We like to imagine ourselves as special, as evidenced by the way we write our mythologies and philosophy, but that's ego talking, not evidence.
What? You don't think the fact that we write mythologies and philosophy at all makes us special among animals?
All that distinguishes us from the other apes is brain size to body mass ratio. And even then, the gulf isn't vast.
No, it's the fact that we write mythologies and philosophy that distinguishes us from other apes. And that gulf is vast.
We can safely assume that any mammal with a similarly large brain in relation to body mass has the same range of emotions, capacity for complex thought, self-awareness, creativity, what-have-you.
No we can't. That's pure speculation. In fact, it's not so much the size of the brain that matters, but the structure.
How do you know what the gap is? I suppose it's easier to tell with our closest relatives, because there's some sort of baseline. But when you start talking about species who live in considerably different environments from us, like aquatic mammals, I think it becomes a good deal harder. For all you know, a whole lot of dolphins are saying "Fuck you murdering bastards" to the Japanese hunters that kill them en masse.
And rightly so. I'm not saying that dolphin-killers aren't scum. But so are gorilla-killers and elephant-killers. And people who torment cats and dogs. I'm all for decent treatment of animals. I'm convinced that the "higher" animals have feelings too, and deserve to not be tortured or slaughtered or bred in brutal ways. But don't pretend that they're people, because they're just not.
I am suggesting that it's a little to pat and really an application of circular reasoning to say "They're not persons because they're not like us, and we know this because they don't act like us."
That's not circular reasoning, it's simply an observation. What better definition of person than "like us" do we have? If merely having a sense of self and a personality is enough to get the right to vote, then quite a lot of animals will fit that bill. Sure, dolphins are smart, but so are chimps and elephant. And whales, orang-utans and crows. But none of them come anywhere near any semblance of the kind of cultural ability that we have.
Your suggestion in many ways is how slavery was justified by stating that the slaves were somehow an inferior animal.
No. Slaves were fully human, and humans already had "personhood". Not just that, but slaves have asked for freedom. And even when they didn't speak the same language, they were still able to express their displeasure over their captivity. (Although I seem to recall a story about a circus with African elephants that were also clearly unhappy about their captivity, no matter their treatment. And yes, that means they tore the place down, and probably got shot.)
In any case, I'm all for treating animals with respect, and letting them live in their own habitats rather than captivity. But giving them human rights simply because they might be slightly smarter than some other animals is just silly.
If you grant dolphins "personhood" (whatever that means), then you've got to do the same thing with chimps. And probably orang-utans. And then maybe whales and elephants too.
My suggestion is that we grant them this personhood when they ask for it. When they're able to ask for it, then it's obvious they deserve it. Until then, there's a huge gap between what humans are capable of and what various smart animals are capable of.
Well, in my opinion, when someone's ego needs cuddling, they're better off visiting a therapist than playing some hard core strategy game with halway capable AI. (GalCiv's AI wasn't even that hard; there were still dozens of ways that you could take unfair advantage of the AI players. The only thing they did really well was economy.)
But you're right. Different people have different expectations. I want AI to be a substitute for playing against a real life human being (my gaming life has been very disappointing so far), whereas other just want justification for their own inflated self-image. I love it when I lose. It means I did something wrong and can improve. Or it means I'm playing someone or something really awesome.
He openly declared one of his superiors to be an idiot - and got away with it.
I've also worked with someone who declared his boss (the CEO of our tiny company) an idiot. He got special rules, and everybody listened to him. But he was right most of the time, and he did more than anyone else to keep the company afloat (which included killing off any stupid ideas by the CEO). He worked weekends and said that he considered working there a hobby. He had a seriously impressive number of questionable qualities that would make him unemployable in many companies, but I'd love to work with him again in the future. I consider him the best programmer I've ever worked with.
There are actually creative people who can take criticism. No idea how rare they are, but they definitely exist. John Carmack has posted on Slashdot. Brad Wardell has posted on usenet (off all the hotbeds of flamewars and trolls...). And I think Brad has had very productive discussions there, which did influence his games.
For example: Brad prided himself on the good AI for Galactic Civilizations, and it certainly had the best AI I've ever seen in a turn-based strategy game. But it still lacked true killer instinct. Brad said it'd be too frustrating if the AI truly pulled all the stops on dirty tricks. I (and others) disagreed; we argued that if a game had difficulty settings called "impossible" and "masochistic", we expected some serious punishment to come our way. We wanted the AI to trick us in the same ways we tried to trick it. In the end, I think he made one particular AI pull all the stops on the hardest difficulty levels. Not all, unfortunately, but it's still something.
Of course there were also idiots who complained that the game was too hard because they couldn't beat the AI at "hard" difficulty, and needed someone to explain to them that they could set the difficulty to "normal" or "easy". You just need to be able to recognize the idiots and trolls and tune them out. Anything that might be useful, you need to read in the most positive light possible. But some people have mastered those tricks.
Offering a place for players to discuss the game with each other and help each other with problems can still be a valuable service.
Personally I disagree with TFA, though. Feedback from players can be incredibly valuable. You just need to be picky and efficient about it. Know which fans tend to write useful stuff and only read that. Have a rating system. Have a personal blocklist so you can ignore the idiots. Maybe have an explicit "this is what I read" forum, and only allow valuable fans (positive karma and not on your blocklist) to post there.
Even the author of TFA relies on fans for feedback. Just not every single fan, but a limited cadre of fans who have proven themselves useful.
But even without any kind of moderation, it can work. Brad Wardell (of Stardock, Galactic Civilizations) read and posted on usenet. And those were often very interesting threads. Not just because of what he wrote, but also because of dedicated gamers giving their well thought-out opinions. No idea if it made a difference to the games, but it certainly made a difference to our perception of Brad as a game developer who really cares about gamers.
No idea what the acronym means, but it's basically an Android distribution. Kernel, core apps, config, lots of tweaks according to the tastes of the creators, and you install it all at once on your rooted phone. (Except if it's god an encrypted boot loader like my stupid Milestone. Then you have to do everything by hand.)
What's interesting about this thread is that a lot of people who have played Fallout 1 & 2 say that Fallout 3 is bad, but New Vegas is better. People who haven't played the originals say Fallout 3 is better.
So my guess is that Fallout 3 is a great game of a completely different genre, not worthy of the name Fallout, whereas New Vegas gets closer to the original in tone, story and RPG depth, but doesn't do so well as a generic post-apocalyptic story shooter (or whatever Fallout 3 is supposed to be).
Fallout 3 is fantastic. much better than fallout 1 and 2
You've got to be kidding me. Fallout 1 and 2 are classics. They're among the best games of the golden age of CRPGs. Fallout 3 is a completely different kind of game. As a sequel, it fails in several ways. In fact, although TFA's author loves Fallout 3, as a sequel, it fails many of his rules. So either Fallout 3 sucks as a sequel, or the author is full of crap.
Bad Sequels: Deus Ex 2, Fallout 3 (though Fallout: New Vegas is on the good-ish side)
TFA disagrees with you. It mentions New Vegas as a good example of a bad sequel. (I have no opinion; I haven't played any Fallout after the original two.)
Testing is a big subject. The basic ideas behind automated tested aren't that hard to grasp, but actually doing it requires some foundation. To be honest, it's only during the last year that I wrote unit tests for a lot of my code. And I didn't even do it all the time, which is what I should have been doing. It really requires a different mindset, and once you're there, I've been told it's really easy and actually saves you a lot of time, but it's not so easy to get there.
Here's my little testing primer for the complete newbie:
There are three kinds of automated tests:
Unit tests: they're very fast, and test the basic behavior of individual objects. You'll have to mock the relationships between that object and other objects, and for that, a mocking framework would help a lot, and that's something you'll need to learn before you can do unit tests well. Mocking is really the big skill you need to learn in order to write good unit tests.
Integration tests: They actually start up your application before running the tests, and they can test database stuff and complex relationships. They're a lot slower than unit tests, however. I don't have much experience with them yet.
Functionality tests: These don't test your code, but what actually appears on the screen. You can ask functionality test frameworks (like Ruby's Watir) things like: click a button with the text "next". Check if we're sent to page X. Now click on link "foo". Etc. Really cool, but obviously slow.
To get started on testing, you might try fixing some bugs in Ruby's Rails web framework. They will only accept your fix if it includes tests that fail on the old code, and succeed after your fix. It can be annoying, but it's a good way to get your head in a proper test-driven mindset.
There are reasonable managers out there. There are companies that respect their employees. When I look for a job, I don't take just any job, I take a job where I think I'll enjoy working.
Of course many good, self-respecting programmers are looking for those kind of jobs, so maybe you wouldn't have much chance at landing a job like that. On the other hand, hopefully it means that the egomaniac managers will end up with crappy spineless programmers and their companies will go bust. Tough for you, but hey, apparently you're equipped to deal with it. Right?
From the perspective of an average man in the United States : there are a number of factors working against the average man in the U.S. today in terms of dating.
1. The obesity epidemic. This removes millions of women who have the genetics to be desirable, but are instead obese.
Are only women in the US obese? I'd say this is acting against Americans in general, and not merely any single gender. And it has little to do with dating either. You can always date someone who's just as fat as you. Or you could get off your ass and get some exercise and healthier food, of course.
2. High incomes of most American workers, and relative egalitarianism. Unlike say, 1950, many women don't need men for money. They are no longer remotely impressed by men making incomes in the bottom 99%.
That just means women aren't desperate to get married for economic reasons. But plenty of women still want a man. Just not some jerk. (Or maybe they do want a jerk; some women seem to prefer them.)
3. Aging of the populance. All men, from age 13 to age 90, want women in the same age range. Women are fertile and make good mothers between ages 15 and 35.
I was under the impression that a lot of men aren't really all that eager to reproduce. They want the sex, but not the kids.
The only real factor weighing against men (and women!) is this: unrealistic expectations. You get your expectations of the other sex from Hollywood, porn, trashy romance novels and what-have-you, and when you finally get out in the real world, all you can find are depressingly real people. Everybody wants to supermodels and ruggedly handsome doctors to fall madly in love with them despite their ill-adjusted anti-social attitudes. The problem is with you, not with the others.
There's certainly something weird going on in scientific experiments. This issue reminds a lot of a recent observation that the placebo-effect was getting stronger. Many older medicines that used to outperform placebos, don't seem to do so anymore.
It's not the same issue, but it does add to the feeling that there's something very wrong.
GigaHertzes don't mean anything. Some processors are faster than others at the same clock speed. I believe the Cortex A8 (in the iPhone 3GS, Motorola Milestone/Droid, and I think also the N900) is at 600 MHz about as fast as a Snapdragon at 800Mhz. In the Milestone/Droid, it can be overclocked to at least 1GHz, which would be faster than a 1.2GHz Snapdragon.
So what we really need to know is how fast this Hummingbird really is. Not in GHz, but in actual computation.
but I'm sure that in the long run it would save time and money
How much time and how much money?
And how long is that run exactly? I'm all for proper test frameworks, but if it takes 5 years before it starts paying off, and nobody knows where the app will be in 5 years, then it's really not such a great investment at all. So, like parent said: do the math. Figure out how much the test framework will cost, how much the recurring bugs cost, and then you've got some numbers to convince your boss. Or yourself.
Well, in my experience it goes like this: You're looking to refactor the code because the code already is quirky. Some 99% of the time, that's just because it's sloppy coding, poor structure and logic or it is simply undefined or irrelevant, the corner cases are never reached, the function is always called with data of the correct format and so on. Then in 1% of the cases, the application depends on this quirky behavior and all in all works correctly - or at least works - until you clean the code. If you have to assume that everything that is there should be there, you end up with code almost as bad as what you started with. This is the problem trying to reverse engineer the intended behavior from existing code.
1%? I think even if the code is buggy, it's quite likely that the code now depends on those bugs in various ways.
In any case, the right way to refactor is to make sure you've got proper tests for the code you're going to refactor. That way, after refactoring, you can check whether the functionality is still unchanged.
So yeah, the submitter has a problem. What he really needs from a code-quality point of few is pretty big and expensive. If there's no money for it, but there is money for continuing as before, then I guess that's the only option here.
That doesn't mean you have to spend 50 hours travelling, that just means you can't feed as many people as you can with farming. You don't have to travel to get food, you have to travel to meet people.
Subsistence farming is a completely different subject. Life as a hunter-gatherer is in many ways a lot easier than modern life. Some hunter-gatherers only had to work for 7 hours a week. The big problem with that kind of lifestyle is that you need a lot of land for it. We don't have enough land to let a significant part of the human population life as hunter-gatherers. And any farming society can easily drive hunter-gatherers off through sheer numbers.
Hunter-gatherer really is the easiest lifestyle there is, but it's a luxury we can't afford anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
We like to imagine ourselves as special, as evidenced by the way we write our mythologies and philosophy, but that's ego talking, not evidence.
What? You don't think the fact that we write mythologies and philosophy at all makes us special among animals?
All that distinguishes us from the other apes is brain size to body mass ratio. And even then, the gulf isn't vast.
No, it's the fact that we write mythologies and philosophy that distinguishes us from other apes. And that gulf is vast.
We can safely assume that any mammal with a similarly large brain in relation to body mass has the same range of emotions, capacity for complex thought, self-awareness, creativity, what-have-you.
No we can't. That's pure speculation. In fact, it's not so much the size of the brain that matters, but the structure.
How do you know what the gap is? I suppose it's easier to tell with our closest relatives, because there's some sort of baseline. But when you start talking about species who live in considerably different environments from us, like aquatic mammals, I think it becomes a good deal harder. For all you know, a whole lot of dolphins are saying "Fuck you murdering bastards" to the Japanese hunters that kill them en masse.
And rightly so. I'm not saying that dolphin-killers aren't scum. But so are gorilla-killers and elephant-killers. And people who torment cats and dogs. I'm all for decent treatment of animals. I'm convinced that the "higher" animals have feelings too, and deserve to not be tortured or slaughtered or bred in brutal ways. But don't pretend that they're people, because they're just not.
I am suggesting that it's a little to pat and really an application of circular reasoning to say "They're not persons because they're not like us, and we know this because they don't act like us."
That's not circular reasoning, it's simply an observation. What better definition of person than "like us" do we have? If merely having a sense of self and a personality is enough to get the right to vote, then quite a lot of animals will fit that bill. Sure, dolphins are smart, but so are chimps and elephant. And whales, orang-utans and crows. But none of them come anywhere near any semblance of the kind of cultural ability that we have.
Your suggestion in many ways is how slavery was justified by stating that the slaves were somehow an inferior animal.
No. Slaves were fully human, and humans already had "personhood". Not just that, but slaves have asked for freedom. And even when they didn't speak the same language, they were still able to express their displeasure over their captivity. (Although I seem to recall a story about a circus with African elephants that were also clearly unhappy about their captivity, no matter their treatment. And yes, that means they tore the place down, and probably got shot.)
In any case, I'm all for treating animals with respect, and letting them live in their own habitats rather than captivity. But giving them human rights simply because they might be slightly smarter than some other animals is just silly.
If you grant dolphins "personhood" (whatever that means), then you've got to do the same thing with chimps. And probably orang-utans. And then maybe whales and elephants too.
My suggestion is that we grant them this personhood when they ask for it. When they're able to ask for it, then it's obvious they deserve it. Until then, there's a huge gap between what humans are capable of and what various smart animals are capable of.
Not to mention the many dolphins slaving away on the cotton fields.
Well, in my opinion, when someone's ego needs cuddling, they're better off visiting a therapist than playing some hard core strategy game with halway capable AI. (GalCiv's AI wasn't even that hard; there were still dozens of ways that you could take unfair advantage of the AI players. The only thing they did really well was economy.)
But you're right. Different people have different expectations. I want AI to be a substitute for playing against a real life human being (my gaming life has been very disappointing so far), whereas other just want justification for their own inflated self-image. I love it when I lose. It means I did something wrong and can improve. Or it means I'm playing someone or something really awesome.
He openly declared one of his superiors to be an idiot - and got away with it.
I've also worked with someone who declared his boss (the CEO of our tiny company) an idiot. He got special rules, and everybody listened to him. But he was right most of the time, and he did more than anyone else to keep the company afloat (which included killing off any stupid ideas by the CEO). He worked weekends and said that he considered working there a hobby. He had a seriously impressive number of questionable qualities that would make him unemployable in many companies, but I'd love to work with him again in the future. I consider him the best programmer I've ever worked with.
There are actually creative people who can take criticism. No idea how rare they are, but they definitely exist. John Carmack has posted on Slashdot. Brad Wardell has posted on usenet (off all the hotbeds of flamewars and trolls...). And I think Brad has had very productive discussions there, which did influence his games.
For example: Brad prided himself on the good AI for Galactic Civilizations, and it certainly had the best AI I've ever seen in a turn-based strategy game. But it still lacked true killer instinct. Brad said it'd be too frustrating if the AI truly pulled all the stops on dirty tricks. I (and others) disagreed; we argued that if a game had difficulty settings called "impossible" and "masochistic", we expected some serious punishment to come our way. We wanted the AI to trick us in the same ways we tried to trick it. In the end, I think he made one particular AI pull all the stops on the hardest difficulty levels. Not all, unfortunately, but it's still something.
Of course there were also idiots who complained that the game was too hard because they couldn't beat the AI at "hard" difficulty, and needed someone to explain to them that they could set the difficulty to "normal" or "easy". You just need to be able to recognize the idiots and trolls and tune them out. Anything that might be useful, you need to read in the most positive light possible. But some people have mastered those tricks.
Offering a place for players to discuss the game with each other and help each other with problems can still be a valuable service.
Personally I disagree with TFA, though. Feedback from players can be incredibly valuable. You just need to be picky and efficient about it. Know which fans tend to write useful stuff and only read that. Have a rating system. Have a personal blocklist so you can ignore the idiots. Maybe have an explicit "this is what I read" forum, and only allow valuable fans (positive karma and not on your blocklist) to post there.
Even the author of TFA relies on fans for feedback. Just not every single fan, but a limited cadre of fans who have proven themselves useful.
But even without any kind of moderation, it can work. Brad Wardell (of Stardock, Galactic Civilizations) read and posted on usenet. And those were often very interesting threads. Not just because of what he wrote, but also because of dedicated gamers giving their well thought-out opinions. No idea if it made a difference to the games, but it certainly made a difference to our perception of Brad as a game developer who really cares about gamers.
And what is a ROM?
No idea what the acronym means, but it's basically an Android distribution. Kernel, core apps, config, lots of tweaks according to the tastes of the creators, and you install it all at once on your rooted phone. (Except if it's god an encrypted boot loader like my stupid Milestone. Then you have to do everything by hand.)
What's interesting about this thread is that a lot of people who have played Fallout 1 & 2 say that Fallout 3 is bad, but New Vegas is better. People who haven't played the originals say Fallout 3 is better.
So my guess is that Fallout 3 is a great game of a completely different genre, not worthy of the name Fallout, whereas New Vegas gets closer to the original in tone, story and RPG depth, but doesn't do so well as a generic post-apocalyptic story shooter (or whatever Fallout 3 is supposed to be).
Fallout 3 is fantastic. much better than fallout 1 and 2
You've got to be kidding me. Fallout 1 and 2 are classics. They're among the best games of the golden age of CRPGs. Fallout 3 is a completely different kind of game. As a sequel, it fails in several ways. In fact, although TFA's author loves Fallout 3, as a sequel, it fails many of his rules. So either Fallout 3 sucks as a sequel, or the author is full of crap.
Bad Sequels: Deus Ex 2, Fallout 3 (though Fallout: New Vegas is on the good-ish side)
TFA disagrees with you. It mentions New Vegas as a good example of a bad sequel. (I have no opinion; I haven't played any Fallout after the original two.)
Do they also have such a ranking of the most evil corporations? I think Oracle passed Microsoft some time ago.
Testing is a big subject. The basic ideas behind automated tested aren't that hard to grasp, but actually doing it requires some foundation. To be honest, it's only during the last year that I wrote unit tests for a lot of my code. And I didn't even do it all the time, which is what I should have been doing. It really requires a different mindset, and once you're there, I've been told it's really easy and actually saves you a lot of time, but it's not so easy to get there.
Here's my little testing primer for the complete newbie:
There are three kinds of automated tests:
Unit tests: they're very fast, and test the basic behavior of individual objects. You'll have to mock the relationships between that object and other objects, and for that, a mocking framework would help a lot, and that's something you'll need to learn before you can do unit tests well. Mocking is really the big skill you need to learn in order to write good unit tests.
Integration tests: They actually start up your application before running the tests, and they can test database stuff and complex relationships. They're a lot slower than unit tests, however. I don't have much experience with them yet.
Functionality tests: These don't test your code, but what actually appears on the screen. You can ask functionality test frameworks (like Ruby's Watir) things like: click a button with the text "next". Check if we're sent to page X. Now click on link "foo". Etc. Really cool, but obviously slow.
To get started on testing, you might try fixing some bugs in Ruby's Rails web framework. They will only accept your fix if it includes tests that fail on the old code, and succeed after your fix. It can be annoying, but it's a good way to get your head in a proper test-driven mindset.
There are reasonable managers out there. There are companies that respect their employees. When I look for a job, I don't take just any job, I take a job where I think I'll enjoy working.
Of course many good, self-respecting programmers are looking for those kind of jobs, so maybe you wouldn't have much chance at landing a job like that. On the other hand, hopefully it means that the egomaniac managers will end up with crappy spineless programmers and their companies will go bust. Tough for you, but hey, apparently you're equipped to deal with it. Right?
From the perspective of an average man in the United States : there are a number of factors working against the average man in the U.S. today in terms of dating.
1. The obesity epidemic. This removes millions of women who have the genetics to be desirable, but are instead obese.
Are only women in the US obese? I'd say this is acting against Americans in general, and not merely any single gender. And it has little to do with dating either. You can always date someone who's just as fat as you. Or you could get off your ass and get some exercise and healthier food, of course.
2. High incomes of most American workers, and relative egalitarianism. Unlike say, 1950, many women don't need men for money. They are no longer remotely impressed by men making incomes in the bottom 99%.
That just means women aren't desperate to get married for economic reasons. But plenty of women still want a man. Just not some jerk. (Or maybe they do want a jerk; some women seem to prefer them.)
3. Aging of the populance. All men, from age 13 to age 90, want women in the same age range. Women are fertile and make good mothers between ages 15 and 35.
I was under the impression that a lot of men aren't really all that eager to reproduce. They want the sex, but not the kids.
The only real factor weighing against men (and women!) is this: unrealistic expectations. You get your expectations of the other sex from Hollywood, porn, trashy romance novels and what-have-you, and when you finally get out in the real world, all you can find are depressingly real people. Everybody wants to supermodels and ruggedly handsome doctors to fall madly in love with them despite their ill-adjusted anti-social attitudes. The problem is with you, not with the others.
There's certainly something weird going on in scientific experiments. This issue reminds a lot of a recent observation that the placebo-effect was getting stronger. Many older medicines that used to outperform placebos, don't seem to do so anymore.
It's not the same issue, but it does add to the feeling that there's something very wrong.
GigaHertzes don't mean anything. Some processors are faster than others at the same clock speed. I believe the Cortex A8 (in the iPhone 3GS, Motorola Milestone/Droid, and I think also the N900) is at 600 MHz about as fast as a Snapdragon at 800Mhz. In the Milestone/Droid, it can be overclocked to at least 1GHz, which would be faster than a 1.2GHz Snapdragon.
So what we really need to know is how fast this Hummingbird really is. Not in GHz, but in actual computation.
If you need to use that kind of deception to do your job, maybe you're better off looking for a better job.
but I'm sure that in the long run it would save time and money
How much time and how much money?
And how long is that run exactly? I'm all for proper test frameworks, but if it takes 5 years before it starts paying off, and nobody knows where the app will be in 5 years, then it's really not such a great investment at all. So, like parent said: do the math. Figure out how much the test framework will cost, how much the recurring bugs cost, and then you've got some numbers to convince your boss. Or yourself.
Well, in my experience it goes like this: You're looking to refactor the code because the code already is quirky. Some 99% of the time, that's just because it's sloppy coding, poor structure and logic or it is simply undefined or irrelevant, the corner cases are never reached, the function is always called with data of the correct format and so on. Then in 1% of the cases, the application depends on this quirky behavior and all in all works correctly - or at least works - until you clean the code. If you have to assume that everything that is there should be there, you end up with code almost as bad as what you started with. This is the problem trying to reverse engineer the intended behavior from existing code.
1%? I think even if the code is buggy, it's quite likely that the code now depends on those bugs in various ways.
In any case, the right way to refactor is to make sure you've got proper tests for the code you're going to refactor. That way, after refactoring, you can check whether the functionality is still unchanged.
So yeah, the submitter has a problem. What he really needs from a code-quality point of few is pretty big and expensive. If there's no money for it, but there is money for continuing as before, then I guess that's the only option here.
Exactly. Berlusconi makes sure that any dangerous people willing to break the law are all on his side.
That doesn't mean you have to spend 50 hours travelling, that just means you can't feed as many people as you can with farming. You don't have to travel to get food, you have to travel to meet people.
Subsistence farming is a completely different subject. Life as a hunter-gatherer is in many ways a lot easier than modern life. Some hunter-gatherers only had to work for 7 hours a week. The big problem with that kind of lifestyle is that you need a lot of land for it. We don't have enough land to let a significant part of the human population life as hunter-gatherers. And any farming society can easily drive hunter-gatherers off through sheer numbers.
Hunter-gatherer really is the easiest lifestyle there is, but it's a luxury we can't afford anymore.