141–150 of 194 posts
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I find Star Trek’s aliens so human-like that it ruins the whole thing for me. But Children of Ruin is so much better!
My head-canon for this has always been the universal translator also translated the physical appearance of beings so that you could read their body language. This explains why everyone looks like humans with a slightly different color and head shape. In some cases, like energy beings and giant slimes, it simply cannot translate anything and displays the original being. This head-canon melts in the face of the actual…
May I suggest a book to anybody that finds cephalopods interesting, especially given the connection with consciousness which is a recurring topic in these circles: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness My only critique is that the plural spelling is octopuses and not octopi , just like the article. Octopuses just looks wrong and sounds funny, I stand my ground. Yes yes I know that i…
As a counterpoint, The Atlantic ran an interesting article[0] yesterday suggesting that it's not really clear what the Octopuses' aims are when they do this, and that we do really like to anthropomorphize them. [0] - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/11/gloomy-o...
> we do really like to anthropomorphize them. Yes, people tend to over-anthropormphize in the sense they map to specific human concepts. But otoh, we tend to greatly underestimate the complexity of animal behavior. Sometimes people mix these up. So, just because an anthropomorphization isn't correct, doesn't mean that the behavior isn't complex. Even animals like spiders and ants demonstratw incredible complex behavi…
Sure, there will be people that do anthropomorphise the octopus' actions, but this doesn't deny the possibility that an octopus can experience something analogous to feeling pissed off. (See: my table has four legs therefore it's a dog.)
To preempt those who might say "ah, but you can't prove that an octopus does have any form of consciousness" I'd point out that it's practically impossible to do that with humans too.
[0] It's certainly not one single ability. Perhaps some fuzzy superset of fuzzy sets.
[1] I include consciousness in "experiences", and I'd suggest that human-type consciousness is just one among very many.
it's interesting how the constraint of being in water limits inhabitants from developing technologies like fire and throwing projectiles for hunting. octopuses seem like they have the physiology and neurology to figure out projectiles and even grinding a sharp point, but that strategy wouldn't give them the same boost it did early humans because of the drag of water. construction and engineering is also made difficul…
Octopus species just don’t live long enough to develop much intelligence or culture. Most of them only live a year and die after reproducing.
> “The environment for these specific octopuses is such that they have this interaction between individuals,” she says. “It’s communication, in a way.” It seems naive to assume they don't have communication (more frequent and more complex), even though we may not have noticed or been able to detect it.
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I googled "cactodes" and this comment was the 7th result on the first page.
Impressive indexing speed.
I worked in indexing over a decade ago, but back then, after some basic constraints (per-IP rate limiting, don't re-check any page for updates too often, don't wait a crazy long time before re-checking any page, etc.), it was a bunch of arcane black magic heuristics to schedule pages for crawling.
These days, I imagine they have one ML model for the expected time until a given page shows up on the first page of search results for some query, another ML model for guessing how much the page has changed (cosine distance of some semantic embedding or something), and schedule based on the product of the two estimates. It's still probably lots of black magic heuristics, just now it's probably heuristics nobody can read.
Ah, if only Gary Larson was still writing The Far Side comics...
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Impressive indexing speed.
If you worked on Google's crawl scheduling, HN would be one of the sites you used to test out ideas for better scheduling heuristics, right? I worked in indexing over a decade ago, but back then, after some basic constraints (per-IP rate limiting, don't re-check any page for updates too often, don't wait a crazy long time before re-checking any page, etc.), it was a bunch of arcane black magic heuristics to schedule…
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> the book reads like his thesis was "Octopuses are cool" and spends the entire time listing fun facts and interesting stories about his interactions with cephalopods. That sounds like a recommendation to me!
Agreed! My curiosity was piqued by OP, but this description is what actually convinced me to buy the book.