On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems
"Evolution of the Grey Aliens" — a famous lost painting by Vrubel. (c) ChatGPT
Recently, I encountered the scientific paper On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2310223120).
Michael L. Wong with co-authors concisely describes the phenomenon of evolution as a universal process inherent to our universe (not just the biosphere of planet Earth), and they do so within the context of a systems approach.
Their ideas resonate with my worldview, so I decided to summarize the article for myself briefly and, of course, for you.
And suppose you think that understanding evolution is unnecessary. In that case, I recommend you reconsider, as evolution affects not only hedgehogs and monkeys but also software, work teams, countries, ideologies, and even the thoughts in your head [ru] — understanding how all this works is essential.
The authors define an "evolving system" as a collective emergent phenomenon of many interacting components (subsystems of this system) that manifests as an increase in their diversity, distribution, and patterned behavior as time progresses.
Read the original article for details
This essay presents my interpretation of the article.
It should be close to the original, but a literal retelling was not my goal. On the contrary, I pushed to adapt the ideas of the original to my worldview (which I present in this blog).
Thus, some definitions and terms may differ slightly. In places where this is particularly important, I have left remarks. However, if you value precision, I recommend reading the original article.
My sabbaticals
A game developer reading a book in the middle of a sabbatical, in the style of My Little Pony (c) ChatGPT.
My friends and readers know that I often take sabbaticals.
How often? Formally, all my periods of working for other people for money are separated by periods around two years long of "working" "for myself" "for free" — the number of quotes may vary. Except for the first two times, when I jumped straight from Itransition to Wargaming right after university. However, the first year and a half at Wargaming was exactly what my soul craved, for which I thank all my former colleagues — a kind of paid sabbatical :-D but we won't count that period.
Based on this information, one can hypothesize a lot about me, for example, that I'm loaded with money (I'm not), that I'm lazy (I hope not), or that I'm incredibly lucky (I don't think so). I can only imagine what my relatives and parents think about all of this. By the end of the first sabbatical, I could clearly see sadness and hopelessness on their faces, but by the third time, they seemed to have gotten used to it or resigned themselves — who knows. In any case, thanks mom and dad for their support and understanding.
People periodically ask me why I spend time on these adventures, what I do during them, where I get the money from, and so on.
Let's talk about it.
The harsh reality of gamedev — the real profit of a successful project
The creative director of Moon Studios (developer of Ori) shared on X (Twitter) some "sad" statistics about the revenue from a successful debut game by unnamed developers that sold two million copies. The tweet is discussed on Reddit.
This sparked a lot of thoughts, and I’m going to share every single one of them with you — whether you like it or not :-)
Feeds Fun: marketing test — or how I blew 650 euros
Since Feeds Fun has been in production for a long time and provides some value to users, I decided to run a test ad campaign to gauge how viable monetization is in the project’s current form.
Reminder
Feeds Fun is a news reader that automatically assigns tags to each news item using LLMs. Users can create rules that evaluate news based on tags. For example, nasa + fake-news -> -50. This allows for filtering and sorting news, enabling you to read only the most relevant ones.
The project is open-sourced: github.com/Tiendil/feeds.fun
It turns out that one does not simply launch advertisements on modern platforms: one needs to implement GDPR compliance, a user agreement, a privacy policy, cookie consent, event/metric tracking, improve the GUI, create an acceptable landing page, and so on. The work spanned almost half a year (on the side, of course, not full-time), but in the end, I implemented everything, designed the experiment, and am now ready to share the results with you.
Thinking through writing
](https://tiendil.org/static/posts/thinking-through-writing/images/thinking-through-writing-cover.jpg)
From the manga Bakuman
Thinking through writing is the practice of translating one's own thoughts into written form to uncover gaps in reasoning and construct a clearer picture of the world.
It’s what I mostly do here on this blog — and, to the best of my ability, at work.
I’ve finally found time to elaborate on this.