Randal L. Schwartz
Why do New Caledonian crows bend wire into hooks with zero training while a trillion-parameter LLM flies straight into the same production bug zapper? How Anthony Zador's Genomic Bottleneck explains what 'instinct' really is in AI coding agents.
If you have never watched the classic Oxford University footage of Betty, a New Caledonian crow (_Corvus moneduloides_), stop and picture the experiment (Weir, Chappell, & Kacelnik, 2002).
A small bucket of food is sitting at the bottom of a vertical glass tube. Next to the tube is a straight piece of laboratory garden wire—a human-manufactured metal alloy that zero generations of crows have ever encountered in 30 million years of evolution.
Excerpt from DEV Community ↗, by Randal L. Schwartz.
Crows, Moths, and Makefiles: How 300 Megabytes of Crow DNA Explains Why a 20-Kilobyte Scar File Outsmarts a Terabyte LLM was first seen on DEV Community · Top this week on Nov 5, 2026. Since then it has appeared in 71 checks on 4 different days. Its best position was #15 of 30, reached on Nov 5, 20:43 UTC. It is #15 right now, climbing from #16 to #15 over the last 6 checks.
Position on DEV Community · Top this week at every check (lower is better).
Best rank per day (UTC).
♥ as reported by DEV Community.
Archived daily, weekly and monthly lists that include this entry.
Yes. As of Nov 8, 14:43 UTC it is #15, climbing from #16 to #15 over the last 6 checks.
#15 on DEV Community · Top this week, on Nov 5, 20:43 UTC. Trendoday checks this list every 60 minutes.
It was first seen on Nov 5, 2026 and has been on the list on 4 days (71 checks) since.