... Lobby crew!

FOSS finally getting general public mindshare. Finally!

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.

... big thing. I don't think anybody has anything against any vehicle, tractor or other, or anything at all stuffed to the brim with useful electronics. (emphasis on useful) The problem is when that technology is proprietary, disfunctional on purpose and designed to be extortive. That farmers are sick and tired of that I can see clearly.

One big part of the problem also is that farmers are locked into their business harder than other people, more prone to corporate extractive and extortive business pratictices and they are likely not the type to have the free time to deal with these practices in other ways.

Setting up a non-profit and/or publicly shared business to offer hardware designs that counter these problems are a likely candidate for some use- and helpful businesses. I expect this to be the next big area where the FOSS concept catches on.

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

It's only that now, roughly 25 years late, even the dimest of dimwitts in the political sphere have noticed that proprietary software is shitty by design and expensive and thus plan to move to FOSS rather than continue spending trillions of Euros on software that experts have downloaded for free and in better quality from the intarwebs for decades now. One should never say never I guess.

It's only by coincidence that that software (mostly) happens to come out of the US. Which is totally beside the point of why FOSS is gaining traction anyway. FOSS from the US will certainly be part of that transition too.

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.

If this AI craze plays out only half as intense as often predicted, the disruptions are going to be much bigger than just the current graduate job crisis.
Which, btw., is happening _all_ over the world right now(!). Yeah, let that sink in for a moment.

*head bangs in approval*

Going from bits/OP-code to OOP and Functional Programming easily happen on its own in a single individual lifetime and career if the hardware is there and available. Many people doing programming in the 80ies or eariler discovered some form of OOP on their own just by writing code. The first serious refactoring of the first seriour program usually leads to OOP all by itself. I clearly remember discovering fundamental principles like higher PLs, APIs, OOP, information hiding, state management, event / messaging systems and other fundamental principles on my very own before learning the academic terms of those things that others had discovered and named. I even came up with my version of Oauth/OIDC for only after something like two weeks to think: Wait a minute, I sure has hell can't be the only and/or first one to come up with the principle of the Ident/Auth/Auth triangle. And sure enough, Oauth and it's update OIDC is already standardized and documented. Test First or DBC are also things that come naturally once you've written a few non-trivial pieces of code that grow beyond the scope of what a single human brain can keep track of all at once at the same time.

Bottom line: No need for those traditions to survive, they come back naturally for any healthy brain capable of logic with a sufficient enough logic machine to tinker with at it's hands.

And let's be honest: For some of the historically grown mess in IT (just take a look at the keyboard in front of you) it would actually be a good thing for that to get lost and be reinvented.

... together for life to evolve and persist on earth. This is certainly a very large part of the answer to the Fermi paradox.

Oh, forgot to link the dry density for you: here you go. 341kcal/100g. Aka 3,41kcal/g.

Which, like I said, should be obvious, since they're almost entirely carbs (~4kcal/g) and protein (~4kcal/g), and they're, as noted, dry (12-16% moisture). It would be quite the trick indeed to get something that is dry and and is almost entirely comprised of things that are 4kcal/g to be 1,38kcal/g! ;)

Just in case you need help:

Your calculation: 195g (dry weight) × 1.38 kcal/g = 269 calories per pound of cooked beans.
Correction: Because you used 1.38 kcal/g (the cooked density) as if it were the dry density, you essentially diluted the calories twice.
The Actual Math: 195g of dry beans * 3.4 kcal/g (actual dry density) = 663 kcal.

When those 195g of dry beans absorb water to weigh 454g (1 pound), they still contain those same 663 calories (since water has zero calories).