Things also get more complicated here by how many Pokemon don't have just one evolutionary line, but multiple, and that said lines diverge based on various external factors.
Eevee is obviously the most famous one, since based on what evolutionary stone was used, how happy it is, the time of day it got happy enough or where it leveled up it can evolve into Flareon, Jolteon, Vaporeon, Espeon, Umbreon, Leafeon, Glaceon or Sylveon.
But there are other interesting examples too. Poliwhirl becomes Poliwrath if you use a water stone, but Politoed if traded with a king's rock. Kirlia evolves into Gardevoir if female and Gallade if male, though it also needs the dawn stone for the latter. A whole bunch require them to have a certain move, level up in a certain region (country), level up in a certain part of that country, to defeat certain other Pokemon, get traded with certain other Pokemon, etc.
That make things a tad harder, since in real life a maturing animal becomes the same thing no matter where it grew up or what it learned to do. A kitten doesn't become a different type of cat based on whether it lived in the US or France.
But yeah, it's interesting to see these comparisons. Just worth remembering that the mechanics of Pokemon evolution and real life evolution or metamorphosis don't map to each other particularly neatly or at all.
> Kirlia evolves into Gardevoir if female and Gallade if male, though it also needs the dawn stone for the latter.
This is incorrect; male Kirlia evolve into Gardevoir just as females do. You can evolve a male (and only a male) into Gallade before that happens, but there is no restriction on Kirlia evolving into Gardevoir.
> in real life a maturing animal becomes the same thing no matter where it grew up or what it learned to do
This is false too. A maturing animal in real life may have its sex determined by environmental factors. (And to complete the analogy, there are paired Pokemon 'species' that differ only by the fact that one species is the male or female version of the other one. For example, female Tauros are called Miltanks, and male Miltanks are called Tauros.)
I can’t believe I’m nitpicking this on HN of all places, but the Taurus-Miltank thing is just fan headcanon based on nothing more than the analogy with real-life animals. While it’s true that Tauros is a male-only species and Miltank is female-only, they have separate Pokédex numbers and were introduced in different generations.
They can breed (because they’re in the same egg group) but the offspring can only ever be a Miltank. The only way to breed a Tauros is via ditto, same as with any other male-only species.
> The only way to breed a Tauros is via ditto, same as with any other male-only species.
You're half right. I was wrong about Tauros and Miltank.
But Volbeat and Nidorino are male-only species that don't need to be bred via Ditto. You can breed Volbeat with Ditto and get an Illumise. You can breed anything with Illumise and get a Volbeat. You can breed anything with Nidoran-female and get a Nidoran-male. You can breed a Nidorino with Ditto and get a Nidoran-female.
Outside-of-universe, this is obviously because the technology of representing Pokemon within the game has changed over time. Later male-female pair species are given the same name and the same Pokedex number. But within-universe, that explanation isn't available.
In early 2009, the Royal Society published an article detailing the discovery "that three families with greatly differing morphologies, Mirapinnidae (tapetails), Megalomycteridae (bignose fishes), and Cetomimidae (whalefishes), are larvae, males, and females, respectively, of a single-family, Cetomimidae."
Is Nidorino/Nidorina headcanon too? Each can also be one gender and have different entries in the Pokédex. Are they considered each other's male/female version?
> That make things a tad harder, since in real life a maturing animal becomes the same thing no matter where it grew up or what it learned to do.
Pretty sure this isn't the case. Pokemon evolution is probably most similar to metamorphosis and there are a number of triggers for metamorphosis across animals since it is a evolved biological process. Probably the most famous is the Axelotl which stays in its neotenic stage in general, but occasionally some undergo metamorphosis on their own. Also triggerable via stress or iodine.
Insects are also interesting in this regard like locusts. I think metamorphosis in insects in most cases probably can be suppressed with growth regulators like an everstone.
In mammals, pigs become feral and undergoe a lot of physical changes once released into the wild.
Yeah, agreeing here, and I think those are some good examples of more "complex" metamorphosis patterns in the real world.
I also found his other argument why Pokémon "evolution" would not be metamorphosis not very convincing either: Essentially, that Pokémon in-game and in-universe are only ever referred to by their "forms" and not by their "species".
That's true, but might simply be a cultural thing: I think I read somewhere that it took quite some time in the real world before people realized that cicadas and locusts are not just the same species but even the same individuals. You could imagine the same in the Pokémon world: People might have encountered Bulbasaus and Venusaurs separately, and when someone found out later that one can morph into the other, the names had stuck already.
Or it might just be more practical to refer to the forms if the metamorphosis get more complicated than a linear chain: You could probably find a good name for the "Bulbasaur/Ivysaur/Venusaur" species, but how about the "Eevee/Flareon/Jolteon/Vaporeon/Espeon/Umbreon/Leafeon/Glaceon/Sylveon" species?
I'm kinda reminded of the Zerg: Almost all the Zerg units start from a larva and then go through one or several stages of metamorphosis to become their intended unit. Still, it's obvious it's all just a single species ("Zerg") and its metamorphosis pattern is essentially a huge tree. So everyone refers to the individual unit names for identification and not the species name.
Because a lot of them are built for the sole purpose of using AI for something, no matter whether that thing needs AI to begin with or (in many cases) needs to exist at all.
It's the issue most trending tech has, where the majority of people trying to make use of it are grifters desperate for a quick buck rather than those who have problems that actually need solving.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised. In many ways, YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment.
The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited. Shops selling books are limited. Etc.
So what you get is very generic and milquetoast. It's bland content aimed at a large audience that (presumably) doesn't want to think too hard or leave their comfort zone, which is designed to appeal to every possible region on Earth at the same time and which doesn't scare away corporate types that see anything outside of a few specific genres as too risky to deal with.
Much of what's on YouTube isn't like that. Yeah, there are censorship issues and other such problems, but many of the videos and channels there are as niche as niche can be, and all the better because of it. You don't need to care if your videos appeal to 300 million people in the US or are understandable to a few billion worldwide, you just need to care that an audience that wants that sort of content can discover them and find value from it.
Almost every commenter on this site watches something different on YouTube, often about topics that appeal to only a tiny percentage of the population. Platforms like YouTube can support that, traditional media companies can't.
The cumulative impact of all those different channels and creators is bigger than any small library of mass market works could ever be.
It's a cool argument, but I don't think it's how YouTube is being used or how it makes money. Most views go to a relatively small number of mainstream content creators who converge on more or less the same sanitized format, down to the same style of video thumbnails.
Sure, there's a long tail of people who do free labor for YouTube by publishing niche reviews or science lectures and never seeing a penny, but if they disappeared overnight, I don't think that YT viewership or revenue would budge.
YT might have gained steam as a video equivalent of the old Reddit, but it converged on mass-consumption of professionally-produced, focus-group-tested content.
> The majority of views goes toward a relatively small number of mainstream content creators
By any precedent YouTube is radically decentralized. Yes, the view concentration follows a power law, and the power law beats the long tail, but you have to add up thousands of channels to get a majority of YouTube views. Think about how that compares to the overall media landscape. Any two TV channels would yield a majority of viewers. The diversity and decentralization on YouTube is much greater.
> YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment.
I think a big factor is that it's low friction. Just open the link or search whatever you want and it plays. It's not like cable where you need to sign up for a service, or Netflix where you need to scroll around in previews selecting for your next show, it's always on your phone, laptop or TV fast and free.
It's successful because it's mindless, people can just pull something up and consume content. If they start pushing more unskippable ads, or requiring subscriptions or accounts to view, their viewership would go way down and people would move on to next easier thing.
Oh this is definitely another big part of it. Signing up for any streaming service is a complete pain, especially if you're trying to set it up on a TV or something. Every time someone non-technical has tried to set up Disney+ or HBO or Netflix, they've ended up asking for help due to stuff like having to type in codes via a TV remote or access the same page across multiple devices just to get started.
And that's not even getting into the content part, where the stuff you want is probably on like 15 different services and you're either gonna pay through the nose for something you barely need or you'll have to miss a whole bunch of things because it's less of a hassle that way.
Yeah, it's a lot easier when almost everything can be found on a couple of sites for free, where you don't need an account to view most videos and where everything is about as predictable as it can be.
Imagine if it was owned by a government, such as China. What do you think would happen? Even if it was owned by US government, how much content do you think would get purged from the library when someone like Trump got elected? See what happened to NPR or PBS.
Sadly this seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. Almost all the right wing populist parties in different countries seem to be heavily connected to MAGA and co in the US, and want to try and push the same things in their own countries.
And even without the whole social media thing, we see an alarming trend where 'issues' seen as controversial in the US end up becoming controversies in other countries too, even if they're basically irrelevant on a cultural level/were perfectly fine for years or decades beforehand.
Add this to political figures from these parties being seen with their US counterparts on a fairly regular basis, and it generally feels like world politics is quickly becoming Americanised.
They see the American experiment of populism as validating, and the fact that in America it is mostly been pulled off by bunglers is interesting too. And the fact that you can get such traction with very few ideas and mostly just labels like “woke” makes the whole thing seem like magic.
But what are they actually pushing for? Like, what does the UK spiralling into a right-wing basket case actually provide to these people? Is it simply that they reckon they can be the metaphorical kings in hell rather than servants in heaven?
There's so much more money to be made by not trashing everything. Is it just that they don't care if that money didn't go directly to them in the first instance?
Eh, I question the list here. Why? Because they're all startup founder focused sites and communities.
Unless your product or service is aimed at other founders, or a techie focused audience in general, that's not where your customers are. Advertising there is like a game developer marketing their game to other devs or a writer marketing their book towards other writers.
What you really want to do is figure out who your audience actually is, figure out where they hang out online, and promote it there. Niche specific forums, subreddits, Discord servers, social media communities, etc.
That said, there's no real harm in advertising in these places, and other founders can give you useful feedback.
I've always wondered what the people in these videos/making these videos think of this extra traffic from articles, sites and subreddits like this. Do they ever randomly go on YouTube, then freak out when they see a ton of notifications from people they don't know? Are there people involved here who see the popularity of some random clip, realise there's a business/channel opportunity involved and go all in with it?
What it's like seeing some random seemingly unlisted/unedited clip you posted suddenly get thousands or millions of views from random people online?
Gonna be a bit controversial here, and say that sometimes the opposite can happen. That someone becoming successful can give them the confidence to share ideas they wouldn't have shared otherwise, and give ideas that people would have otherwise written off as 'ridiculous' a level of extra credibility in the process.
And that can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of ideas put forward by successful companies and business people (like many from Apple or Google or Nintendo or whatever else) would never get off the ground if put forward by a random individual or company, and that risk taking gets us results that make the world better off.
At the same time though, there are a lot of successful people and companies that get hung up on 'bad' ideas that should have been shot down earlier. Like ex Nobel Prize winners that get into psudeoscience or grand overarching theories of everything, popular artists and creators that get away with shaky writing and uninteresting story concepts (George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels, JK Rowling after Harry Potter, etc) or any number of celebrities and politicians completely detached from reality.
So, there is a flipside to the article. Yeah, success can make you less likely to try stupid things because of your ego, but it can equally make you more likely to try them since your status gives you extra credibility and there's often no one there to tell you no.
Sure. And I'd say the culture of the country and expectations there probably play a part even between places with similar income levels.
For example, someone with a very entrepreneurial mindset is probably going to want to be born in the US, and ideally close to a city like New York or San Francisco. You can certainly make it as a founder in Europe or Asia or Australia or what not, but it's a lot easier to get the funding needed to become a household name in the former, since (at least for a while) there were companies and investors willing to throw a ton of cash at crazy ideas rather than a moderate amount at proven businesses.
Similarly, if you're particularly interested in a certain industry, you'll ideally want to be born in a country where said industry has a decent foothold. Video game developers are all over the world, but it's hard to deny your odds are probably better in that industry if you're American or Japanese.
This. People seem way too keen to assume every questionable decision or random mistake is part of some super complex 4D chess game, while the real answer is probably a whole lot more mundane. They write like this because that's how a lot of people write in general, elite or not.
I see all these example emails and such and my first thought is "oh, so how many of my relatives write emails and text messages then".
It reminds me of the whole "scammers use bad English to find easy marks" concept. Yeah, maybe some do. But again, it feels like people giving them way too much credit for what could easily have been an accidental situation.
Like, you suck at writing English because it's not your first language and you've got no professional reason to do so, and try scamming someone on the other side of the world with those skills. If the recipent is smart or internet savvy, they'll ignore your message. If they're not smart/are overly greedy/aren't internet savvy in general they'll fall for it.
So, why would you try and improve your English skills in that situation? As far as you know, they're good enough to get you money from gullible folks elsewhere. You're succeeding at what you want to suceed at, so you don't really think twice about it.
You can certainly try and find some psychology related reason behind every random disrepetency and questionable decision, or assume that people are often pretty dumb and do pretty dumb things, and that they won't stop doing those things unless they've given a reason to.
Technically speaking? Sure, most of the companies I've worked at aren't exactly doing rocket science. Creating media websites and doing work for clients as a marketing company are things that have a very low barrier to entry.
The challenge is that in most of these cases, success is based on trust and long-term reputation building rather than pure technical skill. And doing a good job in either industry requires a lot more time, resources and effort than a single person may be able to provide.
So, while I could definitely spin up some very similar sites, creating the actual content at a level of quality that people would even bother to read would be a chore, as would finding an audience in general.
Eevee is obviously the most famous one, since based on what evolutionary stone was used, how happy it is, the time of day it got happy enough or where it leveled up it can evolve into Flareon, Jolteon, Vaporeon, Espeon, Umbreon, Leafeon, Glaceon or Sylveon.
But there are other interesting examples too. Poliwhirl becomes Poliwrath if you use a water stone, but Politoed if traded with a king's rock. Kirlia evolves into Gardevoir if female and Gallade if male, though it also needs the dawn stone for the latter. A whole bunch require them to have a certain move, level up in a certain region (country), level up in a certain part of that country, to defeat certain other Pokemon, get traded with certain other Pokemon, etc.
That make things a tad harder, since in real life a maturing animal becomes the same thing no matter where it grew up or what it learned to do. A kitten doesn't become a different type of cat based on whether it lived in the US or France.
But yeah, it's interesting to see these comparisons. Just worth remembering that the mechanics of Pokemon evolution and real life evolution or metamorphosis don't map to each other particularly neatly or at all.
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