I hope nobody decides to violate the prime directive and take sides in the chimp war.
To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.
Game theory isn't a force. It's just one way of modeling behavior through one sense of rationality, and it rarely maps neatly onto actual human behavior.
It may be easier to think of evolution as the force, and game theory strongly influencing the fitness test. Those who play the games of mating and predator/prey more optimally reproduce more. We descend from billions of generations of the winners.
We don't descend from winners, we descend from whoever survived and it's not an individual competition.
If the only place a particularly beneficial mutation appears is wiped out by chance volcanic eruption, that's just how it is - the survivors who weren't near the volcano go on to reproduce.
Prime directive doesn't apply because they are part of our home planet. Our actions or in-actions can improve or worsen their living conditions. Their natural world is gone anyway. We've changed it already.
> To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.
Note that the conclusions of the paper, while acknowledging the problem of access to resources, are different. They also do not conclude that this is "more or less inevitable":
> The lethal aggression that followed the fission at Ngogo informs models of intergroup conflict. All observed attacks were initiated by the numerically smaller Western group, contradicting simple imbalance-of-power models that predict an advantage for larger groups. Persistent offensive success by Western males suggests that cohesion supported by enduring relationships can outweigh numeric disadvantage. Our observations are also relevant for predictions from parochial altruism. Because cohesion among the Western cluster preceded overt hostility, external threats may be unnecessary to foster cooperation. Cohesion among members of the wider Ngogo group, however, may have weakened when external threats from adjacent groups decreased after territorial expansion in 2009.
and
> This study encourages a reevaluation of current models of human collective violence. If chimpanzee groups can polarize, split, and engage in lethal aggression without human-type cultural markers, then relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed. Cultural traits remain essential for large-scale cooperation, but many conflicts may originate in the breakdown of interpersonal relationships rather than in entrenched ethnic or ideological divisions. It is tempting to attribute polarization and war that occur in humans today to ethnic, religious, or political divisions. Focusing entirely on these cultural factors, however, overlooks social processes that shape human behavior—processes also present in one of our closest animal relatives. In some cases, it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.
Which sounds kinda hopeful!
My own observations is that the preconditions for the split that led to open warfare between the two Chimp groups was:
1. The nonviolent (illness) death of a few key individuals that linked both groups, and...
2. The complete stop of interbreeding. Once the two groups stopped interbreeding, the split was finalized and they became truly hostile.
Stretching this a bit, it makes me think of those (usually white supremacists) who claim "multiculturalism" is to blame for all the world's problems, and if only every ethnic or religious group stayed in their lane and didn't mix with the other, we could all live in peace. But it seems to me the lesson from this paper is that this (isolating us in separate groups) would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.
> But it seems to me the lesson from this paper is that this (isolating us in separate groups) would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.
of course, and historically we can see that from the past 300 years leading up to ww1 and ww2; every empire was in it for themselves and very nationalistic, mercantilism ruled the day, and lots of crazy theories such as phrenology and eugenics started to appear leading to all kinds of atrocities...
The best selling car in the world in 2025 was the Tesla Model Y, with a little over 1 million sold. ~350k total vehicles have been sold in 2026 as of April.
No, it does not make the comparison unbiased, because other companies, like BYD, may sell in a month as much EV cars as Tesla sells in a quarter, but they are distributed over diverse models, so one Tesla model may indeed sell more than any other model, without this reflecting the EV market share.
E.g. for BYD the 2026 target is over 1.5 million exported EV cars, with more than that produced for the internal Chinese market. During 2025, BYD exported more than 1 million EV cars, besides the production for the Chinese market.
The whole story about Tesla until 2025 was that they had the #1 selling model across any category: BEVs, PHEVs, and ICEs included. So it’s absolutely correct to note when that model’s sales no longer exceed those of a PHEV or ICE model, and it’s always in the context of how competitors choose to segment their offerings.
The core truth is that the popularity of buying a new Tesla has slipped significantly relative to competitors.
Man come one not only is this the wrong analysis because Tesla only has one single model, they literaly build 50k cars which are not sold
50.000
My guess, they made them for pushing the Space X IPO. The same why he did this weird Keynote last week with this megafantasic dyson sphere and whatnot vision.
And I find it very weird tbh that it still even sells. Whenever you see a Tesla, its always the same car.
> a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force
The history of American diplomacy is mostly of an iron fist wearing a thin glove. This administration removes the glove. It is in line with the transparency of the Department of War v. Defense. Consensus is the label they put on the package of sausages to save face.
The glove was there for a reason: it made it a lot easier for the U.S. to get what they want.
Appeals to “transparency” are just an attempt to distract from worse outcomes.
The fatal flaw of this administration is that they care more about looks than substance. They would rather look tough and lose than look meek and win. It doesn’t even occur to them that it is possible to win while looking meek.
There was a lot of forceful diplomacy by the US. Sure, but there was also a lot of actually good diplomacy happening. Calling all of that a thin glove is underselling the good work of a lot people.
The good side of US diplomacy was one of the most positive forces in the world. Trump fully dismantled that. Not just the US aid work, but also the Pax Americana that really limited the scale of war in the world.
There were horrible missteps at the same time. The US wasn’t all good. Maybe it wasn’t even net good. But there was a significant good side, and its dismantling isn’t a small thing in the world.
Measuring data centers in watts is like measuring cars in horsepower. Power isn't a direct measure of performance, but of the primary constraint on performance. When in doubt choose the thermodynamic perspective.
> think there is substantial difference between the two sub-parties
You said something close enough.
Yes, they're both terrible. Biden's admin allowed a genocide to take place in Gaza while pretending to give a damn about it and repeating propagandist lies from Israel. But the Trump admin is openly looting everything they can get their hands on.
The real answer is something HN doesn't like so I won't advocate it openly, but it involves society paying to take care of people to provide homes, provide medical access, things like this. Neither party is interested in that.
But only one is brazen about harming peopler and making content from it or unashamedly posting AI-generated memes.
> The real answer is something HN doesn't like so I won't advocate it openly, but it involves society paying to take care of people to provide homes, provide medical access, things like this. Neither party is interested in that.
There are enough people on HN who think working social democracy is a great option; not everybody here is a libertarian cryptobro, an eastern european with decades-long PTSD or a hardcore conservative.
I hope The Martian becomes the template of a new publishing world. Andy Weir couldn't get any publisher's attention until he self published and achieved 35,000 sales in three months without their help. He succeeded by word of mouth and not publisher's marketing.
Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing shelves and reading blurbs in many years but I read more than ever.
A publisher provides marketing, editing and distribution. Literary marketing is becoming better in the peer-to-peer form than the old business-to-consumer form. Distribution has become unbundled via self-publishing. Editing is no less important than ever, but it would be so much better if the value from such an individual art can be captured by those talented individuals rather than by corporate.
Long live literature, but may Big Publishing fade away into obsolescence.
The Martian was published in 2011. There are vanishingly few like it since then.
Sometimes a book gets picked up purely on its merits. (It helps to appeal to a wealthy target audience.) But on average you'd get richer by getting a minimum wage job and spending it all on lottery tickets.
That's because publishers these days basically require you to have that magnitude of social media presence or they generally won't touch you. If they do, they will do next to nothing to help actually sell your book after it's printed. Very rarely will you see someone who hasn't built a platform already be given any sort of extra marketing or distribution for their work. You'll effectively give them 90% of the sale price for printing and possibly some limited distribution. Publishers used to be tastemakers and make picks and bets based on book merit, but now it's basically like they're just looking for things that would already succeed on their own and injecting themselves into the process.
They've basically figured out how to take half of their job and shove it off on the author while they still take their oversized cut. It's pretty egregious in my opinion.
I've seen this with all types of publishers, btw, from children's books to technical books. Heck, most technical publishers these days are mostly print on demand, so you're barely getting any unique product from the publisher at all.
The Martian is an outlier in its success, but it's far from the only instance of successful self-published sci-fi. Recent examples I've read include The Powers of Earth[1] by Travis Corcoran and Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. In both cases, the authors quit their day jobs (I think both worked in software) and are now full time writers.
Completely disagree. That model means all you’re going to get are pop fiction and the five books trending that month. It leaves very little room for dense publications with more niche audiences.
Your comment history suggests you're in the US, so you should be pleased to learn that you weren't included. The visible landmass is northern Africa, with a smidge of the Iberian Peninsula visible.
Oh, good point. I missed South America under the cloud cover. I guess the Eastern edge of the US would indeed be visible as a highly distorted smudge on the edge of the visible surface.
Thank you. I have having trouble making sense of the orientation. My first thought was misshapen Australia, but where Spain nears Africa is much different than Australia and Tasmania. Also, they forgot New Zealand... while common for maps, I would expect it to show up in a photo.
To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.
reply