They improve efficiency in their airborne and tree crown niches, whereas mammalian traits are optimized for their respective terrestrial or aquatic niches. And so on and so forth for every species.
> Soo evolution doesn't always optimize for biochemical efficiency in isolation.
How could it?
Evolution "optimizes" (as far as local hill climbing can go) fitness, which is the ability to produce viable offspring. Genes get mutated and then combined (in sexual species) and passed to offspring via reproduction ... that's the process that results in biological evolution, which is the change over time of the presence of alleles in a population. That's it -- there's no secret "evolution" sauce or engine. The optimization for fitness occurs through the environment affecting the relative survivability of traits--traits that increase survivability become more common in the population--this part is tautological.
Evolutionary biologists disagree. Adaptations are the result of numerous evolutionary coincidences, but not all evolutionary coincidences are adaptive. Not only are most survivable mutations neutral, but there are traits that are truly "coincidental" in that they come along for the ride, like the color of our blood being red being due to chemistry, not adaptation. (Our visual system that treats red as an alarm, OTOH, is adaptive.)
A split is a split. Archosaurs split into a crocodile line and a dinosaur/bird line--"the avian lineage" (birds being a kind of dinosaur, and the only ones still living) ... that's what "the avian lineage had split from crocodiles" means -- it is not saying that birds are an offshoot from crocodiles, it's saying that the two lines (both kinds of archosaur) split from each other. Likewise, crocodiles are not an offshoot of dinosaurs.
The funny thing is that it would make more sense (going by our popular impression of what dinosaurs looked like) if dinosaurs were in the same lineage as crocodiles, not birds.
Every mention of efficiency is about the chemical process, not about vision as such.
> anaerobic glycolysis that is significantly less efficient than oxygen-powered metabolism
> Oxygen molecules make energy production in cells extremely efficient.
> the presence of oxygen makes energy extraction from a single glucose molecule 15 times as efficient, and sometimes more.
> This energetic ability is powered by an inefficient metabolism.
> This suggested that the strange structure wasn’t bringing oxygen into the bird’s retina; rather, it was helping to pump glucose in, thereby enabling the less efficient anaerobic process.
You complained about the article's talk about "inefficiency" -- you quoted it. But as I noted, THEIR mention of efficiency/inefficiency was ALWAYS about the chemical process, not about efficiency of vision. Now you're totally moving the goalposts. I don't understand why you're playing such an obviously absurd game but I will leave you to it.
I'm not moving goalposts. My 2nd comment just adds detail, which i hoped the reader would manage to infer based on my 1st one. That's all.
My point is it's like saying a car is more inefficient than a bicycle because it uses (more) fuel... totally ignoring that it also gets you much further and that too much faster.
Whereas a valid, to me, criticism would be that a particular car is less efficient than another car bc it burns more gas, when both do about as good a job.
> My point being - there are two sides to this coin.
No, you're simply wrong. UB means that anything can happen. And from a security perspective, that is vital to understand.
The only proper response to this code (or similar UB due to ambiguous sequence points) if found in production is to rewrite it and fire or reeducate the author.
There are two layers two this. On the formal, C and C++ standard lawyering layer, UB can have any result. I of course agree with this as per my previous comment.
However, the compilers are an actual implementation, and actual implementations do things in deterministic ways (even if randomness is involved, realistically it is limited to a certain set of outcomes). As such, in case of UBs it's not "anything can happen" - there is actually a limited set of things that can happen.
And I do believe you've missed the "especially on the offensive side" part of my comment. What you are saying about "if found in production is to rewrite it and fire or reeducate the author" is the defensive security perspective, not the offensive security one. From the offensive security perspective you aren't there to fix the code - you are there to exploit it and hack into the system / leak info / raise your privileges.
