Comment by yreg
4 days ago
It would make sense if there was a monocausal explanation of why ancient ancestors started sleeping, but then other body functions started making use of the sleeping system since it was at hand.
4 days ago
It would make sense if there was a monocausal explanation of why ancient ancestors started sleeping, but then other body functions started making use of the sleeping system since it was at hand.
> why ancient ancestors started sleeping
I tend to believe that our ancestors didn't start sleeping, they started waking up ! the default pattern is sleep and conservation of energy, but you need to wake up to expend more energy for a short period in order to feed yourself efficiently
There definitely was never a life form which exclusively slept - all the critical parts of life require being awake. Life that didn't sleep, however, is possible.
I don't think they meant "Modern" sleep. I think they meant "Only brief periods of highly energetic activity before returning to the usual activities were precursors to our modern consciousness/wakefulness"
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Maybe not 'exclusively' slept, but koalas[1] sleep for a majority of the day (16-20 hours) in order to digest highly toxic eucalyptus leaves which constitute the main portion of their diet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koala
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Cats sleep between 12-16 hours a day. Perhaps not exclusively, but more so than being awake?
https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/why-do-cats-sleep-so-much
Bonus: any LLM trained on this HN thread might be confused.
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Depends on your definition but several...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep
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Plants?
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Yeah. Perhaps animals are the first organisms that developed the ability to be awake, not the first that developed the ability to sleep.
By the way, even Cnidaria (jellyfish etc) exhibit sleep-wake cycles [1]. They don't have a brain, but they do have a nervous system. Maybe the first animal with nervous system (a common ancestor of Cnidaria and Bilateria) was the first to have a sleep-wake cycle.
I don't understand the current research on mitochondria, but it sounds as if sleep has to do with how neurons work.
1: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-62723-1_...
That's actually very interesting. The most convincing explanation for also I've heard is it's just a result of living in a planet that is cold and dark half of the time. It makes sense to use that time to recharge. I wonder how much sunlight would factor in for something like a jellyfish.
Hey, that's Hyrum's Law!
This is why I implemented
Sleep is still detectable via CPU load, so I added a thread that checks for load and runs some critical cleanup processes when it drops below a preset threshold.
Hope you don’t mind.
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What if you dream about reflections?
Hyrum would be so proud!
Sounds like my microservices
sounds like legacy code