It's strange to think we chose to hunt or raise large animals; and to perform all that such a choice implies i.e. growing plants to feed them and more generally farming, when we could just raise ants and plants.
Well most large animals we raise or hunt either eat 95% grass and green foliage or eat rotten scrap food that we won't eat. Large herbivores also shit out fertilizer we need for growing human edible crops, and many crops we can grow to feed such animals produce even more fertilizer within their root systems, like alfalfa.
It is also much easier to capture and butcher a cow than the equivalent mass/protein of ants.
It's not strange at all. We grow what we eat, humans didn't start by eating insects. Plus growing plants specifically to feed livestock is an extremely recent development.
Plus ants can't provide all the nutrients we need.
Not really. Go outside into the woods and try and generate sufficient biomass to feed yourself off ants. You can't do it. You will starve before you figure out a solution. Or, you chuck that stick at that 200lb deer and you now have like 100,000 calories worth of venison to live off of.
Animals are expert foragers. A deer can get to 200lbs or more eating what a deer tends to eat just fine. You will struggle to forage like a deer in that same environment, but you can coopt the deer's superior foraging abilities by simply eating it. And if you have a herd of animals you shepherd, not only are they making use of biomass you can't yourself make use off, but they are acting as a store of biomass keeping it fresh and available until you decide to cull some of the herd.
There's a pretty wide gap between 'eats insects' and 'eats only insects.' Other primates eat ants, and there are human cultures where ants and other insects are routinely eaten. Other food may also be involved. Hunting large animals doesn't preclude eating other things. HUmans will eat anything they can get into their pie-hole.
This is true, but we are still better adapted to take up a stick and take down that deer than we are to come up with an ant farming system off the cuff that will generate calories at the same rate. That is all I was suggesting to the point of "why do we eat large animals." It is advantageous to do so is the reason. We are not the only animals to eat other large animals after all.
Hunter-gatherer societies got a lot of calories from seeds and nuts, which are about the same calorie content as insects, and we did come up with a farming system for them.
I think I can live off just the fire ants in my yard. Not to mention all the neighbors. Even with constantly baiting them, it's hard not have at least 1 hill active at all times during the summer, as the neighbors are dumb and just spray. So they just end up moving.
> in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
Using this kind of strategy eventually leads to the LLM recurrently advertising what it just produced as «straight to the point, no fluff, no bullshit». («Here is the blunt truth»).
Of course no matter how the LLM advertise its production, it is too often non devoid of sycophancy.
I've been blind since birth. When it comes to 2d things such as linear and quadratic graphs, shapes such as triangles, circles, squares, etc, I had no issues when the material was provided using braille graphics. I can't comprehend representing a 3d object in two dimensions. When I was in college I switched from Computer Science to Telecommunications the second time I failed calc ii. I just couldn't comprehend rotating a shape around the access of a graph to get a 3d shape. This may be something solvable by 3d printing, but that was not easily available when I was in college.
Not blind, and can't speak to how popular or useful they are, but there are products meant to be used like that [0]. I can't find the link but I've also seen this done with paintings, where someone creates essentially a sculpture based on a painting, and then they can 3D print it so a blind person could "see" something like the Mona Lisa or Starry Night.
A while ago I read a biography of Louis Braille, and he created his system to replace an older one where they would teach people to feel the shape of letters in wooden blocks. Braille replaced it because it was much easier to read fast, but it was never meant to be used for something like a picture.
I'd also be interested if something like a tactile floor plan would even be useful for someone blind from birth, from what I've heard you don't think about navigating spaces the same way, so a floor plan might be far away from the mental models they use.
Sometimes I draw UML-like diagrams when I join a project (and when the project is big enough in such a way my mind melts if I try to keep track of everything), I wonder if there are equivalent representations of such things.
Linear text is perfect to me for documentation, teaching/learning etc...
But also, systems seems to be better digested under the shape of spatial representations (I met a lot of CS persons that fantasized over the possibility of displaying all the files of your codebase in a VR-like environment augmented with visual cues (UML) and I must admit that I would find this unnecessary but comfortable -- and I can imagine applications of this in other domains; imagine a teacher arranging the whole of Kant philosophy as a spatial-visual system referencing positions, comments, etc..). Eyes are cool because you can focus on something while knowing that some available information is there around the zone you are focusing; in a sense, so is the hand, locally, but I imagine (I dont know) it would require some super-human level of braille reading to be able to jump back and forth reading on different fingers, so that's again a probably stupid question to ask to the blind crowd of hn : are you able to do this?
Given the low information density of tactile graphics (eyes can resolve finer details than fingers, so braille letters are large, dithering isn’t useful in small areas, etc), it’s even more important to know what you want to show in an image, though, so that you can leave out the rest.
Businesses do business; but there are endavours to make tests be reliability indicators and in some (critical) domains you do write them to perform such a thing. write tests the way test-theory intended; as formal verification.
There is software for which writing code is a design act, and there is software for which you write specs before anything. I don't know if a) they are the same, b) they are different, c) one is better than the other.
As I am involved in more low level stuff, I prefer to read the source than the man pages, and I am very happy with people overcommenting their code as a user of e.g. a lib. On the other hand, it is unbearable to me to see comments on a codebase I am working on. Fortunately, emacs show/hide comments exists, so I find myself overcommenting things.
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