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A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

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Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

#171
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A well-nourished, well-protected, comfortable cow will produce much more milk than is required by its normal complement of newborns, and it will (and loudly) want rid of it. In my experience not milking a dairy cow of the excess would be considerably more cruel than milking it, even if you kept the milk exclusively for the newborns, and I’m pretty sure the cows I’ve seen milked in rural Nepal would agree.

> I’m pretty sure the cows I’ve seen milked in rural Nepal would agree. I am not sure any species are going to appreciate being enslaved. And since we can't actually ask the cows, we can only assume based on how we feel about it. In any case we are talking about ethics here, and cows definitely cannot consent being born and bred in captivity. So even if we are doing this out of kindness (which is of course not), it i…

Food chains exist. Animals cannot give or deny consent. Certain approaches can be cruel, but not all.

It’s a settled discussion, any further arguments border on the nonsensical.

Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A living creature" is a low fucking bar. Bacteria are living creatures. And your body is wired to exterminate them so that they don't eat it alive from the inside. Because the moment those defenses falter, they will do exactly that. Consider saving your empathy for things that matter.

Without these very same bacteria, you would not be able to live.

Which is why the body uses those that it finds useful and absolutely murder those that it deems harmful.

It’s nature. Just nature. And it’s such a nonsensical discussion to have that the only reason for it to happen at any given time is to satisfy the ego of those saying “nuh-uh!!”.

Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because lice are also living creatures. And I have no empathy for them, and hopefully never will.

Lice have no choice in their lot in the universe. Do you think if they had intelligence the ability to choose their lot that they would choose their current one again? I doubt it personally. You can detest their mode of existence whilst still having empathy for them I think

> I doubt it personally.

This is precisely why this discussion is best never had. It’s nonsensical. It’s the stuff sci-fi writers come up with because reality doesn’t allow for it. You cannot in any way discuss any part of this subject with a straight face because it is all made up inside your own head. Everything that you think you understand, or feel, is made up solely to justify your argument. There’s no facts here, only ”vibes”.

Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

#174
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write applications that run the same on all three main desktop platforms (typically): Mac, Windows, Linux. Writing an app for any single desktop platform is weird, unless the application uses some sort of specific functionality of that platform. In my case, I use Qt, but I've also written applications which had three UI drivers (X11/Win32/MacOS).

Some of us think it's weird to accept the compromises you have to make to write cross-platform software, especially when you are using AI to write or help write the app.

What compromises? All three platforms are well supported by Qt. In my experience AI can take an app written for any one platform and port it to the others (with an abstract indirect UI interface layer) with no issues.

There's nothing about this specific app that exploits any OS-dependent functionality.

Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt there also a theory and some evidence that the connectome is not enough to model a brain. Based on the fact that butterlies connectome dissolves during metamorphosis to butterfly but it still remembers things from before that stage of life.

Butterflies dissolving is an urban legend. They don't dissolve. Caterpillars have wing stubs inside them. Someone probably cut open a chrysalis and saw goop come out, so they assumed it was just a bag of goop. But goop would also come out of a cut open caterpillar, or a cut open butterfly, or a cut open human.

They do kind of dissolve; we have better imaging now and can watch.

What isn't true is that it completely dissolves. There are parts that don't and are part of the rescaffolding process. One of those bits that does not completely dissolve is a chunk of the brain; it is probably via this that memory persists through the metamorphosis.

Wing stubs are present from the beginning as well as you noted.

Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

#177
post #38

At some point in the future would it be possible to simply download a DNA sequence of an entire animal as a "ROM" and boot it into a virtual "reality"? What detail level of reality would we have to emulate for an egg to grow into an adult animal?

To give you a sense of the computation needed, a spatiotemporal physics simulation of a minimal (493 gene) bacterium's full 105 minute cellular cycle took 4-6 days of GPU hours on two A100s. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742... Compare this with a c elegens nematode: ~20000 protein coding genes and 959 cells, with all the extra machinery you'll find in a eukaryotic cell. I'm reading this as…

Depends on the simulation level. A lot of things can be abstracted away, we don't need to simulate everything down to atomic level.

Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

#178
post #40

Would we be able to have a "digital human" when we reach the level of creating this kind of brain mapping for the human brain? Honestly I think we're still discovering how powerful neural networks are and certainly they can do computations that sound very close to intelligence in some contexts, but I still find it hard to think that we can simplify the whole reality of an incredibly complex chemical machinery down to…

A human brain is about 100T parameters (if you count every synapse) on fp4 quantization (the amount of state information available in every synapse). The architecture is quite different from modern LLMs and currently not well enough understood, but _theoretically_ a modern GB300-NVL72 cluster is nearly computationally sufficient to simulate a human brain (with some optimizations - almost certainly is).

For state equivalence, we don't need to simulate every chemical reaction in every brain cell.

Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

#180
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A well-nourished, well-protected, comfortable cow will produce much more milk than is required by its normal complement of newborns, and it will (and loudly) want rid of it. In my experience not milking a dairy cow of the excess would be considerably more cruel than milking it, even if you kept the milk exclusively for the newborns, and I’m pretty sure the cows I’ve seen milked in rural Nepal would agree.

> I’m pretty sure the cows I’ve seen milked in rural Nepal would agree. I am not sure any species are going to appreciate being enslaved. And since we can't actually ask the cows, we can only assume based on how we feel about it. In any case we are talking about ethics here, and cows definitely cannot consent being born and bred in captivity. So even if we are doing this out of kindness (which is of course not), it i…

We don’t help only cows, we milk a whole lot of mammals. Admittedly many mammals aren’t all that into being milked, and many (if not most) of the carnivorous animals won’t let you hang around long enough to see if they do, or do not, consent, but it’s not solely because we like milk, nor is it solely parasitic (and certainly not solely slavery). Humans have milked orangutans to feed baby orangutans, milked giraffes to feed other giraffes, and milked elephants because, rather like cows, they can get right cranky (and downright dangerous) when there’s insufficient young to remove the excess. For that matter we help our own species, at times, express milk that needs to be expressed — admittedly in that case usually (one hopes) with explicit verbal consent. Nature does not make precisely one teat per toddler, nor does nature produce precisely one portion per progeny. I’ll admit we’ve primarily treated cattle like, well, cattle, but you give me a cow and a bull and sufficient forage and, assuming they like each other and I keep the predators at bay, I’ll soon have a herd and more milk than they know what to do with… if she’s had fewer than four calves (likely) and especially if she’s only had one, then on a roughly daily basis she’ll be bursting at the seams and pushing up against all sorts of things for relief.

I get where you’re coming from, but I’ve seen with my own eyes cows essentially orgasm when someone finally helps get the first really cheezy, frothy, kinda curdled bits out of a neglected nipple. Now I for one wouldn’t go saying I like that milk, I wouldn’t even say I’d come close to consider drinking it… but I’ve seen enough looks of ecstatic delight on enough mammals (of a great many species) to know that it can be a relief to express the unexpressed, and the species doing the expression isn’t of that much issue at all times.

Ever seen the eyes of a shark roll back into its head when you find the bit of obviously dead skin it hasn’t been able to rub off and hasn’t been able to get a wrasse hole near and you give it a back scritch where it by evolutionary design can never reach? I have. Am I imagining that ecstasy? I mean probably… but said shark kept coming back to me for like half an hour. Maybe it was brain damaged, but maybe my choice to do what it didn’t verbally consent to was nevertheless what it was hoping something would do, to whatever degree it can hope. Or maybe I did a shark a dirty and I should feel ashamed… or, for that matter, maybe a shark did me a dirty and both of us should feel ashamed… honestly, not sure now, hence I’ll resolve the dissonance by continuing to assume I just helped out a creature that looked like it really regretted not having evolved fingernails and opposable thumbs.

What I sure as hell didn’t do was enslave that dogfish, any more than I’ve personally enslaved any animal.

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