My earliest introduction to locusts was as a biblical plague. These Sunday school lessons did not include pictures. I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects, and was disappointed to finally discover they were just grasshoppers.
> I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects
Behavioral ecologist Stephen Simpson has proposed the cannibalistic forced march hypothesis[36], that is, the forward motion of a locust swarm is essentially sustained by each individual’s imperative to avoid being eaten by the locust behind it: 1) Align their body axis with neighbors (parallel) to minimize the chances of a side-on attack and present their narrowest possible profile to the individual behind. 2) March forward to bite and feed on the abdomen of the locust immediately ahead.
A billion crazed insects marching through eating all your crops while cannibalizing each other does seem relatively twisted and demonic.
Also, there’s the stimulus causing nymphs to not be solitarious slow green grass-nibbles, but instead transform into armored, black and yellow, upright marching machines that mature into stronger-winged battle bugs. With soft tasty abdomens exposed to the soldier behind them…
Woah up until now I was thinking locusts were a different but related species, but indeed they are the exact same species as grasshopper, just with a different end-product of metamorphosis. And the trigger is just contact with other grasshopper/locusts.
I have been in a locust plague once. It does feel very weird. Yes they are grasshoppers but you might be underestimating just how many there are. Plus they don't look normal, they actually change appearance when they're in a plague.
One small detail I remember was when the sun was just behind a building, you could see this glow around the building which was the sun reflecting off all the locusts that were flying around it
I don't know if it qualifies as a plague of locusts because I do not know where the line is drawn, but the grasshopers were thick one year at my parents' house (which is itself surrounded by flatness and farm fields).
They were ravenous things. That ate everything. Not just "food," either, though eating a snack outside was certainly impossible and merely being outside was treacherous.
These bugs ate things like window screens, cut slivers from a vinyl swimming pool, and dined upon the siding of the house. It was really fuckin' weird even being inside of the house, since the noise of it being pelted by grasshoppers (locusts?) never really slowed down.
That was probably 25 years ago. It never happened again.
Put them under a microscope at 10-40 times magnification and you've got your demons. Claws and hooks and fang-like attachments everywhere, faceted eyes, crusty exterior. The western image of demons was partly derived from insectoid creatures by painters like Hieronymus Bosch so it makes sense for insects to look demonic.
Reviews are wildly polarised.
* Some folks find it to be the best thing ever [long battery life, the new patch makes the eink surprisingly fastly responsive, decent keyboard, no distractions]
* While others find it terrible [it's still eink, that's a lot of money for a device that doesn't actually do much]
I was gifted a Traveler several years ago. It is overpriced and bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality. You can read and write off of it via USB, but it doesn't actually use a true filesystem for your text files, it writes them into the main app's sqlite DB, which in the past has had data loss issues.
My version uses ancient releases of Node and React for the UI for some horrible reason, and it is painfully slow.
I've rooted mine and have it as a project to look at the new OS and decide what to do with it, but if I had the cash I'd look elsewhere.
> bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality.
This is why I don't own a Freewrite. It should be such a simple device, but they found a way to make it complicated and lock it into their proprietary ecosystem. No thanks.
It would be a better device if I could install cfw and make it somewhat more versatile. But I haven't found anyone doing that, and haven't even found enough specs online to get started.
I ought to do a write up, but If you open it up the UART pads are available to get a U-Boot console. U-boot is in HAB mode, with a custom signed debian buster kernel. This was my first time dealing wit u-boot, but it was otherwise pretty open and was able to write to ENV and FS from the u-boot console, which let me stop the Freewrite app from starting, boot into root shell, turn on SSH, etc. So you can get into userspace and replace the UI and whole app. When I dropped this project I had it booting shell onto the e-ink, with a command to drop back into the Freewrite app if I wanted.
Then they released the new app, which looked like it was also just in userspace (not a kernel or fw update) so I wanted to start over with the update, but never got back to it.
I think it's more a supply chain issue. There aren't any very stretched rectangular eInk panels from what I've been seeing. I've seen some for price tags but I mean nothing like 8-10 inches or so.
And they're such a niche phenomenon that they have to do with the scraps left by other industries like ereaders.
For me the small screen is fine as long as I can maintain the mindset of this being a _drafting_ tool, not an editing or structuring tool. I generally don't need to see more than a couple of sentences at a time, and my drafting process is almost stream-of-consciousness as I just focus on getting the words out. If I needed to navigate more to edit or regularly reference prior sections, the small screen would be a hindrance.
My dream device is the "Solar A5 e-ink computer" - It's A5-sized laptop, so it fits in a leather zipped case for journals. If you're familiar with HP Journadas / Sony Vaios from early 2000s, that's roughly the form factor. There's a solar panel on the back of the screen / outside of the enclosure. The screen is e-ink, and the operating system is Linux Mint Debian Edition. For console mode, a good "writing station" applications are "mc" (Midnight Commander) and "ranger" - simple GUI for editing text in folders, like a blog/knowledge base.
Some challenges I've experienced: (1) Can't find A5-sized e-ink screens that accept HDMI as an input, (2) It would be cool to use a common Android phone, since there are many around. RaspberryPI is an option. Honestly, would love the simplest portable device that runs Debian Stable on a battery, (3) I have NOT been able to find small, A5-sized keyboards. Most small keyboards are cheap plastic bluetooth junk.
If anyone would like to seriously rally around this, let's talk'bout it. My vision for this laptop has always been "10:00 AM Austin Texas, sitting at a patio bar in direct sun, journalling/coding/writing". I have not been able to find any computer device that satisfies that situation, so there is obviously a market niche.
I use a Bigme Hibreak Pro eink phone, nix-on-droid/ssh to home server over tailscale, and a foldable keyboard, to have my coding setup with me and not be tied to where I can carry a laptop.
For foldable keyboards, if they are flimsy or stable matters.
The Pomera line of devices from the Japanese company "King Jim" (yeah, I don't know) are really nice from a features point of view: limited enough to stay out of your way when you're writing, functional enough to enable the basic workflows you'd expect e.g. basic file management, SD card/USB transfers (something that many/most/all Western boutique writing devices like the Freewrite somehow didn't support well or at all last time I checked). Somewhere I have a funky e-ink Pomera thing with a folding keyboard that I did a lot of writing on, and later I bought a DM250, which is not e-ink but works pretty much the same, and now has a US version. I recommend it.
The US version (the DM250US) is now $549, alas. I was looking at these briefly, but can’t justify the expense — might as well get a MacBook Neo if I were in the market.
Yeah I think that's substantially more than I paid for my JP market version.
I will say it is a really nice device, probably the all-around best of the dedicated writing devices I've owned and/or researched over the years. But on a typical value scale, it's not worth that.
Onyx iterates on its BOOX tablets fairly rapidly, but tends to continuously offer something in various size classifications. You'll find 13.3" tablets typically named as "Max" something or other.
I've had a previous iteration of their 13.3" tablet, the Max Lumi. Slightly lower resolution, and has a frontlight. It is a very nice display, though with an Android OS which I see as a net negative.
I'd really like an e-ink display option for the Framework 12" or 13" laptop.
It probably makes things easier, but its unlikely that the industry that found a way to make foldables waterproof couldn't figure out a way to put rubber gaskets on battery covers. And in fact, they did, there were several devices introduced in the transition period that had both features.
Rubber gaskets wear out. Best practice is to replace them every time you open the cover. We can put them in, but the replacement battery better come with the gasket because you can't safely replace the battery without a new gasket.
Galaxy S5 was IP67-rated (1 metre depth, 30 minutes) and had a user-replaceable back cover / battery
Also a notification LED, OLED screen, bezels to pick the device up by, headphone jack, unlockable, a continuous light sensor... peak smartphone, save perhaps for the meager 200 Hz accelerometer refresh rate (modern phones have 500 Hz usually, I have no idea what for but I personally love toying with FFT plots)
Waterproof phones all still have charging ports and no flaps. Not sure how but that seems to be solved. Maybe that one part's connectors are encased in glue?
Yes and don't forget consumer preferences. This is Hacker News where they are still clamoring for a "small smartphone" because everything else is too big. Shocker, small phones don't sell. Neither do bulky ones when compared to sleek iPhones.
Not sure if I should be repeating the same answer below each instance of the question but here goes: See the Samsung Galaxy S5 for example as having a good waterproofing rating and user-replaceable battery
Every post about the EU here gets absolutely flooded by negative comments of people who tell me that whatever the EU proposed won't work, governments shouldn't do these things, the proposed legislation is ineffective, it doesn't go far enough, they're just trying to extract money from our successful American companies, and so on and so forth. It's just a neverending diarrhoea of anti-government anti-European underbelly sentiment.
That sounds like seeing a pattern where there is none (apophenia). Do you have examples of posts that wouldn't be downvoted outside of times where Europe/Africa is awake, or that weren't only because it was posted outside of said hours?
There are a handful of anecdotes like this one that make me very hopeful for the future. In spite of everything, humanity is still achieving wonders:
The device, implanted in July 2023, records from the brain region that controls muscles involved in talking and translates these signals into instructions for a voice synthesizer. Within 30 minutes of it being switched on, Harrell could communicate again. “I was absolutely overwhelmed with the thought of how this would impact my life and allow me to talk to my family and friends and better interact with my daughter,” he says. “It just was so overwhelming that I began to cry.”
Agreed, I found this essay engaging and emotional. While I can see why the unusual style might not be someone's cup of tea, I don't agree at all with the criticism that this is bad writing. It had a Haruki Murakami ethereal feel that I am quite fond of.
Regarding other comments in this thread, the moral panic over AI writing has mostly passed me by. While I certainly have a philosophical preference for things written by an actual human, I don't care to invest the bandwidth in analyzing every single thing I read for hints of llm patterns. If I like it, I'll keep reading. If not, I won't. Sometimes discontinuing a piece of writing also aligns with obvious AI use, but that is generally a secondary issue.
Physical books are irreplaceable to me. I love the feel, the smell, and having a house full of them. Just went to a library sale this morning and got even more.
I also really need a break from screens, and reading a book is a great excuse to not be on my phone or watching tv.
Reading a book is also relaxing in a way that reading on a screen is not. It just feels more, I don't know, laid back? I have no idea how to describe that.
It sounds like there wasn't really a counter narrative for the models to learn from. This feature of how llms accumulate information is already being gamed by seeding the internet with preferred narratives.
I'm not sure how many Medium articles, blog posts and reddit threads I need to put out before grok starts telling everyone my widget is the best one ever made, but it's a lot cheaper than advertising.
I'm not sure "being gamed" is the lens I would see this particular instance through. People (some at least) have gotten into their heads that they can ask LLMs objective questions and get objectively correct answers. The LLM companies are doing very little to dissuade them of that belief.
Meanwhile, LLMs are essentially internet regurgitation machines, because of course they are, that's what they do. Which makes them useless for getting "hard truth" answers especially in contested or specialized fields.
I'm honestly afraid of the impact of this. The internet has enough herd bullshit on it as it is. (e.g. antivaxxers, flat earthers, electrosensitivity, vitamin/supplement junk, etc.) We don't need that amplified.
People really like using the word "narrative". I guess we're creatures of story.
But this really highlights how much we've been benefiting from living in a high-trust society, where people don't just "go on the internet and tell lies" - filtered by the existing anti-spam and anti-SEO measures intended to cut out the 80% of the internet where people do just make things up to sell products.
LLMs are extremely post-structuralist. They really force the user to decide whether to pick the beautiful eternal fountain of plausible looking text with no ground truth, or a much harder road of distrust, verification, and old-school social proof.
I’m expecting a lot of things like that similar to the 2000s blog boom, only to see it whither even more quickly as the AI companies switch to value extraction mode. You’re really exposed if one company you don’t even have a contract with controls your customer supply.
Can a model not just ignor all things that have no counter-argument by default? Like - if there are not flat earthers, widly debunked, drop the idea of a spherical earth? It only exists if it was fought over?
Even if you could do this rigorously (not at all obvious with how LLMs work), it's not a reliable metric: you can easily fabricate debate as well, and in this case the main issue was essentially skimming the surface of the reports and not looking any deeper to see the obvious red flags that it was an april-fools-level fake (which obviously even a person can fall for, but LLMs are being given a far greater level of trust for some reason)
you would just game it the same way then, and how would it know who won an internet argument? how can it prove who is telling the truth and whos... hallucinating?
what if it's something correct that doesn't have a counterargument, like "photons with a 450nm wavelength are perceived as red by the average human eye"
And how would it know if a counterargument exists anyway, and if it actually does make sense?
You're grasping for a reliable unsupervised truth machine. That's a fundamentally intractable problem until you limit it down to a wolframalpha clone. And not even that by LLMs.
The majority of my encounters with West Coast Buddhism have been... off-putting.
Particularly in the SF tech scene, there is an unfortunate 'competitive enlightenment' vibe amongst many of those who profess to follow Buddhist teachings.
"Oh, you've only attained the second jhāna? I got through all four on my first try."
I am certain there are plenty of genuine and sincere practitioners out there, but my small sample has not included any.
If it's any consolation, they are full of shit. In the second jhana and above, the factors of initial and sustained attention disappear. In practical terms, this means you cannot direct your thoughts away from the object of concentration once you enter such state. You have to decide beforehand how long you will be in that state and give yourself a mental timer. See Dipa Ma's biography for a case of someone actually entering higher jhanas that way.
This is the reason that anything beyond the first dhyana is not encouraged in Mahayana, as it is impossible to apply vipasyana in a state of concentration so deep that you cannot direct your mind.
The teachers popular in the SF scene are inflating their own achievements and the ones of their students by using very lightweight criteria. I had that experience when I attended a TWIM retreat before their founder died. According to them, I reached the fourth or fifth jhana. I can assure you I did not.
Yeah, agreed, there's a lot of misinformation. I'm always encountering people that say they just started, followed a guided meditation on the jhanas and entered fourth jhana within a week. And then the signs they describe are all just your basic things that arise when you first start having some facility over your practice, probably not even stability in the first jhana. Not to mention that it's impossible to be following a guided, external voice when you're in such a state of absorption.
As Chogyam Trungpa would probably say, they're all practicing spiritual materialism.
I worked in SF prior to the dotcom bust. Since I was commuting and made a day of when I had to be in the office. I took yoga with Larry Schultz - the yoga teach for the Grateful Dead, he had a studio near 4th and Brannon (I believe, memory foggy). He was great to listen to stories and learn from.
As mentioned in another post, I've been to SF Zen Center events both in practice and adjacent classes.
The tech scene now has become much more narcissistic than it was then. I didn't see the evolution as clearly as I did in Palo Alto while working there and in Mountain View.
I would not couple the tech scene with spiritual practices themselves. Judge the so called practicioners not the practice / practice instructors/organization.
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