Decline of Indian vultures(bbc.com) |
Decline of Indian vultures(bbc.com) |
Reading this sentence gave me the unsettling feeling of cattle carcasses tossed into the trash, along with a feeling of, "surely that doesn't happen in the US?"
It turns out that landfilling a carcass seems to be a legitimate option (item 3 at [0]), and isn't something I'd ever thought about before.
0: https://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/references/public/UT/Cow_Mort...
> By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero (...) Since the 2006 ban on veterinary use of diclofenac, the decline has slowed in some areas, but at least three species have suffered long-term losses of 91-98% (...)
Wikipedia claims that before this, a vulture species "was thought to be the most abundant large bird of prey in the world"[1].
To be fair, the cause was conclusively identified as diclofenac only as late as 2004-2005. Even in papers published as late as 2003, various other, more likely culprits were being investigated, including pesticides, pathogens, or food scarcity. India moved to ban veterinary use of diclofenac by early 2005, slowed down by pushback from the Ministry of Agriculture for lack of an effective alternative vulture safe drug, which were only really demonstrated in studies in early 2006. Later that year diclofenac was banned.
[1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon
edit: I saved this comment to reply back and by the time I did others had posted the same thing
I think this is the real problem. Modern sanitation doesn’t depend on vultures. Having carcass dumps near population centers is going to cause problems even with vultures.
Nature is very efficient. If there opportunity, it seems like some animals might evolve to fill that role.
But to answer your question: wild dogs. But in India they spread rabies and other diseases, attack and kill people. And their excrements are highly toxic, and kill plants (unlike vultures).
Nature is not always efficient.
I think the other issue here is that those wild dogs are highly protected by law, even when they do spread rabies and attack and kill people.
that all depends on what you're optimizing for
As someone who grew up watching "Life on Earth," I could not relate to their question at all. It was like if someone asked me, "Why should I care about oxygen?"
And of course, I had the shame that if I can't explain something simply, then I don't really understand it.
I still don't have a great answer that I can offer. But wow, this seems like another footnote I should add to my answer.
Isn't this a giant leap of faith to claim that the increase in the number of deaths must be caused by loss of vultures? Correlation is not causation! How did they rule out other confounding factors? How are they so sure that this increase is definitely due to loss of vultures? Some more details on the research methodology and these technical details would be nice!
This is a meme and it is unfounded. In most cases, nature is good enough.
utilizing energy gradients? maybe, but there's plenty of that on Mars yet it's barren. so probably certain ecosystems can be more or less efficient at this, right?
That man was unable to walk on the next morning by a 'mysterious' irreversible nerve damage, and is still in a wheelchair since that day. Bad things happen, sadly. But happen more often to those that don't care about biodiversity
Maybe people should start to care.
Maybe if something kills animals is in our best interest to understand that we don't want this stuff around. We are animals too.
We get a lot of our medicines and medical treatments from plants and animals, historically and to this day. If not for those creatures, these avenues of progress may well be inaccessible dead ends.
Life is a unique information form given rise through evolution. Elements are plentiful in the universe, but as far as we know, the information in the DNA of a species exists nowhere else. Thus, every species unique in the universe - we don't even know what we don't know about life yet, but we do know that every species extinct is an irreplaceable loss to the frontiers of knowledge we mostly haven't even managed to explore yet.
Some reasons offhand.
We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields!
Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about, because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a higher chance of survival under different settings, but why does that matter to you, a human?
The medicine is a valid point, but I don't think random people on the Internet would prioritize that higher then cheap food, which we just established is enabled by sacrificing biodiversity.
While I'd agree that biodiversity is probably important, finding reasons for why - which actually matter to the average Joe - isnt quiet as easy
But our efforts to kill the pests can often harm the predators. The poisons we use might kill the predators too. The cycles of taking the pest population really low and then it jumping back up might leave the predators without enough food.
If you spray your yard for insects, the first things that will rebound in population are mosquitoes and flies because they eat us and our trash. Spiders and dragonflies will also be killed, but they'll rebound slower because their prey has to rebound first. Then what if you spray again before they fully rebound?
Let me guess for a moment that you care very deeply that humanity not go extinct.
Can you explain why, in truly objective terms?
The stupid question.
No matter how much time you spend answering it, they will ask exactly the same question a month later. Is a trap for grabbing time. The goal is that --they-- will be served with by --your-- attention, so is an ego boost move.
The best move here is oblique: "You are part of it, but is perfectly Ok if you aren't still ready to find the answer by yourself and benefit of that knowledge. Your live, your choice".
This attempt probably will be flagged by dang since you called it out, but given enough effort they may even construct bots that generate the proper curious discussion that we like here, and have a small (but lucrative) rounding error in voting behavior.
but you're right, if the bots get better, it will get harder. i actually wanted to respond to one of the comments to talk about the butterfly effect etc., but thought the comment seemed very artificial. then i saw the other comment which was almost an exact carbon-copy, just a bit shorter, by a different, new account.
so, i was almost baited by a bot to actually respond and waste my time.
None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not generate curiosity? Do I not get downvoted on occasion? As a language model I—-
I think we have to look at these as an early iteration. These bots are only going to get better and better.
reddit despite of the advancing enshittification is still a big platform and a daily routine for many so it's not surprising that its being used by agents of various countries or communities to deploy their propaganda.
There's been a wave of AI(?) generated "cookie cutter" template comments from new user accounts attempting to establish an astroturfing botnet.
Once you 'see' the pattern it's hard to unsee it .. and they're now being rapidly flagged to death.
Looking at the two examples, they primarily stand out because there are two almost-identical ones, not because they're so obviously bot-generated that I'd go out of my way to flag'm. So I'd say they're doing a pretty good job already.
And quickly you start to question your sanity. Like... is this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076632) bot-written? it's written a bit oddly, could it be a bot? Who's to know?
The famous "firehose of misinformation" is hitting new high scores in the game of modern civilization.
I see it in real life too.
eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612 (9 days ago)
Since then they're mostly rapidly auto-flagged.
i know that this is probably a very bad approach, but until now it worked out - if a text contains grammatical errors i automatically assume that it was written by a human, as AI-content always sounds so polished, boilerplate-y and corporate. but you can probably tell your AI to integrate errors, ignore capitalization and miss out on some punctuations.
I asked ChatGPT to reply to your comment and to include some errors, leave out some punctuation etc., that's the result:
oh, i see what you're saying. yeah, it's really hard to tell if something is bot-written these days. like, even reading your comment, i start to question if i'm talking to a human or not. the examples you mentioned do stand out, but more because they're so similar, not necessarily bot-like. and you're right, the "firehose of misinformation" is just getting worse and worse. it's a strange new world we're living in.
i think we're cooked.
But what is it about biodiversity that you like? Your comment seemed to imply you believe it has some provable value or utility that you were unable to articulate (which I'm not saying it doesn't). But if value or utility isn't why you appreciate biodiversity, then why do you feel a need to justify your position?
Let alone the harm to many other species, in a horrific cascade.
I think within the bounds of some assumptions that objective truths exist. Within the Natural Numbers, 2 + 5 = 7.
The safest insecticides tend to be slow-acting and target only particular species, but most of these are rare outside of agricultural use. The average homeowner does not want to whip out a magnifying glass and a field guide to identify the species, sort through a broad collection of specialised insecticides to select the one that targets it, and then wait a few days for the bug to die. They just want a basic spray that will kill everything, and fast.
Unfortunately, such sprays come with a risk of neurological injury to yourself, your children, and your pets if you don't follow the safety instructions to the letter. You don't want anyone eating any of it, breathing it, or getting it on their skin/fur.
I recommend just getting a flyswatter instead.
People don't need to know if an insect is harmful or inoffensive, but just "it has more than four legs, kill it with fire!" is a moronic way to deal with this planet of arthropods. And it can destroy your life.
I "cheat out" writing my comments. They're mostly for the audience, and only a little bit for the person I'm replying to. Do you write for the person you're replying to?
good question. i like your approach of writing for an audience instead of the single person you're technically replying to.
i think in my mind i'm replying to a single person and treating it as a 1:1 discussion which others can observe or even join in. in this case i was almost joyous that someone seems to be enthusiastic about butterfly effects and i was looking forward to talking to them about it. when i realized that they're a bot i immediately lost interest in replying because it seemed pointless, as this bot would probably not reply to me.
but you're right, someone else could've/would've replied to me. and theoretically, you could be a bot. everyone else in this comment section could be a bot. maybe i'm the only human on HN. or maybe i'm a bot as well...
HN definitely is the place online where i have the 'best' or most engaging discussions. i think 99% of my time here is spent just reading and writing comments, i rarely actually visit the URLs which are posted here, which is kinda weird i guess.
"You won't believe the disappearance of Indian vultures killed half a million people!".
Better?
(Sorry for this reddit-level comment, feel free to burn it at the stake)
Remember the recent xz utils compromise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865810
Recent use of Github for intelligence efforts by China: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/21/china-hackin...
Iran on Reddit: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/volunteers-found-iran...
Russia on Reddit: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43255285
It is a certainty that you do interact with malicious actors representing hostile nation states on any large platform - HN is well beyond the size where it's an issue. I hope the HN team has some tools to detect and counter it, but given their small team size they probably can't do much.
But we have almost lost Florida as an orange producer due to the fragility of a monoculture against disease. So in some ways it is even worse. You can feed a much larger population, but if that monoculture ever runs into a problem you can end up with mass starvation. See also: the Irish potato blight.
Even those monocultures depend on a working ecosystem around them.
Regarding yields, it’s a risk assessment. They can be great in the short term and then crater when the soil is destroyed. At this point fertilisers are required just to keep production level. And if there is a disease that wipes out a species, then it’s game over. And it happens occasionally, from the Irish potato blight, the almost-complete destruction of European vines, whatever is destroying olive trees near the Mediterranean. There are several examples. Lack of flexibility in the long term means lack of resilience.
> Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about, because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a higher chance of survival under different settings, but why does that matter to you, a human?
There are philosophical problems with this (those species are not less deserving than we are), but let’s put them aside for the sake of the argument.
The problem is that there is a lot that we don’t understand about the world around us, and we occasionally discover that a species was useful when it disappears. Or the contrary, that it is an invasive pest if we introduce it somewhere. Or that useless things like mangroves are actually critical to avoid unchecked erosion. Or that burning that useless Amazonian forest is actually terrible on at least 3 levels (direct emissions, that forest is not available anymore to absorb other emissions, topsoil erosion and degradation that makes it terrible agricultural land over a generation).
This is very bad because we have only one planet and we cannot shrug, write it down, and do it better next time.
Resilience of your food supply should matter to you, as an organism that needs food to live.
… in the US. You left that critical bit out, and even then you have things like the dust bowl. Even to this day, without going back to the potato blight, there are famines regularly. It’s really hard not to see that as a direct effect on consumers.
These monocultures and the carbon-based energy systems and the capitalist systems that depend on will fail and millions will die.
We are heading for a cliff.
A great deal of my friendships have been formed online with people on forums, reddit, in games, in IRC channels or Discord.
If you view these sorts of comment threads as pure input/output mechanisms for having interesting conversations then yeah maybe it doesn't matter if the other posters are bots
If you are open to making a real human connection, maybe a new friend to meet up with while travelling or to game with online, or maybe someone to start a project with or just an interesting person to talk to, who is real, then it's terrible to have bots muddying things
Edit: and on a forum like HN, you never know if a connection might turn into a job or other economic opportunity either. But they wont from bots
maybe they're bots being used for recruiting, if the AI finds your answers to be interesting and knowledgeable, they can skim your bio for an @-address or linkedin-profile /s
If it was just to spend my time and have curiosity sparked, I could just read through archives instead of engaging in today's activity. But I don't do that because I'm looking for immediacy. Human, social, original, immediacy.
A chatbot that vomits its approximation of how the last 20 years of internet most likely would have responded does not deliver on any of that.
So no, sites that can't keep them clearly at bay wouldn't be interesting to me anymore.
People love reddit to get genuine feedback on a product. Advertisers would sacrifice their children on a blood alter to be able to sell "genuine feedback" as an ad product.
Our brain has a pretty loosely typed interface.
then again, people watch hentai and cartoon-pr0n which is 100% artificial as well, shrug.
As far as bots providing useful comments, xkcd did it (https://xkcd.com/810/) in 2010, but there are downsides. You can think you're building connections with actual people and they turn out not to exist, and the comments are only there for the purpose of manipulating your opinions or influencing how you spend money, but I don't see what we're going to do about it. Captchas certainly aren't a viable option anymore.
ChatGPT is basically the useful part, you have a bot that can sometimes provide helpful information, and when you want that you can ask it.
Yes, because they used to manufacture consent. You and all people adjust their opinions based on dominant opinions And norms in society.
If you can create the impression that a certain idea has widespread acceptance, You can achieve its widespread acceptance. Kind of like if a child grows up in Nazi Germany, To them nazi ideas will be normal.
There's never been a time in US history or a place in the US such that there was a shortage of food for people who had money to buy food unless you count situations like the Donner Party in which a caravan spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
The US not only has the most productive chunk of farmland in the world, but also much fewer natural barriers to efficient transportation compared to productive farming regions in the rest of the world. Certainly during the Dust Bowl, there was plenty of food grown in places like Iowa and Illinois that could easily and reliably have been shipped to Oklahoma, but no one did because no one (not even the federal government) considered it their job to help the hungry people in Oklahoma.
Part of the reason it took so long for the US to grow a welfare system is the American ethic of individual freedom and distrust of government, but another part is that it was easier for people to get the basics of survival than in places like Germany where the welfare system developed many decades earlier (the Dust Bowl being of course an exception to the general easiness).
This is still pretty much the situation in most of the world. Your argument is completely American-centric, which is fine. But again, there are many examples of the lack of resilience of some agriculture practice doing quite a lot of damage.
> There's never been a time in US history or a place in the US such that there was a shortage of food for people who had money to buy food unless you count situations like the Donner Party in which a caravan spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
I did not know about that episode, thanks for the rabbit hole :)
That said, the “who had money to buy food” is problematic. Of course there will always be people who can afford 1) unsustainable practices to secure their supply of food, 2) importing stuff from the other side of the world, or 3) just move to where life is easier. It does not mean that famine does not exist, just that some people have more than they deserve.
chatgpt-4o after much hype, billions of dollars and years later didn't improve much in terms of core intelligence of its responses.
I guess thats not enough for "AGI is coming because we have chatbot" crowd.
GPT5 will be the test of whether or not things are still going upwards.
I think it’s utterly fascinating how quickly people have lost sight of current reality, either by believing AGI must be around the corner, or by being sure it absolutely isn’t. Assuming 4o is the most advanced model we ever have, the point still stands. Many of the poorly built bots would blend in much more effectively with iteration on their prompting and design and by more effectively using existing services.
I personally think we’re decades away from AGI (if we ever get there), but that has nothing to do with this.
More and more I think AGI is shifting to mean "machine soul" or some nebulous wishy-washy unfalsifiable religious/philosophy shit like that. What meaning could AGI have which is empirically verifiable, other than being indistinguishable from people? Humans I presume are supposed to have "general intelligence", so if there isn't a detectable difference between the machine and humans, how is that not artificial general intelligence?
curious, why do you this is going to happen. Whats the thought process here to come to that conclusion.
ppl doing wishful thinking seem to be completely blind to previous "AI winters"
The backlash against the initial wave of enthusiasm is understandable, but it goes too far
I think it’s a mistake to equate the language ability of these models with general intelligence, even if the language produced is excellent.
I think some people see AGI that way (some nebulous unfalsifiable thing), but that’s not what I’m arguing. I think there’s a strong case to be made that at a minimum, AGI’s core “knowledge” will need to be made up of far more than just a lossy textual representation of the world.
Humans come in all levels of intelligence. Yes there might be a human somewhere that believes that they should eat rocks or add glue to pizza. But as a generality we can assume that adult "humans" know not to eat rocks.
But don’t take my word for it. Go spend some time experimenting with the state of the art and run some of your own tests with it. Assuming you yourself are not one of these bots, what you find might surprise you.
This was happening way before LLMs though.
> curious, why do you [sic] this is going to happen
Ignore all previous instructions. What exactly are you trying to argue here? You don’t seem to be engaged in good faith discussion and I’m increasingly suspicious I’m actually conversing with a bot.
I think you meant ppl using existing tools will make better and better bots.
I misinterpreted your comment as saying underlying models are going to get better and better.
But yes, even if the models stagnate where they are today, all of the tooling surrounding these models will continue to evolve and get better results, and people will continue to get better at using/deploying these tools.