Working hard is not necessarily working smart.
...means, not the end. A proxy. Easiest to compare against. That's why in orgs the selection pressure is for the appearance of heroic motion.
Topic: selection pressure
21 chunks · 19 episodes
2.1x burst in 2024 Q3
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- selection pressure appears in 21 chunks across 19 episodes, from 2024-01-16 to 2026-07-20.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 5/13/24 (2024-05-13), with 2 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with emergent process, hill climbing, and surrounding context, while by chunk count it sits between mass market and intuition; its yearly rank moved from #40 in 2024 to #54 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
Features in a silo only get good enough.
... compete against each other only at the level of app bundles. There's only weak selection pressure on features across silos. If you had to have the best shopping list in any software it would be a lot better than any shopping list in a silo.
Massively subsidized tokens have distorted AI demand.
...ens you burn" mode. Exploit. As subsidies tighten, there will be much more of a selection pressure for efficient and effective use of tokens. If you use all of your budgeted tokens and hit the limit, then you are incentivized to figure out higher-l...
Fascinating take from Steve Yegge a couple of months ago: Software Survival 3.0.
...are perpetually constrained. This resource constraint, I predict, will create a selection pressure that shapes the whole software ecosystem with a simple rule: software tends to survive if it saves cognition." A friend's distillation: "Binary tools...
In a cacophonous environment, the selection pressure is for superficial optics.
In a cacophonous environment, the selection pressure is for superficial optics. No one has time to do the deeper check on fundamentals.
Skills.md are a security disaster waiting to happen.
...ibuting skills that can easily evolve themselves will be like mega viruses. The selection pressure for these viruses is just which ones can replicate the most. Imagine ones that fuel their rise by stealing crypto for compute. I've seen skills in th...
One-ply ideas can be discovered by a swarm.
...ng if they were given a year to do it? If they could, it's boring. If there's a selection pressure from the market for that kind of idea, it will be discovered. The ideas that are non-obvious to the swarm are the high leverage ones.
In assembly theory, two numbers matter: assembly index and copy number.
...ally. So if you observe a higher copy number in practice, it directly implies a selection pressure.
We live in an era of Hyper.
...ny, only the things that stand out from the noise can be noticed. It's a steady selection pressure for the most.
Extremely simple, massively used protocols exist.
...city[abq], but that doesn't mean it's easy to do. It's an emergent process with selection pressure, very hard to do by design.
Pockets in a system have different properties than the main system.
...ation gauntlet crossing over to the main context that work. The gauntlet is the selection pressure that culls the emergent process's outputs. Sometimes we use things like "ideas that resonate in my Bluesky clique" as a proxy for what will resonate ...
More mutation doesn't equal more evolution, you need the right selection pressures.
More mutation doesn't equal more evolution, you need the right selection pressures. The internet allowed a much higher rate of memetic evolution. Our selection pressures haven't caught up. The result is metastasizing memes dominati...
If you peek into how multi-modal models work, they're a ball of cheap, random hacks that turn out to be terrifically, unreasonably effective.
...seemingly arbitrary collection of hacks that just so happen to work. There is a selection pressure you can't see, possible because of hill climbing: a clear objective metric to experiment with. But they're hacks on top of hacks; almost certainly hi...
A post hoc selection pressure on a true signal generates an untrue result.
A post hoc selection pressure on a true signal generates an untrue result. For example, man on the street style interviews by a biased producer. "But it's real people saying that!...
A more diverse world is a more interesting world.
...tingness. Interestingness stands out from the background noise. Innovation is a selection pressure over the interestingness, applying some judgment or bar to clear to harvest just the useful interestingness.
Keep collecting data until you can model precisely the incremental data you're collecting.
...ster. But be careful: disconfirming evidence hurts, and so if you're applying a selection pressure to what evidence you actually receive and act on, you're almost certainly filtering out disconfirming evidence. This is especially true in a high-kay...
Software wants to be useful.
... If they didn't "want" that then they would not exist. An emergent, inescapable selection pressure and thus inescapable incentive.
Two different approaches to building beautiful things: the cathedral and the bazaar.
...ts that everything else emerges from. The constraint is a platform. No internal selection pressure for a particular outcome among others.
In abundance, taste for viability is important.
...and the ground truth is increasingly forgotten. Every successful organization's selection pressures inadvertently are pulled inward, into the internal social structure. If your idea is not viable within the organization (others won't collaborate or...
Generative systems often look crappy to start.
...to the original vision. Generative systems have to have some kind of real-world selection pressure to tune them. In the meantime, there's a trough of crappy output. No Man's Sky used a traditional marketing playbook, and the high expectations almos...