If you don't like your honey having been regurgitated, there are alternatives for getting honey...

Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones.

That's not what I said. I said that the word "drone", as in a mindless unthinking being, is derived from drones, as in male bees. I did not say "all bees are drone bees".

And an individual bee has limited memory. They even forget which hive they are from after a while if they don't return to it.

You are confusing "forgetting" with "disruption".

Bees have both a geospatial "mental map" (based on landmarks, the sun, etc) and a chemical fingerprint (they recognize their nestmates' smell). Concerning their geospatial memory, not only is it not poor, the main problem with it is that it's too stubborn. If you move a hive 20 meters away, the bees will fly back to the same empty location where their hive used to be and wait there. They don't adapt well to change because they have a long-term memory of "the hive was here".

If a beekeeper wants to move a hive, they have to trigger an "orientation flight" to get the bees to learn the new location (this typically involves locking them inside their hive for several days to disrupt their routine). During an orientation flight, the bees will learn the new hive location, and then they'll subbornly remember that location long-term, even if you move the hive again.

As for recognizing their nestmates, this is again based on smell. A bee being isolated for days or weeks will still be recognized by guard bees at the entrance and welcomed in. However, guards will sometimes let in bees that don't belong to that hive as well, if e.g. they're passive and laden with pollen and nectar; they haven't "forgotten" their scent, they're just "forgiving" of mistakes if there's a reward to be had (bees sometimes make navigation errors, esp. if all nest boxes are similar in shape/colour or due to wind, and enter the wrong hive)

I'll repeat: bees do NOT have a short memory. This is a myth. It's not true. The very example you gave is actually an example of bee memory being too rigid.

It's IMHO amazingly impressive how dense information can be stored within neural networks. Even a comparably tiny LLM can store more information than the human brain, despite the brain's theoretical storage being far higher due to its vast number of connections (ANNs are better at information density, we're better at learning from limited datasets). The tiny LLM will crush humans at a quiz in virtually anything except said human's particular areas of expertise. Storing information as a superposition of states across a large number of neurons and connections (whether we're talking artificial or biological) is an immensely space-efficient way to do so, and the human mind is nowhere near the limits of information storage capability.

There is no technical reason why a given organism, such as a bee, could not achieve far denser information representations in order to be able to do more with its limited neural capacity (though there are always tradeoffs). One of the reasons that ANNs learn slower-but-denser is the use of a very low learning rate with a very large amount of data that covers the same topic from many different angles, giving the weights ample time to explore different possible circuits in parallel and seeing which ones predict reality the best ("learn everything all at once" vs. "learn this thing NOW"). Bees aren't tasked with learning anywhere nearly as diverse things as a human is and spend all day doing the same basic job (the same information "from different angles"), so it seems quite possible that their greater "information specialization" as they go about their day may be able to lead to denser representations of said information.

BTW, at risk of a tangent (your comment about non-neuron cells playing roles), it's been really interesting to me seeing how a key difference between artificial and biological learning has been clearing up. In biological neural networks, weight cannot flip sign (Dale's Principle). In the general case, a neuron is either excitatory or inhibitory (usually a small number of inhibitory neurons per cluster of excitatory neurons); it can't change from one to the other even if learning would favour that. At a first glance, that would seem to cripple learning capability (and definitely does if you implement that in ANNs). But what appears to actually happen in biological neural networks is a sort of horizontal learning, co-dependent synaptic plasticity, between excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Instead of merely weakening an excitatory connection down to zero and then being able to go no further, learning simultaneously weakens the excitatory connections and strengthens the inhibitory connections. The excitatory neurons are the primary drivers of information storage and processing, but the inhibitory neurons adjust the baseline to give them the flexibility to express negative net activations as needed.

It is a myth that individual bees only retain information for half an hour. Depending on the memory at hand, bee memories can last days, weeks, or even the remainder of their foraging life. They have to remember things, because the timeframes a hive operates on are much longer than half an hour, including night time and being kept inside by inclement weather for days or even weeks at at time. Individual bees also learn much more than can be conveyed through waggle dances, such as what colours and shapes of flowers are yielding best in a given area at what time of day (bee learning is essential to them being able to function as generalists, able to handle any mix of plants at any latitude).

Also, the hive doesn't just blindly accept whatever any bee says. Each bee functions as an individual in a society. When a bee waggles in the "town square" (on the comb), other bees gather around to "listen" (detecting oscillating shifts in the electric field plus tactile contact and sound). But whether a bee actually decides to make use of that information depends on whether they're having good or bad foraging success. Only a small fraction of bees on average (usually a single-digit percentage of watchers) will decide to make use of the information. And if another bee "disagrees" with a waggle dance - for example, if they've been there and found nothing, or worse, found dead bees, predators or a rival hive), they can make a counter-buzz to argue against it. The arguments can get quite "heated", with many bees taking part.

We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!), but they're all individuals each acting on their own. There are simply various rallying factors that keep them together (for example, the scent of the queen, the desire to live in a warm hive, etc). The information communicated within a hive is limited; bees overwhelmingly rely on their own mind and memory, and perform their tasks as individuals.

Seems to me 'dead' for a taxi isn't 'dead' for a static power bank. If I'm running a taxi I've got hard limits on how large my battery can be and how heavy, and I want to maximise the mileage I get between charges, because while my taxi is charging it's not out on the road earning money. When that battery is keeping only maybe 80% of its original design charge, and now I have to schedule one recharge too many per working day? Bang goes my business plan, so I'm replacing it.

If I'm storing energy for the grid I'm a lot less worried about that. It only stores 80% of what it did when new? Better than nothing, and the taxi firm is selling them off cheap. I'll stack them up!

Perhaps not, but if you pick your moment right then permanently stopping the work of some of the most talented researchers there could very well make a difference. A spectacular incident that makes the headlines might also deter others - bright graduates might decide it's far safer to take up a different line of work, subcontractors and suppliers might decide doing business with AI firms isn't worth the danger, investors might figure the increased risk of loss of premises and equipment into their projections, that kind of thing.

If people genuinely believed AI takeover was a real, present and imminent threat, then they wouldn't just be publishing essays online, they'd be forming direct action groups, along the full spectrum of campaigning: all the way from awareness raising publicity campaigns, through picketing, blockades and sit-ins, up through Black Bloc type actions, right up to menacing intimidation campaigns and terrifying physical force operations. But I don't see any Butlerian Jihad getting started. Which tells me they don't actually believe this at all; they're just bigging up their own importance. 'Oh yes, our technology is so incredibly powerful, if it were done wrong then imagine what could happen! Keep the money coming to make sure it's done right instead! Then all that power can be ours instead!... I mean, uh, yours, Mr Investor sir.'

AI stock valuations don't make a bit of sense unless the technology turns out to be every bit as powerful as that. If they don't keep that thought alive, then the bubble bursts right now. That's what all this hot air is about, and that's why nobody really pulls a Miles Dyson at the AI research lab.

I mean, bees attack small hive beetles by building prisons of propolis around them, that's something :)

The interesting thing about the Terminator movies is that when AI researcher Miles Dyson became convinced that his work had a high probability of resulting in an artificial general intelligence attempting to replace humanity, he did not go and post a ten thousand word essay on LessWrong about how he had updated his timeline and p(doom) estimates and discussing the full Bayesian analysis of the situation. He went to the lab that very night with some heavily armed companions and he blew the place up.

I keep hearing that one AI researcher or another claims that they believe as Dyson came to believe. Until one of them takes similar action, I simply do not believe that they actually think their research carries such a risk.

You have access to the lab where the work is being done? You regularly meet in person with leading researchers and talents driving the project forward? You are an American and you have the Second Amendment? And the entire future light cone is at stake? Quintillions of hypothetical future lives riding on the outcome of this project here and now?

What's the most effective, altruistic thing you could do for them?

Yeah, exactly. I've never heard of anyone shooting up their AI lab. Which tells me they don't believe their AI is at all likely to wipe us all out.

... and then to secure Ukraine into the European economic and defence structure as firmly as possible. At this point they're far ahead of NATO on how to use drones and robots in war, and they're clearly getting very, very good at building them too. European military and aerospace people both will have a lot to gain from cooperation with Ukraine after the war is over.

As cadets were so memorably told a generation ago: remember always, your duty is clear - to build and maintain those robots!

Sounds good - DDG is pretty bad lately, it typically just returns a list of AI generated SEO slop pages, so I've been switching back to Google in a private tab for a lot of things. Might be worth trying this one now!

If they leave them there, the next administration might be able to switch them back on and start gathering woke climate science data again.

Meanwhile, X.AI has asked the EPA for permission to release up to 100 million hyperfecund pesticide-resistant male mosquitoes in California and New York over two years to own the libs.

Long ago, the UK courts ordered all the major consumer ISPs to block The Pirate Bay along with various other popular services. Ever since, we've had to keep up to date on what the latest proxy address might be.

Of course, thanks to the new censorship laws introduced more recently, we're all on VPNs now, so as to avoid having to hand our ID to the wallet inspector for every last website we ever use. And once that was set up, it was nice to discover that the original is still in play!

*head bangs in approval*

I am reminded of some source code for a company-specific program that I saw in the late 1990s. I don't remember why I was perusing it, as I was in IT and absolutely not a developer. But I remember being tickled at one of the comments before a block of code. It was something like, "I have no idea why or how the following code works. But every time someone tries to change it, everything breaks, so please don't touch it."