Repost

Bumblebees surprise scientists with ‘sophisticated’ social learning

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First, bees had to push a blue lever that was blocking a red lever… too complex for a bee to solve on its own. So scientists trained some bees by offering separate rewards for the first and second steps.

These trained bees were then paired with bees who had never seen the puzzle, and the reward for the first step was removed.

Some of the untrained bees were able to learn both steps of the puzzle by watching the trained bees, without ever receiving a reward for the first step.

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Ian Aikman (BBC News)

This news story is great for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s a really interesting experimental result. Just when you think humankind’s learned everything they ever will about the humble bumblebee (humblebee?), there’s something more to discover.

That a bee can be trained to solve a complex puzzle by teaching it to solve each step independently and then later combining the steps isn’t surprising. But that these trained bees can pass on their knowledge to their peers (bee-ers?); who can then, one assumes, pass it on to yet other bees. Social learning.

Which, logically, means that a bee that learns to solve the two-lever puzzle second-hand would have a chance of solving an even more-complex three-lever puzzle; assuming such a thing is within the limits of the species’ problem-solving competence (I don’t know for sure whether they can do this, but I’m a firm bee-lever).

But the second reason I love this story is that it’s a great metaphor in itself for scientific progress. The two-lever problem is, to an untrained bee, unsolvable. But if it gets a low-effort boost (a free-bee, as it were) by learning from those that came before it, it can make a new discovery.

(I suppose the secret third reason the news story had me buzzing was that I appreciated the opportunities for puns that it presented. But you already knew that I larva pun, right?)

Young Squirrel Talking About Himself

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Parry Gripp

This week, Parry Gripp and Nathan Mazur released Young Squirrel Talking About Himself.

You might recognise the tune (and most of the words) from an earlier Parry Gripp song. The original video for the older version is no longer available on his channel, and that’s probably for the best, but I was really pleased to see the song resurrected in this new form because it’s fabulous. I’ve been singing it all day.

In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox

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…every major OS vendor has been adhering to the convention that checkboxes are square and radio buttons are round.

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Apple is the first major operating system vendor who had abandoned a four-decades-long tradition. Their new visionOS — for the first time in the history of Apple — will have round checkboxes.

Apple Design Resouces — visionOS — Library

Anyway, with Apple’s betrayal, I think it’s fair to say there’s no hope for this tradition to continue.

I therefore officially announce 2024 to be the year when the square checkbox has finally died.

Nikita Prokopov

The Web did a bad enough job of making checkboxes and radiobuttons inconsistent. I’m not saying you can’t style them, Web developers, but let’s at least keep the fundamental shape of them the way that they have been for decades so that users can understand them!

But yeah, Apple’s new designs could spell the beginning of the end of this long-established standard. Sad times.

The Underground Blog

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theunderground.blog is an experimental blog that is only available to read through a feed reader.

If you would like to read the latest posts, you can subscribe to the feed at https://theunderground.blog/feed.xml, using the feed reader of your choice.

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Chris McLeod

Chris first suggested this idea in the footnote of a post that talks about something I’ve been witnessing recently: that blogging seems to be having a renaissance¹. I’ve for a few years been telling people that now is the second-best time to start a blog. The best time was, of course, ~20 years ago, but if you missed out first time around (or let your blog die as big social media silos took over): now’s the time to join the growing resurgence!

Anyway, he only went and actually did it! The newest member of RSS Club is likely to be… an entire blog that’s only accessible via a feed reader².

There’s two posts published so far, and if you want to read them you’ll need to subscribe to theunderground.blog using your feed reader. There’s tips on that page on getting an easy-to-use one if you haven’t already.

Footnotes

¹ He also had interesting things to say about OPML, which is a topic close to my heart. I wonder if I ought to start sharing a partial OPML file of my subscriptions?

² Or by reading the source code, I suppose: on the open Web, that’s always an option. The Web is, indeed, magical.

I don’t want your data

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The web loves data. Data about you. Data about who you are, about what you do, what you love doing, what you love eating.

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I, on the other end, couldn’t care less about your data. I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content. I just don’t care.

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Manuel Moreale

Manu speaks my mind. Among the many hacks I’ve made to this site, I actively try not to invade on your privacy by collecting analytics, and I try not to let others to so either!

My blog is for myself first and foremost (if you enjoy it too, that’s just a bonus). This leads to two conclusions:

If I’m the primary audience, I don’t need analytics (because I know who I am), and
I don’t want to be targeted by invasive analytics (and use browser extensions to block them, e.g. I by-default block all third-party scripts, delete cookies from non-allowlisted domains 15 seconds after navigating away from sites, etc.); so I’d prefer them not to be on a site for which I’m the primary audience!

I’ve gone into more detail about this on my privacy page and hinted at it on my colophon. But I don’t know if anybody ever reads either of those pages, of course!

Weird A.I. Yankovic, a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

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In the parallel universe of last year’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Dr. Demento encourages a young Al Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) to move away from song parodies and start writing original songs of his own. During an LSD trip, Al writes “Eat It,” a 100% original song that’s definitely not based on any other song, which quickly becomes “the biggest hit by anybody, ever.”

Later, Weird Al’s enraged to learn from his manager that former Jackson 5 frontman Michael Jackson turned the tables on him, changing the words of “Eat It” to make his own parody, “Beat It.”
Your browser does not support the video tag.

This got me thinking: what if every Weird Al song was the original, and every other artist was covering his songs instead? With recent advances in A.I. voice cloning, I realized that I could bring this monstrous alternate reality to life.

This was a terrible idea and I regret everything.

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Andy Baio

Everything that is wrong with, and everything that is right with, AI voice cloning, brought together in one place. Hearing simulations of artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Kurt Cobain singing Weird Al’s versions of their songs is… strange and unsettling.

Some of them are pretty convincing, which is a useful and accessible reminder about how powerful these tools are becoming. An under-reported story from a few years back identified what might be the first recorded case of criminals using AI-based voice spoofing as part of a telephone scam, and since then the technology needed to enact such fraud has only become more widely-available. While this weirder-than-Weird-Al project is first and foremost funny, for many it foreshadows darker things.

Out of the Trees

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After “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” ended, Graham Chapman worked with an up-and-coming young writer named Douglas Adams on a new sketch comedy show for the BBC. It was called “Out of the Trees,” and it bombed. Only one episode was made, and that aired only once, on January 10, 1976.

Once the Beeb gave up on “Out of the Trees,” they did to it what they did to so many other programs of that era: they erased it.

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Chapman had recorded the show on one of the very earliest home videotape formats… it took two years to build a compatible player.

Jason Lefkowitz

It’s neither Chapman nor Adams best work, and you can see how it got canned after only a pilot episode. But it’s not terrible.

But the lesson here is one about the challenge of archiving non-print media. Anything that needs a device to “play” it, whether it’s as simple as a vinyl record or as complex as a videogame, is at greater risk of being lost forever. And the faster the pace of technology moves, the more stuff gets left behind as technology moves on. Is a digital dark age looming? Are we already in it, but that won’t be known until some future date?

Groundhog Day

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Octopuns

After a break of nine and a half years, webcomic Octopuns is back. I have two thoughts:

That’s awesome. I love Octopuns and I’m glad it’s back. If you want a quick taster – a quick slice, if you will – of its kind of humour, I suggest starting with Pizza.
How did I know that Octopuns was back? My RSS reader told me. RSS remains a magical way to keep an eye on what’s happening on the Internet: it’s like a subscription service that delivers you exactly what you want, as soon as it’s available.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised before when my feed reader has identified a creator that’s come back from the dead. I ❤️ FreshRSS.

Woodward Draw

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Explore the set of 4 letter words

Either change one letter of the previous word

Or rearrange all the letters of the previous word

Find all 105 picture words!

Daniel Linssen (via itch.io)

Woodward Draw by Daniel Linssen is the kind of game that my inner Scrabble player both loves and hates. I’ve been playing on and off for the last three days to complete it, and it’s been great. While not perfectly polished¹ and with a few rough edges², it’s still a great example of what one developer can do with a little time.

It deserves a hat tip of respect, but I hope you’ll give it more than that by going and playing it (it’s free, and you can play online or download a copy³). I should probably check out their other games!

Footnotes

¹ At one point the background colour, in order to match a picture word, changed to almost the same colour as the text of the three words to find!

² The tutorial-like beginning is a bit confusing until you realise that you have to play the turn you’re told to, to begin with, for example.

³ Downloadable version is Windows only.

Paul Labyrinth

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Jim Kang

Known Leaders is an open-source program that combines WikiData with a random generator to come up with almost-invariably inaccurate but sometimes hilarious facts. Jim Kang came up with it during Recurse Center‘s Never Graduate Week. Go have a play, or read more about how and why he made it.

The Miracle Sudoku

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Simon Anthony (Cracking the Cryptic)

I first saw this video when it was doing the rounds three years ago and was blown away. I was reminded of it recently when it appeared in a blog post about AI’s possible future role in research by Terence Eden.

I don’t even like sudoku. And if you’d told me in advance that I’d enjoy watching a man slowly solve a sudoku-based puzzle in real-time, I’d have called you crazy. But I watched it again today, for what must’ve been the third time, and it’s still magical. The artistry of puzzle creator Mitchell Lee is staggering.

If you somehow missed it the first time around, now’s your chance. Put this 25-minute video on in the background and prepare to have your mind blown.

Making a Home of Each Other (The Eggs)

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I dislike recipe posts that, before you get anywhere near the list of ingredients, tell you what feels like the entire life story of the author and their family.

“Every morning my mother would warm up the stove, and this was a wood-fired stove back in the day, and make these. We lived in Minnosota…” I don’t care. I can’t begin to tell you how much I don’t care. Just tell me how to make the damn muffins ‘cos the picture’s got me drooling.

This is different. This is the latest and so-far only exception. This, I care about:

When we moved into a house of our own, I bought us a tea kettle that whistled in harmony when it boiled. Rent was cheap, and we were happy. Those were the days of sweet potato hash, wilted kale, and increasingly exotic baked goods. There was the Me-Making-You-Tea-in-the-Morning-Because-You-Hated-Mornings Phase, but also the You-Making-Me-Tea-in-the-Morning-Because-You-Went-to-Work-at-5am Phase.

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Lucy Bellwood

Lucy tells a story so rich and personal about her and her wife’s experience of life, cohabitation, food, and the beauty of everyday life. I haven’t even read the recipe for The Eggs, even though it sounds pretty delicious.

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Over the years I’ve found words for people who have done what we’re doing now, but I’ve also found a deeper truth: our queer community doesn’t demand a definition. They know that chili oil can change a life just as much as a marriage. That love is in the making and unmaking of beds. The candlelit baths. The laughter. The proffered feast that nourishes.

Queerness makes room within it for these relationships, or rather: queerness spirals outward. It blooms and embraces. That is the process by which we broaden our palates, welcoming what might seem new to us, but which is actually older than we know.

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Lucy Bellwood

It’s a great reminder about focussing on what’s important. About the value of an ally whether the world’s working with you or against you. And, of course, about how every relationship, no matter what shape, size, or form, can enjoy a little more queering once in a while. Go read it.

Thoughts on Editing Posts

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I edit all my posts before I publish them – I look for poor grammar, me rambling on (something which I’m terrible for) and things like typos, although some do still get through. I think that kind of editing is fine.

But when it comes to opinion pieces, I don’t think they should be edited. Yes, you should (in my opinion) check the spelling/grammar before posting, but I don’t think you should go back and edit your opinions retrospectively if they change.

Kev Quirk

Kev speaks my mind.

At almost 25 years ago, my blog’s ancient, and covering more than half my life it inevitably includes posts that I feel don’t accurately reflect me any more (or, perhaps, didn’t reflect me well even when I wrote them!). My approach has long been that it’s okay to go back and modify a post to:

Correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar, or improve readability without changing the meaning.
Add content (in a clearly-marked way) to improve context, update information, or prepend/append hyperlinks to updated information.
Make changes that protect an individual (e.g. removing the name or photo of somebody who doesn’t want to be identified).

But like Kev, to me it just doesn’t seem right to change opinion pieces after your opinion changes. I’m happy to write a retraction and link to it from the original, but making-out like I never said those things in the first place seems disingenuous.

Kev links a disclaimer from his older posts; that’s an interesting idea that I might adopt.

Satoru Iwata’s first commercial game has a secret

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Codex (YouTube)

This was a delightful vlog. It really adds personality to what might otherwise have been a story only about technology and history.

I subscribed to Codex’s vlog like… four years ago? He went dark soon afterwards, but thanks to the magic of RSS, I got notified as soon as he came back from his hiatus.

Automattic Acquires ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress

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Automattic has acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from German developer Matthias Pfefferle, who will be joining the company to continue improving support for federated platforms. Pfefferle, who is also the author of the Webmention plugin, said his new role is to see how Automattic’s products can benefit from open protocols like ActivityPub.

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Sarah Gooding (WPTavern)

This is so exciting I might burst. Want to know why?

Matt Mullenweg‘s commitment to ActivityPub makes me happy. WordPress made Pingback and Trackback take off, back in the day, and I believe that – in the same way – Automattic can help make ActivityPub more accessible and mainstream too.
Matthias Pfefferle is both an IndieWeb and an ActivityPub star; I use (and I’ve extented upon) a lot of code he’s written every day and I sponsor him on Github! The chance that we get to work directly together is pretty slim, but it’s a chance right?

Susan A. Kitchens expressed concern that this could increase the level of ActivityPub spam out there (which right now is very low). I worry about that too. But I’m still optimistic that we can make something awesome off the back of this acquisition and keep the interpersonal Web federated, the way it ought to be.