It's a little strange to me that otherwise experienced people feel the need to "study" for Google interviews.
To me, this seems less like they're selecting for good engineers and more like they're just selecting for people who really want Google on their resume.
The article goes on to mention that it likely developed gradually over several generations. The first kids with the mutation would have never been taught recursive language by adults. Instead, they probably developed some semblance of it from speaking with siblings/cousins their age. While this would be pretty weak, it probably gave them enough of an advantage over others.
Once they themselves had kids they would be able to teach them their imperfect version of recursive language. This probably continued and amplified over generations.
It's a pretty interesting case of nature and nurture combining. The mutation is a prerequisite, but largely useless unless there's enough "nurture" happening during the critical period.
It seems that every few years a new backend language comes to the forefront and becomes a popular for greenfield projects or rewrites. First people moved from PHP to Ruby, then Node, and now Go.
Of course, Go's popularity is helped a great deal by Google using it, as well as the huge amount of devops software written in Go (docker, terraform, kubernetes). But at some point the hype for those will settle and they'll just become more tools. At the same time there'll be more and more legacy Go projects at various companies that won't be very exciting. Around about this time we'll probably see the next language start rising in popularity.
It was almost life-changing when I figured out how to do that on both my work Macbook and my home Linux machine. As another evil mode user I second what you said
I wish I could take a class on early film history. It's fascinating to see how people figured out all these techniques, tricks, rules, and conventions in the first few decades of movie-making. It's simply incredible how quickly it developed as an art form so quickly.
Not quite mammals but mammal-like reptiles. They're related to mammals but not our direct ancestors, more like aunts and uncles in the evolutionary family tree.
Yep definitely true. I meant that the original author of Gilgamesh would have lived at a time when certain Sanskrit names may have been heard of in Mesopotamia.
Gilgamesh was written ~2000 years after PIE's theorized origins. It actually lines up well with the Rigveda, one of the oldest surviving Vedic Sanskrit texts.
I added my home and work addresses to my phone's dictionary under the shortcuts "hm" and "wrk". In some ways this is even faster since I don't have to rely on the maps UI to insert my address.
This is a big part of it. This sort of improves with practice, but can also decay from lack of use. For me, I've found that regularly putting myself in a position where I talk to people I don't know helps a lot.
To me, this seems less like they're selecting for good engineers and more like they're just selecting for people who really want Google on their resume.