Some things are annoying, like removing them. But in general they're extremely useful and designed basically exactly how you'd want: it's extremely consistent since to a good approximation, a submodule behaves the same as a normal git repo once you're inside it.

(Why does this project need so much Go code to pipe something through a local LLM?)

I'd read about this many times before I started with Go so I was particularly disappointed to learn that it was a lie. The most important task of a code formatter is to break long lines; it doesn't do it. It doesn't even have an option to do it!

I'd read about this many times before I started with Go so I was particularly disappointed to learn that it was a lie.

> There are few if any passages in the works of Sir Thomas Browne that I do not find thoroughly delightful; but two afford me particularly intense pleasure.

> To my mind, each is in its own way a perfect, exquisitely faceted gem of English prose from an especially glorious literary epoch. The music of the one has haunted me for most of my life;

Oh come on. Sir Thomas Browne looks well worth reading but the author of this article is unreadably pretentious.

The truth is that math is hard: few other subjects have anything close to its crazy conceptual breadth and depth, with hardish concepts being built upon hardish concepts in many layers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345

Do you know of comparable "messes" like the one in biology that you suspect were caused by a lack of more process-based language?

Are there some human languages that are more process-based than English?

It makes me wonder whether what the LLMs have captured in their training data might be effective for looking over different languages to see if there are any interesting different ways of handling "species".

Firstly,

> how do you conclude that these two populations can still interbreed?

I'm saying that people shouldn't spend time asking that question of allopatric populations.

Secondly you're right that I didn't read up on these monkeys. I wanted to rant about species concepts, but I was doing it in a discussion about some doubtless wonderful and very interesting monkeys and I am definitely guilty of not doing justice to them or to the people studying them.

That shouldn't be controversial, but unfortunately the idea that you can and should try to "determine" whether such populations are conspecific is completely entrenched in biology; has been since Linnaeus basically.

Words are just labels we attach to concepts that we find ourselves wanting to refer to. My claim is that there is no concept in allopatry that's worth naming.

Have a look at Hey's underappreciated book (he's the first author cited in the article you linked).

It is an embarrassment: because there's a simple answer (the one I just gave), and because the confusion over "species concepts" has persisted for decades and confused generations of biologists, and hundreds, if not thousands of flawed papers have been published claiming "sufficient divergence" of allopatric populations.

It shouldn't be controversial to say that this is nonsense. The main problem is that it is challenging for conservation biology to admit that 'species' isn't well defined in allopatry. That is indeed unfortunate. But, science can't be politics.

Think about it: there's nothing about the laws of physics, chemistry, or fundamental biology that implies that all populations must be clearly assignable to distinct categories. What biology says is that sexual eukaryotic organisms exist and they breed and distribute themselves more of less connectedly over space, and, stuff happens over time. Whether or not you can interbreed in sympatry is profoundly important -- loss of interbreeding is the basis of biological diversity. And allopatry is profoundly important -- it's the main way you lose the ability to interbreed. But two allopatric populations are just that: the organisms don't interbreed because they can't; they're not in "cruising distance". You could take two groups of individuals of any population you like and ship them off to islands on the other side of the world and they won't interbreed. They were part of the same "species" before their trip so presumably they still are when they get to their new homes. But the question of "when in the future should we say that they've evolved apart enough for us to call them different 'species'" is a question about what's convenient or useful, not a question about biological concepts or mechanisms.

So it's not that studying the biology of allopatric populations isn't worthwhile -- far from it -- it's just that biology has a sentimental attachment to the idea that populations can always be assigned to "species". You can consider their ancestry as organismal pedigrees, and you can consider the ancestry of different parts of their genome, you can model it mathematically, you can collect genetic data and try to make inferences about it and about how the world they evolved in gave rise to it all. Population genetics, phylogeography, biogeography, phylogenetics etc are all extremely interesting and worthwhile. But with those subjects came confused "species concepts" stretching over decades trying to explain why some or other genealogical or phylogenetic criterion was the right basis to use to define the word "species".

But the correct thing to do was much simpler: just accept that there is no scientific reason for the question "are these allopatric populations the same thing or not" to have any particular meaning, let alone answer.

People who have written some sense among the decades of nonsense: Jürgen Haffer and and Ernst Mayr's geographical species, and Jody Hey's in his book "Genes, categories and species".

"operative" is a bit better, but I think of it as referring to grammatical interactions, i.e. interactions at the level of language mechanics rather than semantics.