Notices by myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)

Because they don't really go on the web.

@EricLawton

I'll cheerfully endorse people taking selfies next to The Photogenic Thing over people carving their name in the thing, or chipping little bits off of it... or buying ... suspect "relics"

Victorian tourists were a scourge. I dare say things have gotten better for places like say the pyramids or stonehenge.

@Wyatt_H_Knott @sunumbral

I see no hijacking. :)

I've been reading about the concerns about "over tourism" at Mont St Michel. And there are some legitimate reasons to be concerned...

HOWEVER. I do think it's kind of ballsey to complain that too many people are showing up from all over the world at the... *checks notes* thousand year old pilgrimage site?

Am I being unfair?

A bunch of articles vaugly complaining that people have posted photos of Mont St Michel on social media "now everything is ruined."

But, isn't that ... the tradition?

@Viss

In some STEM adjacent spaces it's not about celebrating the thing, having fun with the thing, helping others with the thing or even complaining about the thing to share the suffering.

It's a competition to be the winner of knowing things. Asking questions and not knowing things is "points deducted" rebuffing "noobs" is points won. It's tiresome and self conscious. For some information such places can't be totally avoided.

Stack Exchange has a low-grade case of this.

What do economists (classical) think of all coins tossed in ponds or pots never to be retrieved, of all the bent swords and brooches made of precious metals at the bottom bogs left for the gods?

There is persistent cross-cultural evidence of people making offerings of precisely the durable goods and currency that are supposed to be the atoms of a rational system acted on by people who are supposed to be rational vectors.

@flexghost

It's also very very unconstitutional. Not that this concernes these men.

But the mail is in the constitution, one of a few explicitly mentioned functions of the federal government.

(I always thought a modern reading ought to imply free high speed wifi nation wide in addition to paper mail.)

I identify with the guy on the left at a molecular level. This is following US politics. This is what it is like.

Only the "audience" keeps begging for more tricks and saying "no no no it's going to be real magic this time" over and over no matter how many tricks get debunked.

https://www.tumblr.com/jollyfurydragonballer/771770325923921920?source=share

Is it possible to become a veterinarian of arthropods? Imagine: New York Bug Hospital

The premiere treatment and research center for arthropods. It would have electric bike ambulances to pick up injured bees. Inpatient and surgery suites. Ant psychologists for ants with anxiety. And even a grooming center where you could get your spider's setae combed and glossy and replacement scale therapy for older butterflies.

@psentee @wroong

The statistical patterns of which words and phrases tend to "go together" isn't the same thing as the meaning of those words.

Because of this, LLMs struggle with things like "What is the sum of seven and 3?"

To an LLM, "seven" is more statically clustered with "forty" than it is with 10.

It's possible to brute force these errors to be less frequent, but there is nothing in the way these systems are structured that processes counting or numbers as well as, say, a crow might.

A lateral concern to this:

I do not think that you can make general AI without incorporating some model of emotional states or moods.

When I bring this up people think about human emotions and complex moods, perhaps in the context of a chatbot. But I'm talking about something much more basic. If you want to model the intelligence of an ant, so it can solve a maze or whatever, you need to have some model for moods if you want to really capture what an ant is doing IMO.

That associative LLM systems don't have:

1. moods/emotions
2. goals that can change

Is the other side of what makes these text and texture generators so limited. All they can do is put things that "should go together" together. This can be very powerful when operating on multiple levels but the system is ultimately unmoored and directionless.

The absence of any kind of logic or ability to subtize, quantify and categorize is also a huge and more obvious deficiency.

There is no reason we can't attempt to model these things. But with LLMs people react to the content generated by them as if all of this structure that's normally behind a human-written paragraph exists.

We infer and project the emotions, the goals, the logic and the ability to categorize. But none of these things are present and it results in deeply strange errors that not even an ant would ever make.

Flint knapping does something to people. Everyone I know who has learned this skill (to understand prehistoric humans) becomes oddly obsessed with it. They do it waaay more than is strictly needed to understand the archeology. And they become ... evangelical about the whole thing. "You have to try this!" knappers can be very pushy.

I have no doubt they are correct, it must be a kind of time travel through synchronicity.

But, I also wonder if they have awoken something in themselves.

There is a theory and neolithic hand-axes are a bit like bird nests. When a bird builds a nest it's driven by deep instincts and by active choices and real-thinking from the bird.

The idea is that humans made hand-axes in a similar way ... not that it was "just all instinct" but that there is something automatic buried there.

And were that true why would it be totally gone?

I'll give another example of an instinct: grooming. The impulse to clean, organize, wash, scrape skin and hair.

Instincts play some role in grooming rituals but the exact expression is influenced by culture and personal choice.

Now consider that many insects groom themselves. Could there be some common element in all of the types of animal grooming and the impulse to self-groom (and to groom others?)

Think about THAT next time you toss a salt packet in the bathtub or braid your hair!

From my observations of ants I'm convinced that they groom as "excitement regulation."

Grooming seems to calm them down and if they can complete grooming without anything else scary happening it's a pretty good sign that the danger has passed and it's OK to stop biting everything.

I've seen two dozen ants all grooming simultaneously after opening then closing the lid to their terrarium (which causes them to panic and start biting everything that isn't a sister)

So you have this very simple creature, an ant, using grooming to regulate levels of excitement. But we also know humans, cats, birds, many much larger animals do the same thing. Did the first bilaterian do this? Or is it just a natural consequence of the bilaterian nervous system?

I'm not saying that ants are going "breathe, Myrmecia,... count to ten, get ahold of yourself." ... but I do think that there is some common thread there.

Emotional states, moods, are an important part of a nervous system. States such as fear, exhaustion, etc. allow the choices an animal makes to incorporate the sum of feedback gathered from their senses.

When ants are "upset" they start attacking everything new and unfamiliar. They will bite your finger, the tweezers, the water feeder, other insects (but never their sisters.)

When ants are calm they will explore these same objects, they will notice they can collect water from the feeder.

Of course, pheromones play an important role in regulating these very different ways of reacting to their environment. The ants, as a colony, are roughly in synch with each other in terms of level of excitement. You can watch a state of alarm spread from one ant to the next when something upsets just one of them.

But, if the upsetting stimulus fails to persist the ants will start grooming, and that spreads too across the group. Once the grooming is done the ants resume their calm collecting.