What I object to (no pun intended) in Javascript has nothing to do with those nice features, which by the way have piss-poor versions of themselves in Javascript (no proper closures etc.)
Excuse me if I speak at a hopelessly general level in the following. Don't have time to write a paper on it with examples.
The problem is sloppiness in language design, which provides too many gratuitously different ways to do essentially similar things when programming. Javascript has flexibilities where they are not needed, and this encourages many different programming styles that are hard to grok for practitioners of another style. Javascript encourages dialect ghettos.
If a language provides a small and mutually orthogonal set of powerful constructs which fit well together, people tend not to have to invent their own meta-programming systems to get things done.
Javascript is kind of the opposite philosophy: Just throw a random bunch of tools in the back of the pickup, and let's be off. Python and Ruby suffer from some of the same excessive casualness in the fundamentals.
In short, Javascript and Python seem to be languages designed to allow people to experiment (wildly) about paradigms for programming, while not providing a solid and elegant way (e.g. Haskell functors) of packaging up the result of such experimenting to make it easily re-usable.
I prefer a language that expresses a coherent opinion about aspects of your programming style while you use it, so that a community of developers who actually understand each others' styles and idioms (and code) develops.
Sorry. What can't you trust on the client, specifically?
Also, what you are saying is going against the trend, which is to richer functionality on the client for better interactivity, while getting data and some heavy-duty processing and identities etc from the server.
Is anyone at all working on something that is not as loosy-goosy and hokey as javascript for client-side computing?
I've used Adobe ActionScript (stricter variant of JavaScript) and it is getting a little better, but why do we think "oh, it's the client-side. Let's go back to (essentially) Basic for programming."
(Still moping I didn't get my Applets.) (Ok, Java is a bit too ugly (accessor hell) but a language with a little rigidity, checking, and simplicity to it wouldn't hurt, would it?)
What about the idea of having the sale/download/use of the software conditional on agreeing with a waiver of liability whose wording states that the user/purchaser recognizes that software systems in general, and the software/system being downloaded/used in particular, are inherently too complex to be able to provide any warrantee of correct operation or fitness for use.
The general truth of this claim can be inferred by taking a survey of any 100 real software products or services which have been at version 1.0 or greater for more than a year, and asking which of them have not had, since version 1.0 delivery, at least one newly discovered bug.
For any given bug, it is only a matter of opinion whether it constitutes an unfitness for use or a significant hidden defect.
The universe has to go through at least one generation of star birth followed by star old age and a large number of supernovae, to create sufficient heavy atoms to support the structures (e.g. rocky planets) and chemical/structural variety necessary to create a "physical vocabulary" in which life's self-maintaining complex systems could be expressed.
i.e. We are in the first time-window in the universe in which life could have evolved.
It would have evolved elsewhere roughly (plus or minus some small number of 100 million years) at the same time it did here.
So the answer to "why have other civilizations not sent probes or emissaries to Earth" is the same as the answer to:
Why have we not sent probes/emissaries to (a large percentage of the possibly life supporting) other stars in our galaxy?
a. It's really hard to do. b. The economic benefits are tenuous c. We just haven't got there yet
And regarding radio transmissions etc. Our technology for long-distance communication has changed vastly over only 100 years since we began, Heck, we are going back to mostly wired (and digital and optical) data transmission instead of crude "blast the universe" analog radio and TV broadcasts. What makes us think we would necessarily detect the bands/modes/codes of communication leaked by other rapidly technologically advancing civilizations?
I'm pretty much on the side of "make the data network like the highway network" - a public infrastructure maintained via general taxation for the benefit of the entire economy.
Also just like highways, there should be a fast lane (voice and video), a middle lane (regular web and other app protocol traffic), and a slow lane (low priority non-real-time traffic like email, etc)
Tiered pricing may be part of that. Perhaps, if bandwidth is a scarce resource, it can be taxed analogous to a gas tax. But how this cost gets divvied up between data sender, data recipient, and public infrastructure provider I don't know the best answer.
The carriers think that voice is different than data.
The Internet (and service providers like Google / Skype etc) think that voice is just another kind of data. (Though a bit of priority for the packets to reduce latency would be splendid.)
This is just a replay of the old Bellhead vs Nethead battle.
I'm pretty sure the Netheads are going to win eventually, by the logic of the usefulness of having general data networking to every device.
But there will be much gnashing of teeth between here and there.
It seems to me the issue is how credible (and hierarchically prestigious) peer review can be organized, and how papers well edited, without funding for journal publishers.
Can a new model replace this, assisted by new info-sharing technology?
Maybe a social web app specifically for coordinating peer review and managing reputation of peers and "journals" can help.
Anyone think that is feasible?
(Also, in conjunction with that, I guess Scientists co-ops could hire editors and peer-process coordinators.)
If you can keep to a schedule while programming, you must be making another scalable application to add an amount to a bank balance.
I visited Google last year, hosted by a mid-level executive. I asked him: Yes but, how can your engineers work on their 20% time projects without being hopelessly stressed out? Every software project I've ever worked on or seen has been behind schedule. Doesn't that apply to your engineers' main project too?
He said: "We don't really have schedules. We work on things til they're good enough."
Everyone I tell this to says: "Yeah but that's because they have money to burn."
To which I reply: "That's a correlation, but we don't know which way the cause-effect arrow goes."
I will admit that science is not tasked with the study of the "woo eee woo eee" world.
Domains that are only about subjective agreement are perhaps best suited to cocktail party repartee or the battlefield.
However, there are domains, such as religion, which have a subjective agreement component, and a utilitarian social organization component. The connection of the form and content of the typical subjective agreements in the domain to the social benefits can be studied scientifically, as can the question of how these forms of subjective agreement evolved.
Is agnostic/atheist an either/or, or is it a dimension. For example, which category would your put someone in who says "I believe it is overwhelmingly improbable that there is a god behind it all for these reasons: 1. Perfectly adequate alternative plausible explanations for the phenomenology usually associated with God. 2. Gratuitously excessive complexity of a system that includes not only the observed physical states and behaviours (which don't need an extra explanation for the way they are) but also the god thing itself and the very complex way, presumeably, that they interact. 3. Gross imprecision in definition of what god is or is like. For example, if god (and special parts of his domain, like heaven) is in any way physical, then he/it is not an explanation for anything, but merely a new subject for scientific investigation. If on the other hand God is not physical, yet not just a product of our collective imagination, then what rough category would one put him in, with respect to everything else? What properties do things in that category have? Are any of these properties measurable, verifiable in any way? Is there any room for this category in a rational ontology tied to observation?"
Would a person believing thus be an atheist or an agnostic? I would call them an atheist, even though they are not saying "There is no God" has the same necessary truth as "1 + 1 = 2", but rather are saying "There is no god" in the same way they would say "If I jump off this cliff I will fall to my death because of gravity and the fact that rocks are hard and pointy." Not necessarily true, but overwhelmingly probable.
There is a new kind of science (or maybe it is just appplied mathematical philosophy) emerging, which so far does not operate by absolute proof, but rather, does the following: 1. It posits a set of operating principles or constraints for how a complex system will behave over time. 2. It creates computerized simulations of a system that operates according to those constraints. 3. It looks to see if that system generates emergent structure or behaviour that is strongly analogous with (isomorphic to) a real complex system. If there appears to be a strong similarity with traits of the real system, the set of operating principles is deemed to be a plausible explanatory mechanism for the emergent structure/behaviour.
The very complexity of the systems is what renders the generative mechanism plausible, in that it is combinatorically unlikely that the observed emergent regularities would "just happen" if the process constraints were not driving things in that direction.
These kinds of simulations, using the mathematics of game theory, and factoring in thermodynamics principles of systems trending toward energy efficiency, for example, can generate plausible explanations for social constraints that are found in human and animal societies, such as "Do unto others" and "thou shalt not kill" type moral rules, as well as rules stipulating payment of a tax/tythe to a hierarchical coordinating authority in exchange for protections and energy efficiencies offered by a functioning group.
My personal "belief" and it is only that at this stage, is that these simulable models will be able to produce plausible explanations for all of the significant, universal aspects of religious group and adherant behaviour, including the workings of authority and social guidance systems based on obedience to a god/powerful adult/king figure posited and taught as the source of wisdom and punishment reward.
That would not be a proof of the non-existence of "real, instantiated God", but it would be an explanation for all of the relevant related human behaviour, and thus would be support for the alternative hypothesis of "socially constructed God (God the utilitarian abstract concept, like money, or taxes, or shunning of the uncooperative)".
Yes, but soon after "I don't know" will come, for a scientist, investigation, logic, reasoning, occam's razor, and probability theory, which are used, in combination with the mostly self-consistent (and very large) body of current scientific knowledge (or "educated, principled belief, if you prefer) to assess the likelihood of various extraordinary claims even prior to any experimental evidence being obtained.
Scientists are busy people, and they need to know what has already been pretty well covered and understood, and what is overwhelmingly probably false, or is not a well-formed concept, so they can get on with pushing the legitimate boundaries of scientific knowledge.
Many religious claims (those to do with specific acts of Gods) don't even stand up to basic logical tests of internal self-consistency nor conformance with the known laws of physics, so can be discounted rather quickly as self-serving twaddle on the part of religious organizers.
There may be a few actually interesting questions about the nature of consciousness or "purpose" of life or origin of life, destiny of life etc., but science is, in general, advancing on even these challenging fronts, so the "gap" into which divine intervention may fall is ever narrowing.
GOD is clearly an invention of people, for the purposes of: a) helping us over the shock of realizing they were conscious, and mortal, b) putting the fear of GOD into uppity peons who might wish to usurp the established hierarchy with one of their own! c) Keeping people civilized by providing cause-effect narratives, plausible at least to the weak of mind or uneducated, tieing bad behaviour to nasty consequences and good or cooperative behaviour to rewards.
Most relational databases I've seen are written at an "implementation" level of table names, normalization, etc, made very specific to one main application, and the databases require the particular application to add high-level (logical level) domain semantics and business rule constraints to the data. i.e. to add interpretation to it. i.e. the data without the program that interprets and presents it and controls its modification is pert' near worthless.
The problem is the performance of transactions and persistence and distribution of data techniques, not whether we are using a logic-like STRUCTURED QUERY LANGUAGE to ask for data matching certain conditions.
The latter is still, and will continue to be, very useful.
It's just that now that we can assume local clusters and WANs worth of co-operating data stores, there are probably better, more performant ways of implementing persistence, replication, distribution of data than traditional RDBMS implementations.
The two concerns: The logical model of how we QUERY for data (or combine it in bulk), which is the core of SQL, and how we persist it and retrieve it quickly, now have more options for being separated.
That might change things by a small and near-constant factor, but the essence of the argument remains; that you need more bits of information to encode more strategies and more complex strategies for organism construction and maintenance.
Technically, the DNA is not encoding directly in binary anyway, it is something closer to base-4 with some symbols not useable. However, this is still very close to pure binary information representation, and is probably about as close as the requirements for chemical stability, transcription, copying-by-complement-creation etc allow. Only a small representation conversion factor is needed to represent the genome as binary information; the most "pure" and artifact-free, and theoretically, if arranged correctly, able to be the most compact representation of any information.
We will learn a lot about evolution, I believe, if we start applying Kolmogorov Complexity theory (formal descriptions of the complexity of an individual, particular bitstring) to analysis of genomes, and specifically, if we consider what the relative Kolmogorov Complexity between two instances of a genome is.
Relative Kolmogov complexity asks how short a program (i.e. description of a set of changes) would it take to produce this bitstring (genome instance) if we had that bitstring (genome) originally. This factor must be highly related to the probability of producing this genome from that genome by mutations and evolutionary processes.
Actually, evolution is progressing toward "increased sustained negentropy" in the matter and energy patterns exhibited in a local spacetime region.
Increased sustained negentropy is roughly more and more matter and energy in the region being describable (its form and disposition) by fewer bits of information (per joule or gram?) over time. The matter and energy are becoming more regular and more homeostatic (in overall larger chunks). The patterns govern more matter and energy in the region over time, and the patterns last longer (are instantiated for longer in matter and energy in the region) as evolution of the patterns progresses.
It is true that evolution "uses" unbiased methods (based on random variation and selection) in "accomplishing" this trend, but a trend it is indeed.
Another way of thinking about this is to say that selection processes shape their environment, and generally, the more long-lasting results of selection will be those which manage to lower the entropy in their surrounding environment, eventually essentially incorporating aspects of that environment into the functioning system that the evolving genome controls.
Slashdot Mirror
What I object to (no pun intended) in Javascript has nothing to do with those nice features, which by the way have piss-poor versions of themselves in Javascript (no proper closures etc.)
Excuse me if I speak at a hopelessly general level in the following. Don't have time to write a paper on it with examples.
The problem is sloppiness in language design, which provides too many gratuitously different ways to do essentially similar things when programming. Javascript has flexibilities where they are not needed, and this encourages many different programming styles that are hard to grok for practitioners of another style. Javascript encourages dialect ghettos.
If a language provides a small and mutually orthogonal set of powerful constructs which fit well together, people tend not to have to invent their own meta-programming systems to get things done.
Javascript is kind of the opposite philosophy: Just throw a random bunch of tools in the back of the pickup, and let's be off. Python and Ruby suffer from some of the same excessive casualness in the fundamentals.
In short, Javascript and Python seem to be languages designed to allow people to experiment (wildly) about paradigms for programming, while not providing a solid and elegant way (e.g. Haskell functors) of packaging up the result of such experimenting to make it easily re-usable.
I prefer a language that expresses a coherent opinion about aspects of your programming style while you use it, so that a community of developers who actually understand each others' styles and idioms (and code) develops.
Sorry. What can't you trust on the client, specifically?
Also, what you are saying is going against the trend, which is to richer functionality on the client for better interactivity, while getting data and
some heavy-duty processing and identities etc from the server.
Is anyone at all working on something that is not as loosy-goosy and hokey as javascript for client-side computing?
I've used Adobe ActionScript (stricter variant of JavaScript) and it is getting a little better, but why do we think "oh, it's the client-side. Let's go back to (essentially) Basic for programming."
(Still moping I didn't get my Applets.)
(Ok, Java is a bit too ugly (accessor hell)
but a language with a little rigidity, checking, and simplicity to it wouldn't hurt, would it?)
What about the idea of having the sale/download/use of the software conditional on agreeing
with a waiver of liability whose wording states that the user/purchaser recognizes that
software systems in general, and the software/system being downloaded/used in particular,
are inherently too complex to be able to provide any warrantee of correct operation or fitness for use.
The general truth of this claim can be inferred by taking a survey of any 100 real software products or
services which have been at version 1.0 or greater for more than a year,
and asking which of them have not had, since version 1.0 delivery, at least one newly discovered
bug.
For any given bug, it is only a matter of opinion whether it constitutes an unfitness for use or
a significant hidden defect.
had lost the war.
Never trust anyone over 30,000,000
The universe has to go through at least one generation of star birth followed by star old age and a large number of supernovae, to create sufficient heavy atoms
to support the structures (e.g. rocky planets) and chemical/structural variety necessary to create a "physical vocabulary" in which life's self-maintaining
complex systems could be expressed.
i.e. We are in the first time-window in the universe in which life could have evolved.
It would have evolved elsewhere roughly (plus or minus some small number of 100 million years) at the same time it did here.
So the answer to "why have other civilizations not sent probes or emissaries to Earth" is the same as the answer to:
Why have we not sent probes/emissaries to (a large percentage of the possibly life supporting) other stars in our galaxy?
a. It's really hard to do.
b. The economic benefits are tenuous
c. We just haven't got there yet
And regarding radio transmissions etc. Our technology for long-distance
communication has changed vastly over only 100 years since we began,
Heck, we are going back to mostly wired (and digital and optical) data transmission instead of crude "blast the universe"
analog radio and TV broadcasts. What makes us think we would necessarily detect the bands/modes/codes of communication
leaked by other rapidly technologically advancing civilizations?
I'm pretty much on the side of "make the data network like the highway network" - a public infrastructure maintained via general taxation for the benefit of the entire economy.
Also just like highways, there should be a fast lane (voice and video), a middle lane (regular web and other app protocol traffic), and a slow lane (low priority non-real-time traffic like email, etc)
Tiered pricing may be part of that. Perhaps, if bandwidth is a scarce resource, it can be taxed analogous to a gas tax. But how this cost gets divvied up between data sender, data recipient, and public infrastructure provider I don't know the best answer.
The carriers think that voice is different than data.
The Internet (and service providers like Google / Skype etc) think that
voice is just another kind of data. (Though a bit of priority for the
packets to reduce latency would be splendid.)
This is just a replay of the old Bellhead vs Nethead battle.
I'm pretty sure the Netheads are going to win eventually, by the
logic of the usefulness of having general data networking to every
device.
But there will be much gnashing of teeth between here and there.
It seems to me the issue is how credible (and hierarchically prestigious) peer review can be organized,
and how papers well edited, without funding for journal publishers.
Can a new model replace this, assisted by new info-sharing technology?
Maybe a social web app specifically for coordinating peer review and managing reputation of peers and "journals"
can help.
Anyone think that is feasible?
(Also, in conjunction with that, I guess Scientists co-ops could hire editors and peer-process coordinators.)
If you can keep to a schedule while programming, you must be making another scalable application to add an amount to a bank balance.
I visited Google last year, hosted by a mid-level executive. I asked him: Yes but, how can your engineers work on their 20% time projects without being hopelessly stressed out? Every software project I've ever worked on or seen has been behind schedule. Doesn't that apply to your engineers' main project too?
He said: "We don't really have schedules. We work on things til they're good enough."
Everyone I tell this to says:
"Yeah but that's because they have money to burn."
To which I reply: "That's a correlation, but we don't know which way the cause-effect arrow goes."
.n.
.||.
n||nn
son of C and an impure virtual function.
Now you get 2, 2, 2 languages for the price of 1.
N' delay pas. Acheter now!
Please please let it die.
Can't we use a decent 21st century language
with embedded D or something for the
bare metal access sections.
I will admit that science is not tasked with the study of the "woo eee woo eee" world.
Domains that are only about subjective agreement are perhaps best suited to cocktail party repartee or the battlefield.
However, there are domains, such as religion, which have a subjective agreement component, and a utilitarian social organization component. The connection of the form and content of the typical subjective agreements in the domain to the social benefits can be studied scientifically, as can the question of how these forms of subjective agreement evolved.
Is agnostic/atheist an either/or, or is it a dimension. For example, which category would your put someone in who says "I believe it is overwhelmingly improbable that there is a god behind it all for these reasons: 1. Perfectly adequate alternative plausible explanations for the phenomenology usually associated with God. 2. Gratuitously excessive complexity of a system that includes not only the observed physical states and behaviours (which don't need an extra explanation for the way they are) but also the god thing itself and the very complex way, presumeably, that they interact.
3. Gross imprecision in definition of what god is or is like. For example, if god (and special parts of his domain, like heaven) is in any way physical, then he/it is not an explanation for anything, but merely a new subject for scientific investigation. If on the other hand God is not physical, yet not just a product of our collective imagination, then what rough category would one put him in, with respect to everything else? What properties do things in that category have? Are any of these properties measurable, verifiable in any way? Is there any room for this category in a rational ontology tied to observation?"
Would a person believing thus be an atheist or an agnostic? I would call them an atheist, even though they are not saying "There is no God" has the same necessary truth as "1 + 1 = 2", but rather are saying "There is no god" in the same way they would say "If I jump off this cliff I will fall to my death because of gravity and the fact that rocks are hard and pointy." Not necessarily true, but overwhelmingly probable.
There is a new kind of science (or maybe it is just appplied mathematical philosophy) emerging, which so far does not operate by absolute proof, but rather, does the following: 1. It posits a set of operating principles or constraints for how a complex system will behave over time. 2. It creates computerized simulations of a system that operates according to those constraints. 3. It looks to see if that system generates emergent structure or behaviour that is strongly analogous with (isomorphic to) a real complex system. If there appears to be a strong similarity with traits of the real system, the set of operating principles is deemed to be a plausible explanatory mechanism for the emergent structure/behaviour.
The very complexity of the systems is what renders the generative mechanism plausible, in that it is combinatorically unlikely that the observed emergent regularities would "just happen" if the process constraints were not driving things in that direction.
These kinds of simulations, using the mathematics of game theory, and factoring in thermodynamics principles of systems trending toward energy efficiency, for example, can generate plausible explanations for social constraints that are found in human and animal societies, such as "Do unto others" and "thou shalt not kill" type moral rules, as well as rules stipulating payment of a tax/tythe to a hierarchical coordinating authority in exchange for protections and energy efficiencies offered by a functioning group.
My personal "belief" and it is only that at this stage, is that these simulable models will be able to produce plausible explanations for all of the significant, universal aspects of religious group and adherant behaviour, including the workings of authority and social guidance systems based on obedience to a god/powerful adult/king figure posited and taught as the source of wisdom and punishment reward.
That would not be a proof of the non-existence of "real, instantiated God", but it would be an explanation for all of the relevant related human behaviour, and thus would be support for the alternative hypothesis of "socially constructed God (God the utilitarian abstract concept, like money, or taxes, or shunning of the uncooperative)".
Yes, but soon after "I don't know" will come, for a scientist, investigation, logic, reasoning, occam's razor, and probability theory, which are used, in combination with the mostly self-consistent (and very large) body of current scientific knowledge (or "educated, principled belief, if you prefer) to assess the likelihood of various extraordinary claims even prior to any experimental evidence being obtained.
Scientists are busy people, and they need to know what has already been pretty well covered and understood, and what is overwhelmingly probably false, or is not a well-formed concept, so they can get on with pushing the legitimate boundaries of scientific knowledge.
Many religious claims (those to do with specific acts of Gods) don't even stand up to basic logical tests of internal self-consistency nor conformance with the known laws of physics, so can be discounted rather quickly as self-serving twaddle on the part of religious organizers.
There may be a few actually interesting questions about the nature of consciousness or "purpose" of life or origin of life, destiny of life etc., but science is, in general, advancing on even these challenging fronts, so the "gap" into which divine intervention may fall is ever narrowing.
before you realize that it doesn't exist,
and then realize that you can't realize anything because you're dead
and your neurons have stopped firing,
and then disappear in a puff of logic.
Amen
GOD is clearly an invention of people, for the purposes of:
a) helping us over the shock of realizing they were conscious, and mortal,
b) putting the fear of GOD into uppity peons who might wish to usurp
the established hierarchy with one of their own!
c) Keeping people civilized by providing cause-effect narratives, plausible
at least to the weak of mind or uneducated, tieing bad behaviour to nasty
consequences and good or cooperative behaviour to rewards.
Whack-Fol-the-daddy-o !
Sun Computers: "The Network is the Computer"
Me: "The Network is the Hard Drive"
Don't bother saving stuff on a dvd. Just encrypt it and gmail it
to yourself, and you're good.
Oh, don't forget to pass your password down to the grand-kids
before your memory goes.
Overall cool - iphone with big enough screen
But they really should focus on design of a virtual keyboard that is large and ergonomically laid out.
We have to avoid trending toward encouraging passive web surfers who are only "channel surfing"
just like the advertisers want you to.
The internet is way more interesting and useful when it is truely two-way, peer-to-peer.
Most relational databases I've seen are written at an "implementation" level of table names, normalization, etc, made very specific to one main application,
and the databases require the particular application to add high-level (logical level) domain semantics and business rule constraints to the data. i.e. to add interpretation to it.
i.e. the data without the program that interprets and presents it and controls its modification is pert' near worthless.
The problem is the performance of transactions and persistence and distribution of data techniques, not
whether we are using a logic-like STRUCTURED QUERY LANGUAGE to ask for data matching certain conditions.
The latter is still, and will continue to be, very useful.
It's just that now that we can assume local clusters and WANs worth of co-operating data stores, there
are probably better, more performant ways of implementing persistence, replication, distribution of data
than traditional RDBMS implementations.
The two concerns: The logical model of how we QUERY for data (or combine it in bulk), which is the core of SQL,
and how we persist it and retrieve it quickly, now have more options for being separated.
That might change things by a small and near-constant factor, but the essence of the argument remains; that you need more bits of information to encode more strategies and more complex strategies for organism construction and maintenance.
Technically, the DNA is not encoding directly in binary anyway, it is something closer to base-4 with some symbols not useable. However, this is still very close to pure binary information representation, and is probably about as close as the requirements for chemical stability, transcription, copying-by-complement-creation etc allow. Only a small representation conversion factor is needed to represent the genome as binary information; the most "pure" and artifact-free, and theoretically, if arranged correctly, able to be the most compact representation of any information.
We will learn a lot about evolution, I believe, if we start applying Kolmogorov Complexity theory (formal descriptions of the complexity of an individual, particular bitstring) to analysis of genomes,
and specifically, if we consider what the relative Kolmogorov Complexity between two instances of a genome is.
Relative Kolmogov complexity asks how short a program (i.e. description of a set of changes) would it take to produce this bitstring (genome instance) if we had that bitstring (genome) originally. This factor must be highly related to the probability of producing this genome from that genome by mutations and evolutionary processes.
Actually, evolution is progressing toward "increased sustained negentropy" in the matter and energy patterns exhibited in a local spacetime region.
Increased sustained negentropy is roughly more and more matter and energy in the region being describable (its form and disposition) by fewer bits of information (per joule or gram?) over time. The matter and energy are becoming more regular and more homeostatic (in overall larger chunks). The patterns govern more matter and energy in the region over time, and the patterns last longer (are instantiated for longer in matter and energy in the region) as evolution of the patterns progresses.
It is true that evolution "uses" unbiased methods (based on random variation and selection) in "accomplishing" this trend, but a trend it is indeed.
Another way of thinking about this is to say that selection processes shape their environment, and generally, the more long-lasting results of selection will be those which manage to lower the entropy in their surrounding environment, eventually essentially incorporating aspects of that environment into the functioning system that the evolving genome controls.