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I had a very similar feeling until I took a course with one of the leading researchers in the field of protein folding. Two things that he repeatedly mentioned stuck with me a lot:

Evolution is not the survival of the fittest but the not-dying of the unfit. That explains why we have so many different species in the same ecological niche. The example he used was different types of grass on the same field. All of those were fit enough to not die.

The second thing he always repeated was that biology only observes what does or at some point did work. That leads to a huge confirmation bias that research needs to be aware of. Two species might be very similar but just across different sides of the boundary of survival.

The title is a bit misleading as it really doesn’t explain why bees die when they sting in the sense of a causality. The article itself mentions that the stinging mechanism bees use, is itself not a prerequisite for how they are organized as wasp use a different one. Very interesting read though.

Interesting to read that a number of people struggle to view this using their laptops while it works decently for me on an iPhone. It makes sense and that comparison is meaningless, especially when not given any specific specs, but still, I find this fact fascinating.

What an interesting discussion. Especially everything about that writing it in Asm would be the solution if you want secure code.

Both, gcc and clang, are orders of magnitude better tested than all the closed source applications, developed under tight timelines and that we essentially trust our lives with.

To be very clear, there are compiler bugs but those are almost never the problem in the first place. In the vast majority of cases it starts with buggy user code. An now back to handwritten assembly…

Sorry? So obviously with GC one means managed GC. Otherwise the comment above doesn’t make any sense at all since then Rust itself would use GC because it also supports reference counting.

Strictly speaking you could obviously say reference counting is a form of GC. So to avoid GC you then surely recommend people to use C since that, in contrast to Rust, Swift, C++ and many others, really doesn’t use any GC, neither managed nor reference counting based.