Prompt:

Hey ChatGPT, who is being reasonable in this argument?

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Rei: " ... We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!), but they're all individuals each acting on their own.... "

Synonymous Homonym: "Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones."

Rei: "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"."

Synonymous Homonym: "What you actually said:

We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!)

Suggesting that the word "drone" means "mindless bee.""

Response:

Rei is being more reasonable here.

The key issue is whether Rei's original sentence implied that all bees are drones or that "drone" as a metaphor comes from bees.

Rei wrote:

"We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!)"

The parenthetical "literally, we took the very word!" naturally reads as:

The figurative word drone (meaning a repetitive, unthinking worker) comes from the bee term drone.
Therefore, our cultural association of bees with "dronelike" behavior is reflected in language.

That is a claim about etymology, not about bee taxonomy.

Synonymous Homonym's first correction:

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

is technically true, but it doesn't actually address what Rei was saying. Rei wasn't claiming that all bees are male drones.

Then Synonymous Homonym shifts to:

"Suggesting that the word 'drone' means 'mindless bee.'"

This doesn't accurately paraphrase Rei either. Rei never said the word means "mindless bee." The sentence only suggests that the metaphorical sense of "drone" is derived from the bee term.

If I were judging the exchange, I'd say:

Synonymous Homonym's factual statement is correct: drones are male bees.
But it's responding to a claim Rei didn't make, making it a misreading.
Rei's clarification directly matches the ordinary reading of the original sentence.

So the stronger interpretation is that Synonymous Homonym misunderstood the original remark, and Rei's correction is justified.

Or to put it more simply: you're attacking a straw man (a claim I never made) because you cannot defend your actual scientifically inaccurate comments about bees having half-hour memories.

You are confusing "forgetting" with "disruption".

I am not.

Your entire argument was that bees have short-term memories. The example you cited demonstrates precisely the opposite - that bee memory is if anything too durable>/i>, such that bees will refuse won't even bother searching for their hive if it has been moved, that they always go back to the spot where they remember it being last.

However, what you are choosing to ignore is that, once a bee has been accepted into a different hive, it becomes part of that hive

That's like claiming that if you move to a different city, you've "forgotten" where you used to live.

When a bee, due to a navigation error or its previous hive being gone, enters a different hive (drifting), it absorbs the pheromones of the new hive. It is now chemically marked as belonging to that hive. Chemicals are communication to bees, just as much as vocal commands are to you. Bees do not learn all of the other bees in their hive, they don't have some sort of rolodex. If you smell like hive A, you're allowed into hive A. If you smell like hive B, you're allowed into hive B. Bees don't particularly "care" which hive they're in; they have their own individual motives and drives, which simply involve being in "a" hive. Once they're marked as belonging to hive B, they can no longer enter hive A (at least not safely).

Note in the above what has nothing to do with any of this? Memory. It's just about smell. Memory is about where the hive can be found after foraging (which is also about memory) - and it remains, even after drifting (they'll continue to return to the same spot - again, even if the new hive is moved). Smell is about which hive you can enter. Or for a summary version:

1) A bee leaves the hive to go foraging

2) It remembers where the best spot to visit is (usually from having gone there before, but occasionally from having seen a waggle dance) and what flowers (shapes, smells, sizes, etc) will be yielding best there at what times of day, and what areas to NOT go to, where there may be threats. This information persists for days, weeks, or even the bee's entire life. It can target an area to an accuracy of a couple hundred meters, and then begins a search.

3) When done, it returns back to where it remembers that the hive should be (this memory is highly persistent, and can only be reset by an orientation flight.

4) The bee starts by using the sun and broad navigational features as with outbound flights to get to within a couple hundred to a few dozen meters (the "visual catchment area"), then gradually switches to small-scale features and searching. This is all based on memory.

5) For the final approach, the bee relies on a mix of sight (remembered), sound (generic), and smell. The latter is not a learned trait, it's "whatever you happen to smell like". While it's usually described as recognizing the smell of their sisters, that's not exactly right. The actual underlying mechanism not so much learning what something does smell like as it being unable to detect what they do smell like

The mechanism the same as how humans become unable to notice their own body odour or perfume: sensory adaptation. Because they're constantly smelling themselves, their brain learns to tune out their own smell. However, it doesn't tune out the smells of others. When they return to their own hive, the scent is something that they're adapted to tune out. But when they arrive at a different hive, they're hit with a scent that they're not adapted to, and that they can detect.

If you want to put it in human terms, the underlying mechanism is "this hive thinks you're stinky, that one doesn't smell you because you've all been around each other for so long".

If you want to call sensory adaptation "forgetting", then you're going to need to call human sensory adaptation "forgetting" as well. And again, none of this has anything to do with actual memory tasks, such as navigation and how to find the best flowers. Bee memory is exceptional with them.

I think this is the thing people are getting confused about.

AI isn't a business. For a brief period of time it will be integrated into the economy as capital. That's not the same thing as a business. It's something you own to produce things. It's not a business in and of itself it's a cost center that is part of a business.

That's not going to last very long. Because that's not the purpose of ai..

The goal of AI is to completely replace wages. Or at least replace enough of them that the bargaining position of working people become so bad that the trillionaires ascend to godhood. You know how Japan had an emperor that was considered a deity? Sam altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg want that.

The problem is right now they are dependent on you buying their products and working for them. So they want to automate you away so that that dependency goes away and they can have the power to control whether you eat or drink or have shelter but you can't withhold your labor to counteract that.

It's debatable to what extent they will achieve that goal and people will cope with the horror of it by telling you that it's just impossible. However if you do a little googling you will find that 70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 got taken by robots not outsourcing. And that is have a huge impact on your ability to bargain for higher wages and therefore a better quality of life. They want to expand that.

Who said the word "small"?

I think the possible adverse impacts to society would not be outweighed by something that small.

(My personal hot take is that, both for copyright reasons ("Purpose and Character of the Use", aka for-profit, is a critical factor in determining copyright violation, such as from scraping), and general moral reciprocity argument (closed commercial models extracts profit from the commons without giving back), closed source trainers should fundamentally be required to give back to the commons in some meaningful way)

... some public ownership of compute, to offer out for grants to Open Source development, so that the commons can better keep up with the closed source providers?

I'm sorry that the genitals of people you neither know nor are dating bother you so much, dude.

Do you also spend this much time thinking about the genitals of children, like so many of your ilk?

Bluesky knows full well it's not operating a real federated service

Better tell that to Blacksky, Eurosky, etc.

The vast majority of people stay on the primary PDS, relay, etc namely because Bluesky hasn't proven itself to be some evil overlord pursuing insidious goals. If that were to ever occur, people would just migrate. Unlike with ActivityPub (Mastodon), ATProto allows for true migration. Your content isn't tied and linked to a specific server - it's more like a URL on an arbitrary domain, and you can just change the "domain" (the PDS). Everything is timestamped and cryptographically signed, so if you download a backup of your content, you can just reupload it somewhere else and it continues to remain linked into the whole ecosystem.

More to the point, primary Bluesky servers have gone down and third parties like Blacksky remained operational, very much demonstrating that the network is federated.

Also, re: this from the header:

" and by the end of October last year, it had reportedly seen a 40% drop in daily mobile active users over the past 12 months."

... is cherry picking. If you graph users, you'll see that - like most sites - new users tend to arrive in big "spikes", triggered either by events at other social media platforms, or major news cycles (such as elections). Most new users to a site are not "sticky". Some drop off in days, some in weeks, some in months, etc, but this slowly levels out, and the rest are "sticky". With Bluesky, usually half or so of new users stick around, which is an unusually high percentage. If you measure from a new-arrivals spike, of course you see a "dropoff", but you see that for any site. The question is, how is the long-term trend of users that stick around? If you cancel out the spike pattern, Bluesky has a long-term population of around 600k daily posters / 1M daily likers / 300k daily followers.

What you can say is there haven't been any big new user spikes since late 2024 / early 2025. That said, there kinda was some serious news going on in late 2024 / early 2025....

Dude robots and computers aren't going to fix the shit. We already have computers and robots are too expensive. Also they don't work.

The problem here is like everything we've let private equity devour in the world. They have cut staffing levels to dangerous levels. Meanwhile we cut all the government funding to higher education so there are fewer nurses and doctors. Remember if you're over 50 when you were growing up the government paid 70% of your tuition. Now they paid 20%. The thing is they didn't cut you a check they paid that money to the university and the university passed it on to you in the form of cheap tuition.

I am fully aware that rich assholes are going to enter markets and they are at a huge advantage because we refuse to do away with Rich assholes by taxing the fuck out of them.

But just having a little bit of competition and a little less power at the top would be a good place to start.

And yeah I need to proofread my shit. Then again I mean for fucks sakes I'm posting on a dead forum mostly to scream into the void. I don't actually type any of this crap I'm using text to speech on my phone.

Every few years Facebook faces a mass Exodus because no teenager wants to be on the same platform as their parents. The way they got around that was they just bought all their competitors or they ran them out of business or in the case of tick tock they lobbied the government to shut them down.

Removing teenagers from the pool is great for Facebook because it means they don't have to deal with them going to their competitors and then buying those competitors or worse risking a serious antitrust enforcement action that prevents them from doing that and leads to a real competitor.

Meanwhile when the kiddies become adults they're not going to be as uptight about being on the same platform as their parents anymore so they can be easily funneled into Facebook's ecosystem for cheap.

Facebook could collapse almost overnight if people just stopped going to the website. They are painfully aware of that and they take measures to make sure it doesn't happen.

If the boobs on my character aren't sufficiently pointy the cut glass then there's too many polygons.

From things other than cigarette smoking.

We have been consistently making cars cleaner to the point where vast swaths of them are zero emissions. I've mentioned this before but if you are in a city or even a decent sized town you're breathing in little bits of tire particulate and there is no way around that. People really really really really hate it when I point that out because people grew up loving cars so the idea that there is a problem with cars that is basically impossible to solve doesn't go over well....

My point is like it or not you are going to get along full of contaminants unless you can live out in the country or some shit. And fact of the matter is most people can't. You still need jobs and unless you own a shitload of land you're not making it as a farmer. Modern farmers are actually pretty fucking wealthy. The small family farm is long long gone.

So yeah somebody who has all the genes that make me prone to lung cancer I'd like to see you some more research on it for sure.

There is exactly one scenario where nuclear power makes sense now and that's if you have extreme space constraints and can't just put a wind or solar form up. For everything else you were taking a huge amount of risk, specifically the risk is that billionaire finance bro wanna be tech bro asshats are going to stop paying for the maintenance on those reactors and you're going to have a meltdown. And because these reactors are being proposed to power AI slop data centers they're going to be close to where people live because that's where the water is and those data centers are thirsty. Don't have to be but they are.

I do not know why old nerds are so obsessed with nuclear power. I know that we are I just don't understand the obsession. I'm assuming it's some weird techno future that never happened that we were all dreaming of and that we are upset we didn't get.

It's frustrating because that future is right there waiting for us if we just force the switch to wind and solar. But we can't have that because the oil companies want to control the transition that is inevitably going to happen so that they can continue to control your access to electricity.

Yep. It really pisses me off and freaks me out that we've let so many grifters take over.

Between the gambling houses that are claiming to be securities trading and this nonsense and the president of the United States constantly selling pardons and soliciting bribes I know the shit's going to hit the fan hard and there's not a hell of a lot I can do about it.

I used to think the baby boomers were all going to die and leave everyone was a mess to clean up but I think they fucked up so bad letting these lunatics and grifters in charge that a lot of them are going to live to see the crash and spend the last years of their lives struggling to get food and medicine.