure). There’s epigentics to tweak things but the major driver is still a full reproductive generation. It’s obviously more complicated than such a simple model (eg crocodiles and sharks have been largely unchanged for a long time) but it’s a good rough first order approximation that satisfies the original statement. It’s more interesting to take a stronger intent of the author than nitpicking them being technically wrong with the idea they expressed.

Whatever humans are descended from existed during the time of the dinosaurs

If you go a bit farther back, we all ultimately come from the same lizard-like amniotes, newly emerged onto land from amphibious ancestors. It just took dinosaurs and mammals a little bit to evolve out of the "four-legged monster with teeth" body type.

But we and dinosaurs share a descendant that already had neurons/a brain?

Picture wrench attacks. What use is your Monero's security, for example, as I turn a screw into you until you give it up?

Shamir's secret sharing. In that scenario, capturing me alone isn't going to get you anything even if I divulge my piece of the secret. You'd still need to find out who has the other pieces, find them, and convince them to divulge as well.

Maybe there's 3 of us, and the 4th part of the password/secret/private key is on a server of mine somewhere. If I don't check in for x duration, it wipes itself.

Yeah it means my Monero is gone now, but at least my attacker didn't get it.

I remember when I first learned Java, having to just accept "public static void main(String[] args)" before I understood what any of it was. All I knew was that went on top around the block and I did the code inside it.

Should people really understand every syntax there before learning simpler commands like printing, ifs, and loops? I think it would yes, be a nicer learning experience, but I'm not sure it's actually the best idea.

If you need to learn "public static void main(String[] args)" just to print to a screen or use a loop, means you're using the wrong language.

When it's time to learn Java you're supposed to be past the basics. Old-school intros to programming starts with flowcharts for a reason.

You can learn either way, of course, but with one, people get tied up to a particular language-specific model and then have all kinds of discomfort when it's time to switch.

For most programming books, the first chapter where they teach you Hello, World is mostly about learning how to install the tooling. Then it goes back to explain variables, conditional,... They rarely throws you into code if you're a beginner.

I mean, I didn't need to learn those things, they were just in whatever web GUI I originally learned on; all I knew was that I could ignore it for now, a la the topic. Should the UI have masked that from me until I was ready? I suppose so, but even then I was doing things in an IDE not really knowing what those things were for until much later.

I think the problem is that it's also an interesting problem for humans. It's very subjective. Imagine a therapy session, filled with a long pensive pauses. Therapy is one of those things that encourage not interrupting and just letting you talk more, but there's so much subtext and nuance to that. Then make it compared to excited chatter one might have with friends. There's also so much body language that an AI obviously cannot see. At least for now.

Spamming leaves is probably just the cheapest strategy?

The pragmatic answer is that it is probably a better spend of time to innovate tech that circumvents politics than to spend time winning politics.

A lot of the tech research and investment is done by governments, though.

Yeah, because it worked flawlessly the last time we tried (crypto)

I forget what book it was, it might have been the happiness trap, but a big point they made was that building new habits and changing your life has a lot more to do with your inner notion of identity and long-run values. It's much easier to change your habits when they align with who you believe you are, The mental model difference between "I'm trying to eat healthier," and "I am a healthy eater."

Yeah, for me <5MB per pic uploaded (and then compressed) and 5-10 images limit per user should be sufficient to start. That, or some platform specific things like you only get to 1 upload per 10 votes...

Good reminder to set usage caps with a deployment

In theory I start integrating some safe image api or something, but I'm not seasoned enough to know if scrubbing the data away manually then is going to be easy enough. Right now I use supabase email auth , and I figure that cuts things down somewhat.

And if I am to have a plan, why not just implement from the start?

Risk management is not (always) about prevention as much as it is about reaction and mitigation.

Most nefarious attacks on sites/apps are occasional or one-time things. As an example, I used to work on a site that would get DDOSed a few times a year. I'm not sure why we were targeted, but rather than move our entire weird old legacy infrastructure to a vendor who could mitigate DDOS attacks, we had standard actions to take: Call our server dude, roll traffic to the backup data center, id the IPs at fault, add them to our block list, inform partners and customers to let us know if the new IP blocks affected them.

It was an annoyance, but not a disaster. That is the level of preparation you want - enough to just be annoyed when bad things happen, not demolished.

That should not stop you from prevention, either, of course - if you want to be proactive about such things, go for it.