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by wewewedxfgdf 53 days ago
The Cambrian period has to be the most interesting period in Earth's history.

A close second is the period where the monkeys started wearing clothes, driving cars and programming computers.

3 comments

Or maybe just before that, when they started wearing digital watches.
While as a species we may have moved on from thinking digital watches are a really neat idea, some of us will always remain stuck in the past.
The first digital watch was from 1972.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/54481-far-out-in-the-unchar...

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Yes. That.
Beat me to it tho was gonna mention instead the exchanging of pieces of leaves part (engineering students in my uni just before 2020 were humanities averse/have compartmentalized knowledge and not well-read, 2 professors passionate about HHGG had their references meet a handful of knowing laughs in a hall of hundreds e.g. "bring a towel" and "this invisibility is powered by the Somebody Else's Problem field" and as you can see even you are seeing it on HN lmao)
They were making a joke that digital watches are outdated/out-of-style.
If we’re just another animal that can program computers, then I don’t feel bad about the take over of AI and LLMs as we’re nothing special in the evolutionary climb upwards.
We're apes, friend.
It turns out to be more interesting than that. For example, there is no other ape with skin resembling that of marine mammals. And that is just a start. Mankind is seriously weird.
Apes are a subset of monkeys.
Primates.
Primeats, from many perspectives.
Top pendantry. The words are interchangeable in daily speech. This is a comment section, not a journal.