>> "Some external circumstances could change reducing them to a pile of oxides"
(or some other transformations I guess in case of fire.)
That was precisely not what I was talking about (or put another way if you still require abundant explicitness): not the kind of immortality I was describing. Maybe I was not clear enough.
> For example, a star could hypothetically fall into another much larger than it and prolong its life
Well, once again:
>> Of course they can still be impacted by external effects, but sustaining their own internal processes does not require such inputs
For the majority of life existence as we know it (meaning, a proton gradient separated by a membrane), living systems were immortal.
Some external circumstances could change reducing them to a pile of oxides, but the systems themselves were perfectly self-perpetuating -- i.e. time-independent, or put another way 'given enough time' is not sufficient.
Of course, before the heat-death of the universe entropy-reducing systems will break down, but that's not an interesting observation.
> Some physical processes decrease entropy locally, sometimes by incredible amounts.
I think that's the more interesting observation. How to qualify life beyond only 'local entropy reduction systems'.
My uninformed opinion is that it is both 'entropy-reducing' and 'context-dependent' systems that should be considered 'alive' (not sure though that this is sufficient). Dependence on their context means that those systems will have a feedback-loop with their environment, allowing for example non-linear causality and thus complexity to emerge.
A star radiating away their stored negative entropy is an all give and no take, no dependency, full autonomy system. Of course they can still be impacted by external effects, but sustaining their own internal processes does not require such inputs, they are incidental to them emitting away their stored energy. Once started, their schedule (when they will deplete themselves, collapse, etc) is known and predictable, thus not alive.
Sure, it's definitely not the same. I would not think of someone not believing the most extreme predictions to be a skeptic.
What I call climate change skeptics are people playing into the well-known playbook of industries being attacked by research into the harm to inflict on society: tobacco, "forever chemicals", etc, and today also climate change.
The science behind climate change is generally sound, even if we have unknowns and things yet to research, we know two important things: climate is changing, and human activities are causing it.
Some people however are ideologically biased against questioning the status quo. The industry put into question is at the core of our models, it's impacting every facet of modern life in developed countries.
Some political parties are counting on this, so you have had propaganda for 20 years in the US ridiculing environmental efforts, highlighting the most unhinged voices to disparage the effort as a whole, and people generally well educated that should know better, are following suite. The website posted by the OP of this thread is a literal example of such rhetoric.
I see this on Hacker News at least, so many people seemingly too afraid of words like 'degrowth' not to conjure scary strawmans (going back to the dark ages), instead of asking the tough questions of how we are going to get through this.
I just find ridiculous how so many people are too happy to lean into their bias, I find it cowardly and unreasonable.
This website is a pathetic example of cherry-picked and misrepresented data.
No surprise coming from climate change deniers.
Hacker News always had a pretty high number of such people (and an even higher number of climate change sceptics) amongst its users. I think it's due to a prevalent ideological proximity with the American right, which has been (and still is) the main driver for this propaganda.
Life appears in spite of the 2nd law. The context in which it appears means that life orders its context, so 'feeds off' low entropy. But low entropy environment is not sufficient.
You must have pretty specific causal patterns in the 'primordial soup' for the system to self-organize into 'entropy accelerators' such as life.
This article conveniently designs its benchmark to be exactly when open addressing would work.
In almost all of the maps implementations I have used so far, chaining was necessary and intrusive linked lists were used.
An open-addressing scheme was however preferable (cuckoo) for a read-mostly map allowing concurrent reads and locked writes.
I would be more interested in an article exploring the compromises involved there, e.g. related to paying the cost of an additional indirection when accessing the value.
Another critic of this article I would add is the many tables throughout referencing different baselines. A single baseline would be much preferable, to keep a sense of scale for each change.
The hero saves the day by hacking old routines lying in the depth of the ship systems.