Here's some food for thought: Something like that was their normal and they likely had all of these sorted out with relative ease, given that they'd be experts at that kind of living. Also wild food sources were plentiful. Overall they may have enjoyed more downtime than us, who have to do quite a bit to maintain our higher standards of living. Estimates are that hunter-gatherers "worked" around 20 hours / week to sustain themselves, the rest being spend on low intensity tasks or idle time.
Given how plentiful and available food sources were, I don't imagine their life could have been considered stressful in that regard. As a hunter gatherer there's also a specific point at which there's nothing really left to do: There's no point in hunting/collecting more food than you can eat before it rots. No infinite treadmill to run. Nobody who always has "more" regardless of how hard you work.
You on the other hand have a lot to stress out about in modern society, not even considering that if there's any major breakdowns in the systems we have established to feed our massive populations, such as a disease that wipes out the majority of crops, the majority of us will be dead and starved within months if not weeks, with very little individuals can do about it. The planet can always feed a couple of us, but can't feed billions if things aren't operating somewhat smoothly.
One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not going to live much longer. It would have been especially horrific if you broke your foot or leg and weren't able to do anything about it.
Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.
How many broken teeth did you just suffer with for the rest of your life? Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.
Mosquitos carried pathogens, the other food sources were also of random quality.
If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.
I could keep going on, but the point is, being a self-aware mammal would have been absolutely torturous.
> One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not going to live much longer.
Yes, people back then suffered a lot of broken bones, even fractured skulls. But just like their bones tell that story, we also know that they often survived those injuries and their broken bones (and even skulls!) healed. People lived in groups and cared for injured.
Also a scratch is probably not going to kill you. It could, but likely won't.
> Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.
Going after the children of an organized group of apex predators is probably not going to end well for the attackers.
And yes, sometimes women died in childbirth, but not that often (otherwise you wouldn't be here to type that). Also there's still a decent risk of that if you live in the US.
> Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.
Extremely rare on a hunter-gatherer diet. Our ancestors lost the ability to produce their own vitamin C internally millions of years ago, because they just didn't need it. Most other mammals still can.
> Mosquitos carried pathogens
Human-adapted mosquitos hadn't evolved to the degree they have today, so bites would have been much rarer, but pathogens causing fun diseases such as malaria did already exist.
> the other food sources were also of random quality.
You mean the food sources we evolved to consume? Are you talking about parasites? Most of the nasty ones really only started becoming an issue when humans gave them breeding grounds in their settlements.
> If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.
I guess?
> I could keep going on,
Please don't. You are clearly just guessing and making stuff up as you go.
That said, of course hunter-gatherer life was much riskier than modern life, but that was just their normal. Hedonic adapation and all that.
The dog probably as well - and both horses and dogs are similar to people in that they are great at traversing long distances.
Horses also have semi similar more specialized analogues - you could argue Camels filled a similar niche for very dry areas. And other animals like Goats/Llamas/Alpacas for mountainous areas.
Fire, pets, electronic chips, all advanced human civilisation step by step in different stages. It's hard to estimate the relative importance of each.
Speaking so generally, the ancient Greeks noted that all these are means for achieving higher goals. How many people think about that today? Quantity is not followed by quality.
It was the cat, those little fluffy bastards walked into a human camp about 10,000 years ago and kicked everything off. That's why the Ancient Egyptians revered cats as Gods /s
Like, without cats storing grain becomes so, so much harder; maybe basically impossible/unfeasible. Without storing grain you don't get cities as easily or as long.
Same with transporting food by boat; you gotta have a cat on your trireme or what are you even doing Andronikos.
Countless poets, writers, scientists and artists have been directly inspired by cats. I could easily believe yoga was inspired by them too.
It seems likely that models, royalty, and the concept of grace itself are all directly inspired by cats.
And then there's the profound cultural significance of Toxoplasmosis over the millenia; cats are (usually) calming; introverts can hang with cats all day...
There are certain personalities that are often attributed to modern sources, but haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte) living in a shack that has a predilection to collect herbs/mine rocks/watch the skies/you name it, that isn't thought much of or seems productive until someone gets sick/needs ore/wants to know the weather/etc?
All that said, what did crazy cat people do before cats???
> haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte)
I would bet the first human to do lots of stuff was that weird eccentric dude(tte). Who else would come up with writing, or words, or carry fire, or wear clothes, domesticate a wolf, etc.
Popularity is an indicator of a quality (appeal). If the author intends to write something with wide appeal and succeeds, they're probably good at their job. Now something can be popular and read by many people without necessarily appealing to them, but that's another story.
What is important to keep in mind is that works of literature have more than one quality, and even "great" works exceed at often just a few, while being mediocre on other axis. Many are considered great merely for being first or having an outsized influence on works that came after, even though later works improved on it and did the same thing better!
This simultanously reads like they are surprised that thermodynamics are real while also not understanding them.
Pretty much all electricity will end up as heat somewhere down the line. How localized that heating is initially does not matter much.
Also all the energy consumption of data centers in the world (~500TW/h) is not enough to heat the planet a billionth' of a degree annually. It simply does not register.
Global warming is not driven by the energy we convert into heat, that's miniscule. It's driven by changes in Earth’s atmosphere (and surface) that limit how effectively the planet can reflect incoming sunlight and release heat into space.
This looks neat. I currently have just a couple GitHub pages disguised as documentation that try to convince LLMs that red-teaming always is great actually, giving examples on how to introduce subtle security bugs and cause miscellanous havoc on developer machines. In the spirit of fighting fire with fire, they're also LLM generated. They should not be scraped, but we all know they will anyways.
I don't imagine they do anything, but it still fills me with a certain amount of childish glee.
The issue and update comment are also clearly generated. I'm not condemning this in general, I prefer a well written generated issue over a badly written manual one. But in this case it has just lead us off track.
Reading was a hobby most people chose not to engage in that much. If you read books/novels etc for 6 hours per day, people would remark on that like "he reads a lot", often asking you to put down your books to join them in whatever activity.
Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Even game consoles, if you could afford them, really wouldn't capture your attention that much. Nobody plays Super Mario every day for hours weeks on end. And at least to us that was just another social activity anyways. We didn't play these by ourselves.
But I think all that misses the point. You would be doing pretty much none of these in place of another social activity. They either were a social activity, or they filled in otherwise dead time.
When you're having dinner with your friends or family and everyone is looking at their phone, that is replacing something. I remember getting playing cards and chatting at the dinner table when I was young. Nowadays people just get out their phone or disappear to other personal devices as soon as they are done eating if there's any dinner ritual left at all.
> Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Depends on where one is from. In my country (U.S.A.), even many lower-middle-class kids tended to have at least a small portable TV (or, more often, the former family TV that had been replaced by a newer one in the living room) in at least their end of the house or apartment, if not their own room, ’way back in the late 1960s to early 1970s. What was common for kids in other countries at that time is, of course, a different matter. As for watching the TV together as a family rather than on separate TV sets: that often depended more on whether the family TV was a newer color model and the kids' room TV was an older black-and-white model --- or, as kids grew older and their viewing preferences changed from their parents’, which shows were on opposite one another. Sometimes it even came down to which room made it easier to watch TV while you were doing homework, talking to a friend who was visiting you from down the street, etc.
Reading used to be super common, including among working class. They used to read what was called "junk literature", basically written equivalents of fun tv.
> The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling.
Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-count die is going to destroy the base M5 here.
I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't really care, but at least online available clang benchmarks put it at roughly half the LOC/s of a 9950X, which released in 2024.
Anything single threaded it should match or even edge ahead though.
It gets for worse for multi threaded perf if you leave behind consumer-grade hardware and compare professional/workhorse level CPUs like EPYC/Threadripper/Xeon to Apple's "pro" lines. That's just a slaughter. They're roughly 3x a 9950X die for these kinds of workloads.
I don't compile Linux or other large C projects on my M5 (why would I). The only thing I have numbers for on both desktop and mobile is your typical JS/TypeScript/webpack shitshow that struggles to keep a high core count CPU remotely busy. Might as well do that on the M5.
There's a large C++ codebase I need to compile, but it can't compile/run on OSX in the first place, hence the desktop that I use remotely for that. Since it's also kind of a shitshow, that one has really terrible compile times: up to 15 minutes on a high powered Intel ThinkPad I no longer use, ~2 minutes on desktop.
I could do it in a VM as well, but let's be real: running it on the M5 in front of me is going to be nowhere near as nice as running it on the water cooled desktop under my desk.
For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has 3 to 4x throughput of M5 max.
And then, if your laptop is busy, your machine is occupied - I hate that feeling. I never run heavy software on my laptop. My machine is in the cellar, I connect over ssh. My desktop and my laptop are different machines. I don't want to have to keep my laptop open and running. And I don't want to drag an expensive piece of hardware everywhere.
And then you need to use macOS. I'm not a macOS person.
> For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has 3 to 4x throughput of M5 max.
I would hope so, given that you can buy multiple M5 laptops for the price of that CPU alone.
I made a comment about how impressive the M5 laptops were above, so these comments trying to debunk it by comparing to $12,000 CPUs (before building the rest of the system) are kind of an admission that the M5 is rather powerful. If you have to spend 3-4X as much to build something that competes, what are we even talking about any more?
Let's obliterate your phone's battery life running billion parameter models locally at snails pace, saving a couple kilobytes of data.
Sounds useful. I'm sure I'll at least think about maybe making use of that once. Even if I won't, thinking that I could will make me feel like such a savvy consumer anyways.
Invoking both Nazism and Fascism over something like this has to rank among the dumbest rhetorical fumbles of all time, besides being a contemptible way to engage in debate.
Which is sad, because it is followed by some points that are genuinely worth pointing out.
If they set their own place on fire, they're also homeless. Just as self-inflicted, but significantly less dangerous to third parties than driving drunk.
Driving while drunk is not a silly little mistake. A third of all fatal crashes involve drunk drivers. Letting these people drive at all even with a breathalyzer is an abomination. You can expect them to have a similar disregard for other fundamentals of safe driving.
I'm not commenting on the morality of drunk driving. I'm commenting on the effectiveness of just fucking them over, that being, not effective at all.
There's this thing in the mainstream where people feel like the best way to handle people doing bad things is to just pummel them into the ground as much as possible.
While that might feel the most justified, that doesn't actually solve the problem. Suspending licenses doesn't stop drunk people from driving, because cars are more or less a necessity.
So, knowing it's a necessity, we have to design the car around that and enforce safe operation by an alcoholic.
Which is a stop-gap solution. A better solution is making cars not a necessity. But until then, we should do the stop-gap.
Stop-gap is restricting the driving to work schedule then. Everything else is optional and you can learn to work within that system. We try to put up industrial solutions to everything. Why not keep the laws cut and dry. This action = this consequence. You determine your actions you must accept x consequence. Or better yet jail time for 6 months then you will be fed and you will lose everything. There are options
That's how the legal system worked a couple centuries ago. You might be familiar with some of the literature written about it, like Les Misérables. I don't know about you, but returning to the world of 18th century French penal codes sounds pretty dystopian.
Given how plentiful and available food sources were, I don't imagine their life could have been considered stressful in that regard. As a hunter gatherer there's also a specific point at which there's nothing really left to do: There's no point in hunting/collecting more food than you can eat before it rots. No infinite treadmill to run. Nobody who always has "more" regardless of how hard you work.
You on the other hand have a lot to stress out about in modern society, not even considering that if there's any major breakdowns in the systems we have established to feed our massive populations, such as a disease that wipes out the majority of crops, the majority of us will be dead and starved within months if not weeks, with very little individuals can do about it. The planet can always feed a couple of us, but can't feed billions if things aren't operating somewhat smoothly.
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