I didn't mean to claim that I though trade secrets in code were a good thing, merely that they were a reason a company might not want to open their source code. Patents are not such a reason. (Also, I don't believe software patents should be valid. Copyright, yes. Trademarks, yes. Trade secrets, yes. But software should not be patentable. [And copyrights should have a much more limited duration.])

You left out "trade secrets". That would be plausible if the software were sufficiently innovative.

That's "tool using", not "tool making", but I wouldn't be surprised if dogs could to simple tool making. A cow was recently documented making a backscratcher.

If rolling a styrofoam ball is using a tool, adapting a towel to a flyswatter is making a tool. I'll admit that I've never met someone who was that limited. Everybody used to be able to whittle something, if not something fancy, but I think that knives are now generally not used that way. I don't even know if rubber bands are still used to launch folded paper (which is multiple instances of tool making).

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 does not matter if China or the US or Timbuctoo does this first. The world is fucked whoever gets there.

I would trust my American Overlords over the Chinese overlords ANY day of the week....

Most just want money....and that's the goal they will work for no matter what the perceived consequences might be.

And "might be" is the key phrase here.

I mean, unless a humanoid cyborg from the future comes to MY house, cuts and peels his arm skin away to show me the endo skeleton and maybe the chip in his head..I'm not going to believe "maybe" could happen and sacrifice my research and livelihood.

I don't "lighten up" when small minded people are talking about decreasing my quality of life for their selfish benefit. I look down on them, as is appropriate. You're a small little man, and you're also just not funny.

I've lived MANY MANY years before all the environmental crap has been thrown out there...and my quality of life has not suffered one iota due to it.

I think that's impossible for internal combustion engines. They can't meet the emission control standards without intricate computer engine controls.

Fuck the emissions control standards..hell, we're already rolling them back in the US.

They weren't realistic anyway....let users have a choice.

I lived all those years before we had them and feel no ill effects nor is my life any poorer for the experience.

Typical nostalgia story. You must have forgotten how many repairs were made when you were a kid. My 15 year old prius has never failed once. I have only taken it in for routine maintenance: oil changes, AC recharging, bulbs replaced, battery changed every few years. It's never broken down or failed to start or made a funny noise and I live in a frozen hellhole. When I was a kid, this level of reliability was UNHEARD of. My parent's Chevy's were being repaired constantly. We knew the local auto mechanic well. I remember being stranded on the side of the road and getting a ride from a stranger to a pay phone to have our 5yo car towed. I was probably 8 and the lady driving had a bag of sour cream and onion chips open she was eating and that was my first time eating one (and I didn't like it, but was so glad she gave me a snack). It was kinda scary being stuck and seeing my dad stressed out in the days before cellphones on a rural road.

Funny....my family had pretty much the direct opposite experience yours did.

In the 70's and 80's....Let's see. My '78 280Z ran like a top...the only repairs it really ever needed was when I kept wrecking it as a kid. But I changed the oil regularly on it myself, easily....and mechanically ran with very minimal shop needs.

We had a Buick Le Saber early 80s....never really problems with it, I think it had AC work on it once that I recall. We had a '69 Volkswagen bug....pretty much ran till it just one day fell apart in the mid 80's and was then replaced. 280ZX....ran great for years, no shop time that I can recall.

And as for washing machines and dryers....hell the stuff from 30 years ago is STILL usually runing just fine today, it's the new shit that fails in a few months.

My mom has had to replace high end washers once and dryers twice in the past 2 years....

Computers and other crap are just extras to go wrong...I dont need 55 gradients of water or warm air temperatures...just the basics...wash....dry.

If my old trusty units finally give up the ghost....not a lot of simple dryers to find, but I'll spend over $1K to get the simple Speed Queen mechanical washer....just the basics and should last the rest of my life time.

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.

I've never met a human who couldn't make a tool. Not a complex tool, but just a tool. Complex tools are a lot more difficult, but anyone who can adapt a towel to a flyswatter can make a tool.