Let's start off with 'Which Python?'

> but RNA is fragile

Early on that may have been a feature though, isn't it?

What strikes me as the most interesting thing about life is that almost immediately (on geological time scales) after Earth had developed an environment where life in theory could exist it came to be. That suggests strongly that the mechanism to do so was relatively simple. Then again, the Earth was a vast laboratory and it only has to happen once.

aside: you have the most interesting job!

There is a chance that before 'LUCA' there were many dead ends and we ended up on the lucky branch by definition, and we don't actually know much about what happened before then so there is some possibility that what you are seeing there is the single largest example of 'survivorship bias'.

> You need evolution to have life.

I don't think you can say this with certainty. It is assumed that life and evolution go hand-in-hand from the beginning but it is not proven to be the case.

How exactly can it be proven? Even if we create life from scratch and see it evolve, it won't be a definitive proof

It could be proven if there was a record found of something that predated the currently known fossilized bits from really long ago that would give a hint about how life at that stage was put together. This is highly unlikely to happen.

Someone should reverse that and see how many paintings can be made to execute as Perl and what those programs do when invoked.

You could kill two birds with one stone by entering them in the Obfuscated Perl Contest, were it still being held.

Every single day there's an Obfuscated Perl Contest being held somewhere on this planet....

It is you that is annoying.

He's still a shareholder. It is considered extremely bad form to start a company that competes with a company that you are still a shareholder of unless you have not been fired with cause. The only other example I can think of is Jobs. So it is possible but I would assume that post Jobs contracts were put together in such a way that it would be very hard to compete with the company you got booted out of and that you are still a shareholder of. I've signed a couple of contracts over the years just as shareholders and those already mentioned that if I had competing interests the deal would be null and void and I'd be liable, and for good reasons too.

He could pretty trivially divest or move his shares into a blind trust or something. This isn't rocket science, and furthermore it's not as bad form as you might think. It happens all the time with little repurcissions.

You think the kind of lawyers that power the documents behind these endeavours (a couple of trillion dollars) have not thought about this?

> the kind of lawyers that power the documents behind these endeavours

Those lawyers were hired by Jensen.

And paid by NV.

Why couldn't he just sell his shares then buy unencumbered fresh shares straight on the stock market? Lose <1% of spread...

So you're the one responsible for the information apocalypse of 2047 when all of the planet's computronium melted down from a single job... nice going.

Then make a brain without access to other brains or things made by other brains.

I wrote this quite a while ago:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/you-will-die-get-used-to-it/