That honestly is a tool that should be used more often.
"Oh, Twitter is a cesspool!" Agreed, don't use it.
"Oh I hate Instagram influencers!" Don't use it.
"Fuck Facebook." Great, don't use it.
"Windows 10 is awful." Other alternatives are available.
I know what people will say. "Hurr durr, I can't quit it for XYZ reason". Fine, you can judge that for your own life. But I will say that life is SO much better when you are able to deploy this absolutist hammer with a force of an anvil. I DON'T use Facebook or Twitter or Instagram so I just don't know how much of a cesspit those places really are. There is SO much life to live beyond staring at a rectangular lamp. As my mum says, if it's a chronic problem, either accept it or find a coping mechanism.
Yes, it is a shame people don't take action in their lives to fix all these supposed problems. "I can't quit for XYZ reasons" is bullshit. Unless we're talking life critical systems here, you absolutely can quit. Period. People's inability to do inconvenient or uncomfortable things is the main problem. Their lack of willpower does not absolve them from being complicit in continuing the supposedly terrible, toxic systems.
That's simplifying it a lot. Things can be really bad, but still be the best/only way to achieve some goal. If you wat to play games on your PC, Windows is your best bet, regardless how bad it is. If you want to keep up with acquaintances, you gain a lot from Facebook, even though it might be terrible.
It's crazy to think that you are not allowed to complain about things if you are using it. Arguably that's the most valid critique.
I'm saying too many people don't even consider the idea of "Could I possibly quit playing video games?" I've found an enormous amount of liberation in using that line of thinking. It's a kind of Zen "Eliminate the Inessential" freedom that comes through this attitude; "I just don't use facebook, and let the leaves fall where they may".
Proton is a compat layer, and it often incurs performance cost or glitches. In a few cases games are not even playable. Granted, some games work perfectly.
Nonetheless, I've done my fair share of Linux gaming, and I'd never ever recommend an average gamer to put Linux on their rig.
Agreed, sometimes you cannot. Hence my comment about being able to judge for yourself.
I am just railing against the (perceived) lack of consideration given to the all-in solution of not using services that are not satisfactory. I think people have way more agency in the matter than they appreciate.
I agree, but sometimes you just cannot. In facebook case - it basically killed most of internet forums as people switched to facebook groups. My experience is with car restoration/old car aficionados forums that were replaced by fb groups, but I'm sure it also aplies to other.
So now you cannot find anything as they are not indexed by google, facebook search just sucks and if you set up you own forum then people just don't use it as it's "to much hassle" to open one more tab. And if you're in market for some exotic part fb is your only choice nowdays.
Second thing, I don't remember where (maybe here?) I've read article how guy missed his childhood friend's funeral, because he has no faceboook account, and it was the only way that family informed his friends - by posting on fb that he died.
Next time the topic of "advertising funds the the internet"^1 comes up on HN, remember that this ad-riddled mess disguised is the "content" that advertising "is paying for". As I recall the early www, this sort of survelillance submarine "content" was absent in the time before such "funding" was available.
It's amazing that people don't use adblockers. uBlock Origin on desktop, also works on mobile such as Firefox Android, Kiwi browser, etc. On iOS you can use AdGuard, Edge with adblockers, Wipr, etc.
Also, SponsorBlock for YouTube to block sponsors inside videos, and even uMatrix if you want to globally disable JS and select which sites do use JS.
I use the DuckDuckGo browser on iPhone and Brave on desktop, and Gizmodo (along with most of the web) is not bad. Occasionally, I have to do something from my wife’s computer, and it’s astounding how crippled the web experience is without a decent browser.
Nextdns + Firefox reader mode makes it ok. Couldn’t find any other way to get rid of this “what’s new in macOS” video that was taking up half the page otherwise.
Most cephalopods and, I think, all octopoda are semelparous--they procreate once, and then usually die not longer after. I wonder if this is their Great Filter, preventing the emergence of more cooperative, social behaviors among themselves that could potentially put them on the path humans found themselves on.
Certainly I think octopus and squid, along with covids and some other groups, show that intelligence is rather easy to come by so long as it's adaptive. Human-level intelligence is probably only adaptive given other factors that preceded leaps in our intelligence. For example, I bet nascent (but theretofore unseen) altruism and culture emerged and created an ecological environment into which our intelligence could profitably expand, after which the process probably accelerated and became more dynamic.
In my eyes their solitude and their short and fragile lives are what caused them to evolve to such a fascinating creature. Just like the human's fragility: no inherent armour, no inherent weapon, no inherent speed. If you can survive under those conditions, you'll certainly be interesting.
Wouldn't it make more sense that the fragility, lack of armor (fur/thick skin) or claws etc. Came after tools made them redundant, like how our bowels are shorter than apes' because they atrophied after the invention of cooking- a digestive system capable of processing raw good being less efficient overall in that new environment?
> octopoda are semelparous--they procreate once, and then usually die not longer after. I wonder if this is their Great Filter, preventing the emergence of more cooperative, social behaviors among themselves that could potentially put them on the path humans found themselves on.
The fact that they are solitary is a much, much bigger obstacle than the fact that they die quickly.
It was related to the discussion of octopus being condemned to a loner existence by cannibalism and their "death-spiral" after procreation. A meaningful observing of octopus culture would only be possible if this was fixed.
The ocean is their great filter. Ocean animals are very limited in their tool use - there's not much in the way of rocks or sticks to be had. Some shells and corals. And fire is off the table. I would expect it to be true that any technological civilization has to live on land at least part of the time.
No fire means no energy or metals which means no technology more advanced than the Stone age.
One could conceive of a species that makes its own tools the same way it makes its own shells, and uses energy from hydrothermal vents, but yeah, chemistry and metallurgy would be pretty difficult underwater.
When the name COVID-19 first came out, I found myself frequently fighting back the urge to smile and think about 19 crime-fighting crows and ravens (Force Corvid-19).
And that's a good thing, because if they lived as long as we do and worked out how to get along with each other they'd be running the planet, and most likely farming us for food.
It’s pretty hard to rule the land from the water. Even with all of our technological might, do you think we could wage war on an ocean-bound technologically advanced species? They have the same disadvantage. In all likelihood we would coexist.
I don’t have a good answer to “what does underwater technological progression look like?” I just want to point out that we are under a heavy survivorship bias. Just because we are where we are does not mean there aren’t other plausible histories.
Sure, you can't identify path dependence from 1 data point.
Moving back to the land-sea war, we know how to make bombs and stuff, so they better have something like steel and know how to come attack us on land and so on if there is any notion of it being a contest.
there is some pretty good sci-fi about intelligent octopuses[1], one of the coolest ideas is how a society might evolve in a way that reflects the animal's nervous system, i.e. more of a distributed thing than our centralized one.
(Though one should put in the time to also read the novel of which this is a sequel, which is about intelligent spiders, and is also pretty nice.)
They would need to solve the problem that was easy on land: how do you release an energy from one resource to thermally pricess other resource (food at first but then metals).
There are two things holding back octopodes from world domination: their short lifespan and solitary nature. Both of which should be curable. If instead of curing cancer in mice every week, if we fixed these two issues in octopodes, we will probably have our own aliens in our oceans.
Same. But even more curious is that it's not as if they die of old age or anything typically...the parents both seem to commit suicide of sorts after having offspring. So that leaves the bigger question of why? Does reproduction doom them for death internally? Population control mechanism? Really interesting.
In some species at least, it’s not really suicide, more of an all-in reproductive strategy. In these species, a female will stop eating so that she can spend 100% of her life tending to the egg mass, protecting it from predators as well as using her arms to circulate water around the eggs for proper oxygenation (the mass is stationary, usually adhered to rock or an otherwise sheltered crevice).
Unlike fish eggs, octopus eggs generally take several weeks to hatch once fertilized. Going this long without food basically starves the brood mother to death (or makes it exceedingly unlikely that she will be able to recuperate on her own).
I realize you still could describe this as suicide with extra steps, per your comment.
I've never heard of this youtuber but I'm really digging her videos. I'm now on my 4th video of hers. They are long and I cut out about half/quarter-way in but thoroughly enjoying her reviews.
If these videos are real-time and not slowed down, I think the word “punch” is a little hyperbolic.
It’s more like a push or a nudge.
Saying that “octopuses punch fish” makes it sound violent, but it doesn’t look like the octopus intends to harm the fish at all.
These videos may be out of context. Some fish behave perfectly nice while eating, but are obnoxious most other times. The person recording this may have never seen the fish before, but an octopus has incredible memory and may have a hate on for something it did before. They certainly remember humans.
These punches are thrown to “prevent exploitation and ensure collaboration."
Best quote from from the article. Reminded me of "The Three Stooges"
The world would be a better place if you could slap a selfish idiot when they are doing something idiotic. Or maybe not.
I’ve kept ornamental fish for many years and certainly octopuses are not fish but it looks to me that it’s only keeping others away from its territory like many fish do.
I'm not sure if there is a deeper meaning in your comment I'm missing, but octopi, whilst being a word that people use, is strictly speaking wrong (in a prescriptive sense).
Octopus is a 3rd declension noun in Latin coming from Greek. If one believes nouns should be pluralised according to their origin - which someone using the second declension latin -i plural would likely be - then it follows that one should say octopodes. [0]
Of course this can be solved in a rational way by using the English plurals as they used in the article to both avoid unusual sounding words and technical incorrectness.
I heard of an octopus in a marine biology lab that was able to work out that the feeder was controlled by an app on the postdoc's phone, and the cephalopod was able to sneak the phone out of the postdocs pocket, unlock it, and activate the feeder, then place the phone back, multiple times before the postdocs wised up.
This doesn't even make sense. Even if it connected the phone and the food it also figured out how to navigate an unfamiliar operating system? A good portion of humans get stuck on that
I can believe it’d learn to associate the phone with rewards—-and maybe try to grab it but the rest seems like a legend (how would it see the screen, which was presumably faced the human user).
That said, I worked with a macaque that learned how to trip a treat dispenser by shorting it out. Took me and an EE nearly two days to figure out how he was doing it.
Edit: found two original sources, no good summary article yet though https://twitter.com/octoeduardo/status/1340076579108646913?s...
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy....
Edit 2: the original study PDF is only 8 pages and is an easy read; dunno the policy on linking to scihub here but here you go, I’ll delete if needed https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2020-12-19/fd/10.1002@ecy.3266....