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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Many families have recessive fucked alleles that cause all kinds of problems. An allele is a variant of a gene. You need two copies of a recessive allele for that gene to be expressed (do something).

    Every fucked allele the parents share has a 25% chance of being expressed in the child. The more DNA the parents share the more fucked alleles they share. Usually… sometimes the opposite happens and the number of bad alleles is reduced in the child. Inbreeding can lead to fucked animals and “perfect” ones. Weird stuff.

    Now you might be thinking “why do families have so many fucked alleles?”

    That’s a good question. The thing about carrying a single recessive, fucked allele is that it doesn’t do anything to you. Mutations happen all the time and so these alleles are floating around and multiplying constantly.

    It’s only a problem on the odd chance that they get expressed which is most often when family members produce offspring.

    So it’s worth noting that this is the type of thing that we can check for these days. In some cultures it’s acceptable to marry a cousin and I’ve heard that they check for any genetic issues before proceeding when they live in a first world country.


  • You’re certainly not the only software developer worried about this. Many people across many fields are losing sleep thinking that machine learning is coming for their jobs. Realistically automation is going to eliminate the need for a ton of labor in the coming decades and software is included in that.

    However, I am quite skeptical that neural nets are going to be reading and writing meaningful code at large scales in the near future. If they did we would have much bigger fish to fry because that’s the type of thing that could very well lead to the singularity.

    I think you should spend more time using AI programming tools. That would let you see how primitive they really are in their current state and learn how to leverage them for yourself. It’s reasonable to be concerned that employees will need to use these tools in the near future. That’s because these are new, useful tools and software developers are generally expected to use all tooling that improves their productivity.