My understanding is that the great filter theory means this is bad news for us humans here on earth. And considering the state of the world right now, it's especially ominous. Fate loves irony.
The great filter is only one of the possible explanations of the Fermi paradox however. There are other far less bleack including that there is actually no paradox at all: life is indeed frequent and but we are just bad at detecting it/have not been looking for it long enough.
I used to think that rare earth/rare life was the bleak option. As I get older, I think the bleak thing would be a galaxy full of technologically advanced species with morals potentially equal to, or worse than ours.
With due respect, the Great Filter is a hypothesis, not a theory.
That being said, I agree. I read in a similar thread yesterday someone confused how this would be bad news rather than good news—that there are many other intelligent species indicates that such a filter either doesn't exist or is very easy to pass. But, like your point does, I think it's important to recognize that such a "good news" position is predicated on the notion that we as a species are already past the Great Filter, rather than that we're still behind it and the others are ahead.
Not necessarily. I think it's reasonable to imagine that 'some sort of low-level life' might be fairly common across the galaxy ('one in a ten million'), whereas complex life - never mind 'intelligent' or technologically-sophisticated life might be very much rarer.
The older I get and the more I appreciate Just How Lucky we are to exist at all on our planet here, the more I favour the above thinking.
How so? If great filters exist at all, which is not a given, there could be multiple ones, first of all. They could be somewhere between our level of biological complexity and the kind hypothesised to be responsible for this signal. Endosymbiosis is a very plausible such filter. The evolution of language and the bootstrapping of cultural evolution is another one. Both n=1 on our planet. Probably there are others I can't think of right now.
In music, the performer can either perform the music as written, or they can inject emotion into the piece by changing the velocity and timing of the notes. This app lets you inject the emotion through timing, even though you don’t actually know how to play piano.
It also lets you focus entirely on the “feel” of the piece.
Whatever is on that article is probably not worth knowing about anyway. People used to pay money to host websites just to get their opinions out there. If they really wanted us to read what they wrote, they'd be cramming it down our throats.
Good to hear it’s not just me. Syntax highlighting and old fashioned code completion are essential for me, but CoPilot is a distraction.
I think “reading” code is my least favourite part of the job, and CoPilot means I have to spend a lot more time reading the code it generates, trying to figure out what it’s trying to do, then realising it’s wrong and I still have to write it myself. It’s rapid fire context switching.
But turning it on only when I need a second opinion seems like a better way to use it.
Alignment used to be a big problem with CSS. Before improvements like flexbox and grid, people used to struggle to do basic alignment, like horizontal or vertical centering, or simply spacing items apart. There were a lot of (ab)uses of floats, tables, and relative/absolute positioning used for layout
IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera had their own separate rendering engines. IE was also notorious for running with "quirks mode" out of the box which basically meant that IE was render pages in a non-standard way by default
It was possible to develop things correctly, of course. But resources, both in terms of availability of documentation as well as time, were not as easy to find as they are today
It was tedious, sure. CSS2, especially, was just powerful enough but unstandardized enough that nothing worked quite right universally. Now, I can jump into CSS3 and throw a flexbox down or a grid and just tell it exactly what I want, in 1/8 the code and it'll work across all major browsers.
I recently enjoyed reading https://every-layout.dev. Even though I considered myself to be quite good at CSS, some of the ideas covered in that book (like thinking about how big your elements should be and let the browser handle the breaking instead of relying on media queries) was eye opening for me.
By having a reason to use it. Make something cool and complex and don't shy away from edge cases and best practices. Strive to improve every day and you will learn.
Interested too.
I did several full courses and exercises on it (Freecodecamp, W3, Mdn, Codepip…) and I still struggle a lot to create clear UI and have each HTML element where I want them.
I am looking at CSS frameworks (BEM, Tailwind) but I would like to master « vanilla » CSS.
It’s not a direct method, but really, you should try a) study the source code of the big ‘frameworks’ such as Bootstrap (especially if you dig into the comments & issues / patches that fixed worse practices with better practices) & b) hit F12 to start inspecting sites that are doing things interesting that you’d like to know about (but keep in mind they might not be experts & how you might improve it).
I think the author's intended use of the word 'hack' is less about veering off the beaten path to get it to do something unexpected, but more inline with 'life hack' or 'cool things to try'. The intended audience for a post like that might be the less-technical crowd.
