There are many examples in anquity. Greek had a flowering in the Bronze age, then a dark age, before classical Greek took over. The Hittites had a major disaster including the destruction of their capital before they recovered in a great way (until their final demise at the end of the Bronze age). Egypt had several dark periods where they recovered from, until they fell prey to Greek and Roman imperialism.
What's also annoying is that sizes of the same clothes change.
I have a pair of jeans that I ordered on Amazon in 2020. It happens to fit me great. So recently I decided to order two more of the same. I got exactly the same model with the same size on Amazon, just with different colors. But neither fit very well, they were far wider. The first one had such a horrible fit that I immediately sent it back. The other I can wear, but it's quite different from the other perfectly fitting one. Why are they doing that? It's insane.
I don't feel his overflow miscompilation example is a good one. A 64bit multiplication converted back to 32bit has the same overflow behavior as if the computation was in 32bit (assuming nobody depends on the overflow indication, which is rare). And in high level programming languages you typically can't tell the difference.
chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans evolved intelligence too. They are smarter than most other critters in the jungle. Just all not as much as the lineage that leads to humans.
It's actually quite difficult to define human intelligence. Every time we think we find something unique by humans eventually some animal turns up that can do it too. It may be all just a question of degree and how it's used.
From what I've heard, language is unambiguously unique to humans, if you consider grammar an integral part of languages. You can teach chimpanzees hand signs, but they could never make the leap to stringing them together under a coherent rule: something like the difference between "Mom give me cookies" vs "I give mom cookies."
(I'm no expert, so take that with a grain of salt.)
proto-grammers are fairly common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot) for example shows that parrots are capable of understanding English word order to some extent.
Unique to modern humans, maybe. But that's only because we outcompeted/killed all of our sibling species that also spoke language. Denisovans likely had language as well.
Starting from what should be considered "writing" to how to identify specific artifacts as abstract words.
Some researchers spend years in the forest studying one animal to isolate one single word they're speaking. Understanding other kind of intelligences is a crazy complex task.
This is actually not correct for Starlink. They did a lot of work to lower their albedo based on astronomer complaints, even though there wasn't any government regulation in this area.
It might apply to some of the emerging Starlink competitors however, especially the Chinese ones and AST.
The albedo reduction they worked on is the exact reason why I wrote this, "...or if they think that a government order is imminent so they come to some voluntary agreement ahead of time."
SpaceX only "voluntarily" did that because the government was likely to put more stringent requirements on them if they ignored the complaints.
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