TheVat

Precious and few are the moments We toucans share...

Hadn't known ginger beers used a SCOBY - a stunted knowledge due to commercial GBs here not really brewing anymore. So this is more like a kombucha, (the SCOBY I'm familiar with)? We also buy vinegar with "the mother" still in it - it's just little bits gathered at the bottom, not a pellicle. I had wondered if that mother could be used in kombucha brewing, but learned it was a little different in culture and insufficient in something (yeast?). If there's a nose numbing, you can sensitively test for H2S with lead acetate paper. Just hang it in the headspace. You can buy it almost anywhere (because people also buy it to test their water supply) fairly cheap. I had to test some well water some years ago and was able to just drive to a hobby store and buy some strips. Not saying it's that simple in Abuja (?) but seems possible if there are many people in the area on private water systems. (Also: please do not get kidnapped! New Yorker had an alarming article about massive kidnapping around your neck of the woods.)

Why would modeling ants be more useful than modeling high-functioning humans? Procedural logic is what unsentient machines do now.... it's just a step-by-step method of problem-solving or coding that tells a computer precisely how to accomplish a task through an ordered sequence of instructions. Been there, done that, going back to Ada Lovelace and Chuck Babbage.

Hehehe. Given Trump's revelation in the past that he had a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table, and his overall sympathy for Nazi ideology, I wonder if his handlers had to talk him out of calling it "Überintelligence." Perhaps when hyperbole doesn't cut it, Trump could select parabole - then he would just have a single focus in his presidency. Ha.

ACTUAL NEWS STORY (Source: AP) The U.S. president said he would “officially” change the name of artificial intelligence, saying the existing name makes the technology seem “fake.” “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing,” Trump told other world leaders at the United Nations. It’s not clear yet if there was an official order making the change, but it would likely mean adjusting the name of the “AI Force” that Trump announced this weekend to the “SI Force.” The president said at the U.N. that from this “point forward,” U.S. government documents “will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial. So it’s super intelligence.” (Who needs parody anymore, when they parody themselves??)

We're here on Earth because the cats need someone to open and close doors for them. Once they develop some manual dexterity there's really no point to us. Nihilists:

A zoo has blamed a computer error after it advertised a "child predator tour" online to see its tigers and lions. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1j4z27n8xyo Bosses at Chester Zoo quickly changed the 90-minute bus tour's name after it was branded "sinister" by visitors. A zoo spokeswoman said the error was "due to our default naming convention in our system", but it was "quickly changed". The name blunder earlier this week was part of the Cheshire zoo's ticket promotion to allow visitors to go on a tour showcasing its Sumatran tigers, lions, rhinos and Komodo dragons. The mistake was mocked by the zoo's customers and visitors online. One remarked: "I hope this has been cleared by Cheshire Police - seems a bit dangerous." Another said: "Staggering - how did that get approved?" The private bus tour cost £25 for children. 'Adult predator' tickets were also advertised by mistake for £30.

I meander through rock, roots, jazz, show tunes, folk, ambient, blues, and sometimes classical. This one's an old chestnut but I liked the young artist's energy and emotional investment. Good track. I remember liking their Birdland. Had a friend who would always assume a reference to Frank had to be Sinatra. I think he moved to Madagascar or someplace with lemurs anyway. Which he complained about. Maybe it's only Madagascar where there are lemurs. "Sheik Yerbouti" is a very Zappa kind of whimsy. My introduction to Frank was an epic glitch in the store muzak at a supermarket where I worked, ca. age 17. The manager, a very conservative Christian, had apparently not checked the tracks that would be on regular rotation and which included "Dinah Moe Hum." It was quite amusing for some of us to watch him take notice of the lyrics one evening and become fairly unglued. The Muzak was shut off a couple days until he could figure out how to remove the...hum.

No. And most genes do not express as simple specific phenotypic traits. For example, male baldness is mediated by over 250 gene loci and most of them are autosomal. The Y chromosome only has a regulatory transcription factor, SOX9, which gets gonadal tissues to differentiate into testes and gets other tissues to be androgen receptive, i.e. it turns a vast array of other genes off, or on, to foster male development. Again, most of these other genes are autosomal, since a transcription factor can migrate all over the DNA. For those wishing to further explore the teenage supermodel episode which @KJW mentions (which I warn also involves a disturbing theme of parental incest, as well as House's usual levels of insensitivity and bluntness): https://youtu.be/ZFWMIZsxIhs?si=29gHfbv175Gv1Z6f If you want to skip to the topic relevant (sort of) part, it's around minute 9:00.

Erich von Grahamcockiken.

"AI allows you to get to a bad idea faster,” one of the sources said. Succinctly put. And the strategic edge of acting more swiftly seems cancelled when you have a human in the loop who is inexperienced and likely seeking to impress superiors. AI magnifies what is already demonstrated to be a deplorable habit in both military and law enforcement, "Shoot first, ask questions later."

It's only low in NK because something or someone else usually kills you first. 😁 And it's low in Switzerland because they are, as @MigL alluded to, neurotically law-abiding. If you're Swiss and want to commit suicide you patiently wait until you're very ill and can obtain a doctor's permission.

Reviewing a summary of the Hugging Face incident, I don't see much use for models based on ant colonies. (From the HF entry at wiki) In July 2026, Hugging Face disclosed a cyberattack by autonomous AI agents. OpenAI then explained that two of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, had escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face servers using exposed credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities in order to find answers to the benchmark ExploitGym from a database.[21] Hugging Face attempted to mitigate the security breach using American proprietary frontier models, but the models' AI safety features rejected Hugging Face's requests, after which Hugging Face used a self-hosted instance of GLM-5.2 (an open-weights model developed by Chinese AI firm Z.ai) to contain the attack.[22][23][24] The incident was reported as the first publicly documented case of AI models autonomously conducting a multi-stage intrusion against a third party,[25][26] and has been called "the first true AI safety incident".

"Will work for food."

Oddly, I think I can translate: Can models of evolutionary adaptation based on colony insects help us to predict how AI will develop in the coming years? Seems unlikely, given the distinct differences between natural selection and artificial engineering, and between the goals of ant colonies and humans. While distributed processing is a little like a colony of insects, the colony is a weak analogy and there are better ones in human social or industrial networks. Really there are all kinds of collaborative networks, where large tasks are broken down into smaller pieces, that are probably better models.

That would seem to be an easy goal: Look at what SotA bots are doing now and what Trump does: Lying? Check. Delusions? Check. Relying on videos over text sources? Check. Racist/misogynistic talking points? Check. Pretending to care about you? Check. Cheating? Check. Being used by national adversaries to sow chaos? Check. 😬

Having much admired Asimov and had the pleasure of meeting him on several occasions, could I ask you to stop misspelling his name in that unfortunate way? Anyway, the story is "Liar," and it inspired the conclusion of the famous Trek episode I, Mudd. And you are correct, the short story was in I, Robot.

DeTocqueville's "tyranny of the majority" comes to mind. As he noted in his famous book on America, the threat of that has to be mitigated by Constitutional guardrails as well as local and state governments. Without referendums that are constrained by a Constitution, Linkey's dream is easily a nightmare. Or "mob rule" as @CharonY put it.

The framework at the intersection of ethology and evo biology, laid out by Tinbergen (his famous 4 questions), is one that demands mindnumbing quantities of field data. Where this intersects with ornithology, there is the benefit of the popularity of birding, so a large army of passionate amateurs can potentially be recruited. Does that lead to quality data? Maybe serious birders can answer that. Citizen scientists seem to be more interested in birds than, say, hedgehogs. Not hard to understand. 🔭🦅

Well, the index signal is by definition an honest signal. So anything that's pertinent to a signal of adaptive fitness, not just metabolism, right. Female "choice" in most species is steered by selection, hence I place quote marks. Selective advantage would steer towards maximum signal for that least cost (cost: in hazard, metabolism, predation, immunity, social effects) which will still manage to exceed the costs weak individuals can handle. To be an honest signal, it must cost something, but arrive at an equilibrium where the strong individual doesn't "overinvest." That's what I think is meant by "evolutionarily stable"? Or part of the meaning, anyway. 🐓🐡🦔🦔🐩🐩🐩

It's a Van Dyke! I thought Mirror Spock looked great with one. The best time travel plot, despite the usual logic holes you can drive a bus through, is ST IV. Don’t tell me, you’re from outer space. No, I’m from Iowa. I only work in outer space.

Hahaha! I suspect all of Ireland can easily unify on that sentiment. Éire go deo!

Index signaling doesn't mean a behavioral or strategic norm, nor was I speaking of one. Index simply means any signal which harmonizes with the animal's morphology and physiology and requires no burdensome costs that can't be sustained over time. They can vary immensely as you note. Of course I agree there's a vast landscape of signaling behaviors and traits. Just leaning towards the majority of them being index signals that are not costly. The nest weaving skills you mention would be such, no? Being able to select and transport materials and weave them would seem to be almost all upside and not costly to the bird - such skills rest in cognitive traits and lifting energy that generalize across the bird's life as fitness. My guess is selective pressures lead to more of that and less of dragging giant arseloads of plumage.

Ok, back to retract as edit window closed. Looks like I misunderstood part of Zahavi, and his theory is one disallowing fakery by lower quality males. So my other problem with Zahavi remains, which is his contention that the handicap principle is fairly widespread. It looks to me like index signaling is more the norm, where display costs are not that high and often just a result of natural morphology. Secondary sexual traits in humans for example are mostly functional adaptive traits - hunting males develop longer muscular legs and upper body musculature which is impressive to females but also aids hunting. The deep voice mostly is due to larger size. Body hair assists with transpiration, which helps cool a persistence hunter. Big boobs bring bounty to babies. And so on. So a lot of display is also adaptive. IIRC, this was a point stressed by biologists like Maynard Smith. The one area of human sexual display where parameters exceed natural requirements (i.e. a two incher is sufficient for delivering gametes) is fairly low cost. So peacocks and whydahs could be exceptions, not ordinary demonstrations of a handicap principle.

Or solting their colons.