11 ms·

Shrimp Trap

166 points by nikolay 10y ago

bradknowles 10y ago
It's a couple of paragraphs on what a shrimp trap is and how it can be used to catch shrimp. Remind me why this is on HN?
- adrusi 10y ago
  Did you watch the video? This guy makes tools using just the resources from the woods and his own body. Interesting for anyone with a passion for engineering.
- nom 10y ago
  because primitive technology is an awesome channel that can't be upvoted enough edit: also, it's a slow day
  - vacri 10y ago
    This is his weakest video to date, though. If you weren't familiar with his body of work, I can see how you'd be underwhelmed. It's informative as usual, but it's less interesting than all the others - I mean, right after he builds his own smelter from scratch (and inventing his own airflow tool) and smelts iron from riverbank bacteria, a simple cane trap is a bit anticlimactic...
- colordrops 10y ago
  This is HACKER news. This guy is definitely a hacker.
  - jaimex2 10y ago
    Old school Aussie shrimp hacking!
- taspeotis 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
- donw 10y ago
  Hacking is not the same as computing or programming. The ways that the Primitive Technology Guy (PTG) has figured out how to make clay roofing tiles, charcoal, and a primitive forge blower are pretty fascinating. He's managed to build a pretty amazing little house with all of that. That PTG has managed all of these with literally nothing that he could not source from his local environment is quite impressive. No knife, no tools, no matches, just a pair of shorts and an informed mind -- that's pretty much hacking distilled down to its bare essentials.
- shostack 10y ago
  Because before the computer you wrote this comment on existed, at some point in early history the original hardware hackers were figuring out how to hack mother nature and their environment to first keep themselves alive, and then to thrive enough to allow them to build up to where we are now. The evolution of technology is relevant to all of us here. It is utterly humbling and fascinating to try and imagine a time when this was bleeding edge technology that was saving lives from hunger. But some random cave person somewhere came up with this with a much smaller brain than yours. What he is doing is not entirely different from building a computer from first principles... He's just doing it for "primitive technology" and honoring the real original neck beard (literally) who was nerdy enough to come up with this concept.
mynameishere 10y ago
He killed some shrimp here. That was the big revelation. I suppose many of the people watching him fabricate spears and bows thought, "That was cute, but good luck taking a stag with it". Well, he finally took a shrimp. Maybe he could get a budget and go to Alabama or somewhere with a wild hog problem and get a legal sign-off on hunting something properly with stone age tools. I mean, that's actually what cavemen were doing most of the time. Fire alone doesn't make a meal.
- nom 10y ago
  what's your problem? just ignore it if it doesn't resonate with you
  - mynameishere 10y ago
    I don't have a problem. I've watched his videos for a long time and it is fairly clear that he was ignoring the key element of primitive life: hunting. And in his shrimp trap video, he finally broached it. Now, if he brought the whole thing to completion, he would hunt something properly. Alabama has legal spear hunting, and it would probably be the likeliest place to host stone-tipped spear hunting with a film crew.
    - nom 10y ago
      I think I misunderstood your comment, I can see what you were trying to say now.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - saji13 10y ago
      The show is called Primitive TECHNOLOGY. If you haven't noticed he builds stuff, why do you need him to go hunting?
    - Shanea93 10y ago
      It would be a fairly unlikely place for him to go though, given that everything he does is on his own land (and other areas where he has the owner's permission). He's presumably constrained by the local wildlife and regional laws. In Queensland, Australia where he is based, it's illegal [1] to hunt anything which isn't feral or an invasive species of hare or deer, which are pretty hard to find, especially on small plots like the one he owns. [1] - https://ssaa.org.au/hunting/state-territory-hunting-regulations/ https://ssaa.org.au/hunting/state-territory-hunting-regulati...
sdrothrock 10y ago
For anyone curious about this who didn't want to watch the video, the trap consists of: 1. A large woven cone 2. A smaller woven cone without a tip The smaller cone is placed in the larger one; shrimp swim into the small cone to explore, but then get caught in the space between the two cones when they try to get out (presumably because it's difficult to find the single entrance). He mentions that the only skill necessary is basketweaving -- I wonder if it would be possible to carve something similar (two interlocking geometric shapes) or if the trap being woven is essential to its function, for example, for allowing flowing water in to entice shrimp. One of the parts that stood out for me was > In practice, a long stretch of creek might have several traps collecting food each day without any effort on the part of the fisherman. If he were to go whole hog long-term, shrimp traps would free up his time for doing other crafts in ways that spear fishing or actively hunting wouldn't, though I suppose the local yield of shrimp would factor into that (whether he could collect enough calories consistently to fund his other efforts).
- iowahansen 10y ago
  100 grams of shrimp are roughly 100 calories. Let's generously assume that one shrimp from the video yields 200 grams of meat. So he would need to continuously catch 10 shrimp a day to satisfy a 2000 calorie diet. Seems to me that the shrimp population of this stream in the video would be exhausted pretty quickly and he would need to move elsewhere to continue hitting his calorie goals. Given that we are surrounded by an incredible amount of high-calorie food (100g of a Snicker's bar provide 488 calories), it is easy to forget how difficult it is to source calories in the wild.
  - sgt101 10y ago
    He had some yams with it, as well! But yes, I think the big gain here is protein, two shrimp a day in the diet of a family with five members would be a huge boost vs. hit and miss hunting / gathering.
  - Someone 10y ago
    River shrimps are very common. It wouldn't surprise me if that creek held a thousand of those shrimps. Taking out 1% every day may actually be sustainable, as it takes out grown shrimps that otherwise would eat smaller shrimps. And that's to survive on shrimp alone. It would be foolish to try that, not only because it wouldn't be a good diet, but also because putting all your eggs in one basket definitely isn't a good idea if your live depends on it. And of, course, he may catch other edible animals, too, such as eels (this kind of trap is still commonly used in commercial eel fishing in Western Europe; if I had such a trap, I would consider putting a dead shrimp or other meat in such a trap to attract eels)
mrkgnao 10y ago
> I humanely killed the shrimp using the splitting method which destroys the central nervous system (boiling alive is more painful). How do we know this?
- kierenj 10y ago
  Sounds intuitive to me - trigger all pain receptors in the animal, or cut off the ability to feel pain, which is more painful?
  - mrkgnao 10y ago
    I agree, but I'm curious if there is a way to tell "for sure".
    - logicallee 10y ago
      you just casually threw out a question that is a source of fervent fundamental debate in the field of philosophy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia So I'm going to completely hijack this thread and tell you just how deep this rabbit hole goes, this shit is going to blow your mind. so first of all, how do you know that I (or the next person you meet IRL who'll humor your philosophy bullshit while they groggily drink their coffee) actually feel pain? Couldn't they just say they do? Moreover obviously sims like AI characters in 2016 in video games don't really feel pain, they're just actors whose motions have been digitized, they're obviously "pretending" or mimicking the reaction, there's no neural or nervous structure there. So IRL it's pretty obvious why actual people telling you they do and behaving as though they do or actors literally acting and pretending, differ from video game characters who just act that way -- the real people are made of the same stuff you are, you feel pain, obviously something else will feel pain. Asking if it's "really" feeling pain if it's a replica is pretty silly. Okay, so what about about if we replace one of your neurons with an electronic version that interacts with the other neurons over the same (already established, adult) pathways, and you can switch a switch to flip back and forth between the artificial and the real one. As you flip back and forth, since as a "black box" the artificial neuron has the same chemical effect as the real one, obviously the emergent behavior will be the same. It's as though we flipped a switch back and forth to replace a structural bone in a bird with a 3D printed one that is plastic but with the same weight, flexibility, density, porousness, etc, and in every way as regards the rest of the bird's systems it takes on the same role. So obviously the bird will still fly. If you ended up somehow replacing every bone and muscle with an artificial version - then the bird would still fly, what I mean is that birds are a proof of concept that flight is possible. The idea that anyone could ever say that heavier than air flight was impossible, when birds literally prove otherwise, is ridiculous. so it's obvious that pain by artificial systems is possible, it's just ridiculous to say it's not. If you threw the switch back and forth that switched between your real neurons and an artificial black box neurons that had the same structure and behavior, obviously you would report the same effects (you would say you feel pain the same way) and obviously we would believe you. This is obvious. It's completely out of the question that neurons actually have an interaction with some spiritual ethereal plane using quantum effects or something, where pain really comes from Souls and when you switch to an artificial version the Soul is cut off from the ethereal plain, so you would stop feeling the pain. That's bullshit and not worth discussing. Okay all of this was really really simple. it's child's play. But now here is the shit that will totally and completely blow your mind, this shit is insane. So there are only like 10 billion neurons, they fire at like 150-500 hertz or something, and the whole brain just weighs a couple of pounds, shrimps even less. Nothing travels at light speed, these are chemical and biological connections rather than nanometer-scale etchings on silicon. So a server room that has like 10,000 servers each with 64 cores running at 4 Ghz and with 64 GB - 256 GB of memory is ready for all that. It's overkill. The human brain is a couple of pounds of stuff, it uses like 60 watts, it works at like 150 herz before neurons get tired. It's not lightspeed. 4 Ghz is faster by a factor of a million. And this lets you model in real-time in a server-room sized room, you don't need something tiny. The only hard part is that there's like 10 billion of them - it's quite a lot of memory. But anyway, in the long term it's obviously possible that you can make a simulation that, whether in real time or a bit slower, simulates a brain, this stuff is now easy. Okay, let's do it. You make the simulation. you program in VR stuff so we can interact with it. You ask it how it's feeling, etc. You set all this up. Let's say the whole environment takes a million terabytes, whatever. Go for it. Okay we're doing it. Now here's the shit that will blow your mind. For sure we don't need quantum effects. For sure we can have the VR program use a pseudorandom number generator to go through its world-states, and for sure this will work even if we don't seed the PRNG with a source of real-world entropy. So, now it's deterministic. Our world isn't, so I used think this isn't a bit philosophical problem, who cares if in theory we could be deterministic - quantum mechanics means we're not. But it turns out this IS a problem, because in 2016 we damn-near have the hardware to have a program tell us that it's thinking, and since we're modelling every human brain cell, all 86 billion of them, of course we'll believe them. For sure. No real question about it. It'll actually be thinking. But it's deteministic. The total world-state we've set up for this has a checksum. It's like the first screen of super nintendo Mario. It'll always be the same - that ROM has a checksum, it's not something random. It's just math. So that is the mind-blowing part. We don't have influence over the program once we've written it and taken its checksum, you know, this is what the program data is, these are the rules. Then it's out of our hands. So the end result is already fully determined - like the quadrillionth prime. So we've already said that it feels pain, for sure, but it's just math, and actually running it to find out what it reports won't change it. If calculating the numbers, for example imagine I'm calculating the series of even numbers, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12.... could cause pain to be created, surely in some sense it already exists even before we've calculated it? This is not really a theoretical problem. It's very practical - DNA is quite literally "code" (that has been sequenced), we have it, it's about 700 MB uncompresseed, it was fully sequenced in the late nineties or early 2000s. So we know for sure that this math exists. Give it a few more decades and we can work in the other direction and model DNA cells in a VR womb while an organism grows -- we have the data for it today (except a few details). This is different than the neural argument, because there are so many atoms and cells in a human body, but the gist is the same. So in a sense, the math for that already exists, calculating it doesn't do anything but tell us what that math "feels", which we know for sure feels. So in short: if there's a quadrillionth prime (actually let's say nonillionth, just to match the number of atoms in a decent-sized VR chamber, that's the size of a very large opera hall or something) -- so, if there's a nonillionth prime, then it feels pain. And it's asking for an aspirin. (Of course "prime" is standin for some other function, that we come up with but which is still deterministic.) This is actual reality that you have to really accept. Throughout history whenever scientists had to reject their own absurd conclusions that followed rigorously from what they knew for sure, then what ended up happening is that this meant their own cultural biases and worldview were too strong. they discovered something bit, but were too closed-minded to accept it. so what we can say, for sure, is that numbers can actually (not in a theoretical sense, but actually, as in, using more or less the hardware that we have today) feel. True, they're very large numbers, but they feel. The nonillionth prime is feeling something right now (again an an analogy for a different mathematical function, not P() for the prime function.) And soon we'll be able to calculate what it is - but as soon as we have the starting conditions, if we make it deterministic, the actual calculation will be out of our hands and already exist. Of course, maybe there isn't a nonillionth prime until someone calculates it. That would make this conclusion a little easier to swallow. but to me that is rather hand-wavy. After all, the prime function (for mathematicians exploring what happens to be our standard set of axioms) works the same even in a parallel universe that doesn't share our physical laws. Even with totally physical laws, if someone explores our mathematical systems, they can't find that there are two integers between the fifth and sixth primes (11 and 13). It'll still be a difference of two even in a parallel universe with different rules, as long as someone sets out to explore our axiomatic systems (even if it doesn't correspond to anything in that reality) -- so given that these truths transcend even physical laws, it's really bizarre and hard to understand how I could argue that the quadrillionth prime doesn't exist until you calculate it. It does and it (or rather the deterministic function we'll have a few decades from now for some VR program, like the ROM image for Super Nintendo's Mario, but with a full set of human neurons and nervous system and every reason for us to know it feels pain the same as we do) already has its behavior set in stone today. that is insane. So sure this shrimp feels pain. and so do number. ow.
alva 10y ago
The PrimitiveTechnology videos are such an incredible example of the wonders the internet provides. Here you have a guy making such interesting, engrossing videos, uploaded for free and accessible to all. The series is worthy of being on the BBC. I wonder if there are any companies who spot this sort of content with the aim of getting in on tv screens.
- m0nty 10y ago
  > The series is worthy of being on the BBC I think much youtube content is better than the output of the BBC, which shows an unfortunate tendency to "jazz up" its shows to make them more "accessible" and "fun". If Primitive Technology were on the BBC, he wouldn't be allowed to do everything without talking (he rarely makes eye-contact with the camera, even). There would probably be a "panel of experts" to discuss or direct the course of events, and they would introduce some competitive element, so several people would be working against each other to produce the best shrimp trap. The same thing goes for other channels like Matthias Wandel, Paul Sellers, Alain Vaillancourt, Marius Hornberger, Louis Sauzedde and Chris on Clickspring. These are excellent channels, I would recommend all of them if you are into making things with your hands. But they could never exist on mainstream TV, and if they did, they would be stripped of their charm and value to make them more commercial. So youtube > regular TV, imo.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    If some light Christian libertarianism doesn't bother you also check wranglerstar. And AvE needs to be on this list of nothing than for the comic relief FYF!!!
  - rawnlq 10y ago
    I am pretty sure if you like primitive tech you would love the historical documentaries BBC did on this subject. Primitive tech's presentation and focus on one technique per video is nice. But for comprehensiveness, you can't beat reenacting the 15th-16th century by living on a farm for a year like what BBC did in "Tales from the Green Valley", "Tudor Monastery Farms", and related series. A lot of the exact techniques primitive tech covered is also covered by those series: Fish traps: https://youtu.be/ZIbhoR1GBuI?t=302 https://youtu.be/ZIbhoR1GBuI?t=302 Wattle and daub wall: https://youtu.be/Qn1h8DOQGEQ?t=589 https://youtu.be/Qn1h8DOQGEQ?t=589 Building roofs: https://youtu.be/jgjFsR-c0-Q?t=558 https://youtu.be/jgjFsR-c0-Q?t=558 Smelting lead ores: https://youtu.be/ZIbhoR1GBuI?t=837 https://youtu.be/ZIbhoR1GBuI?t=837 etc etc
Lxr 10y ago
Can anyone actually start a fire that easily without chemicals?
- krastanov 10y ago
  It is not that easy, but yes. The fluffy dry mass (the tinder) is very important - it is the thing that catches fire at low temperature. See his pump drill video for some of the pain points.
robtaylor 10y ago
On reddit overnight there were tens of posts on this from separate users, now I see this on here. Is this common / natural or is there some PR at work?
- DanBC 10y ago
  It's natural. Many people on HN enjoy the videos and blogs, so it's natural that they post links.
keeganjw 10y ago
Yes, yes, yes! I didn't know he had a blog. I've only seen his Youtube channel. Time to take a deep dive into his written material.
koolba 10y ago
This guy is seriously amazing. I've spent hours watching every one of his videos and I think I ran out of, "WTF?"s by the time I was done.
yandrypozo 10y ago
This guy is a perfect hacker of primitive technologies. I'm a big fan of his videos, all of them! I wish I could find more of those.

166 points by nikolay 10y ago

It's a couple of paragraphs on what a shrimp trap is and how it can be used to catch shrimp. Remind me why this is on HN?

adrusi 10y ago
Did you watch the video? This guy makes tools using just the resources from the woods and his own body. Interesting for anyone with a passion for engineering.
nom 10y ago
because primitive technology is an awesome channel that can't be upvoted enough edit: also, it's a slow day
- vacri 10y ago
  This is his weakest video to date, though. If you weren't familiar with his body of work, I can see how you'd be underwhelmed. It's informative as usual, but it's less interesting than all the others - I mean, right after he builds his own smelter from scratch (and inventing his own airflow tool) and smelts iron from riverbank bacteria, a simple cane trap is a bit anticlimactic...
colordrops 10y ago
This is HACKER news. This guy is definitely a hacker.
- jaimex2 10y ago
  Old school Aussie shrimp hacking!
taspeotis 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
donw 10y ago
Hacking is not the same as computing or programming. The ways that the Primitive Technology Guy (PTG) has figured out how to make clay roofing tiles, charcoal, and a primitive forge blower are pretty fascinating. He's managed to build a pretty amazing little house with all of that. That PTG has managed all of these with literally nothing that he could not source from his local environment is quite impressive. No knife, no tools, no matches, just a pair of shorts and an informed mind -- that's pretty much hacking distilled down to its bare essentials.
shostack 10y ago
Because before the computer you wrote this comment on existed, at some point in early history the original hardware hackers were figuring out how to hack mother nature and their environment to first keep themselves alive, and then to thrive enough to allow them to build up to where we are now. The evolution of technology is relevant to all of us here. It is utterly humbling and fascinating to try and imagine a time when this was bleeding edge technology that was saving lives from hunger. But some random cave person somewhere came up with this with a much smaller brain than yours. What he is doing is not entirely different from building a computer from first principles... He's just doing it for "primitive technology" and honoring the real original neck beard (literally) who was nerdy enough to come up with this concept.

mynameishere 10y ago

He killed some shrimp here. That was the big revelation. I suppose many of the people watching him fabricate spears and bows thought, "That was cute, but good luck taking a stag with it". Well, he finally took a shrimp. Maybe he could get a budget and go to Alabama or somewhere with a wild hog problem and get a legal sign-off on hunting something properly with stone age tools. I mean, that's actually what cavemen were doing most of the time. Fire alone doesn't make a meal.

nom 10y ago
what's your problem? just ignore it if it doesn't resonate with you
- mynameishere 10y ago
  I don't have a problem. I've watched his videos for a long time and it is fairly clear that he was ignoring the key element of primitive life: hunting. And in his shrimp trap video, he finally broached it. Now, if he brought the whole thing to completion, he would hunt something properly. Alabama has legal spear hunting, and it would probably be the likeliest place to host stone-tipped spear hunting with a film crew.
  - nom 10y ago
    I think I misunderstood your comment, I can see what you were trying to say now.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - saji13 10y ago
    The show is called Primitive TECHNOLOGY. If you haven't noticed he builds stuff, why do you need him to go hunting?
  - Shanea93 10y ago
    It would be a fairly unlikely place for him to go though, given that everything he does is on his own land (and other areas where he has the owner's permission). He's presumably constrained by the local wildlife and regional laws. In Queensland, Australia where he is based, it's illegal [1] to hunt anything which isn't feral or an invasive species of hare or deer, which are pretty hard to find, especially on small plots like the one he owns. [1] - https://ssaa.org.au/hunting/state-territory-hunting-regulations/ https://ssaa.org.au/hunting/state-territory-hunting-regulati...

sdrothrock 10y ago

For anyone curious about this who didn't want to watch the video, the trap consists of: 1. A large woven cone 2. A smaller woven cone without a tip The smaller cone is placed in the larger one; shrimp swim into the small cone to explore, but then get caught in the space between the two cones when they try to get out (presumably because it's difficult to find the single entrance). He mentions that the only skill necessary is basketweaving -- I wonder if it would be possible to carve something similar (two interlocking geometric shapes) or if the trap being woven is essential to its function, for example, for allowing flowing water in to entice shrimp. One of the parts that stood out for me was > In practice, a long stretch of creek might have several traps collecting food each day without any effort on the part of the fisherman. If he were to go whole hog long-term, shrimp traps would free up his time for doing other crafts in ways that spear fishing or actively hunting wouldn't, though I suppose the local yield of shrimp would factor into that (whether he could collect enough calories consistently to fund his other efforts).

iowahansen 10y ago
100 grams of shrimp are roughly 100 calories. Let's generously assume that one shrimp from the video yields 200 grams of meat. So he would need to continuously catch 10 shrimp a day to satisfy a 2000 calorie diet. Seems to me that the shrimp population of this stream in the video would be exhausted pretty quickly and he would need to move elsewhere to continue hitting his calorie goals. Given that we are surrounded by an incredible amount of high-calorie food (100g of a Snicker's bar provide 488 calories), it is easy to forget how difficult it is to source calories in the wild.
- sgt101 10y ago
  He had some yams with it, as well! But yes, I think the big gain here is protein, two shrimp a day in the diet of a family with five members would be a huge boost vs. hit and miss hunting / gathering.
- Someone 10y ago
  River shrimps are very common. It wouldn't surprise me if that creek held a thousand of those shrimps. Taking out 1% every day may actually be sustainable, as it takes out grown shrimps that otherwise would eat smaller shrimps. And that's to survive on shrimp alone. It would be foolish to try that, not only because it wouldn't be a good diet, but also because putting all your eggs in one basket definitely isn't a good idea if your live depends on it. And of, course, he may catch other edible animals, too, such as eels (this kind of trap is still commonly used in commercial eel fishing in Western Europe; if I had such a trap, I would consider putting a dead shrimp or other meat in such a trap to attract eels)

mrkgnao 10y ago

> I humanely killed the shrimp using the splitting method which destroys the central nervous system (boiling alive is more painful). How do we know this?

kierenj 10y ago
Sounds intuitive to me - trigger all pain receptors in the animal, or cut off the ability to feel pain, which is more painful?
- mrkgnao 10y ago
  I agree, but I'm curious if there is a way to tell "for sure".
  - logicallee 10y ago
    you just casually threw out a question that is a source of fervent fundamental debate in the field of philosophy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia So I'm going to completely hijack this thread and tell you just how deep this rabbit hole goes, this shit is going to blow your mind. so first of all, how do you know that I (or the next person you meet IRL who'll humor your philosophy bullshit while they groggily drink their coffee) actually feel pain? Couldn't they just say they do? Moreover obviously sims like AI characters in 2016 in video games don't really feel pain, they're just actors whose motions have been digitized, they're obviously "pretending" or mimicking the reaction, there's no neural or nervous structure there. So IRL it's pretty obvious why actual people telling you they do and behaving as though they do or actors literally acting and pretending, differ from video game characters who just act that way -- the real people are made of the same stuff you are, you feel pain, obviously something else will feel pain. Asking if it's "really" feeling pain if it's a replica is pretty silly. Okay, so what about about if we replace one of your neurons with an electronic version that interacts with the other neurons over the same (already established, adult) pathways, and you can switch a switch to flip back and forth between the artificial and the real one. As you flip back and forth, since as a "black box" the artificial neuron has the same chemical effect as the real one, obviously the emergent behavior will be the same. It's as though we flipped a switch back and forth to replace a structural bone in a bird with a 3D printed one that is plastic but with the same weight, flexibility, density, porousness, etc, and in every way as regards the rest of the bird's systems it takes on the same role. So obviously the bird will still fly. If you ended up somehow replacing every bone and muscle with an artificial version - then the bird would still fly, what I mean is that birds are a proof of concept that flight is possible. The idea that anyone could ever say that heavier than air flight was impossible, when birds literally prove otherwise, is ridiculous. so it's obvious that pain by artificial systems is possible, it's just ridiculous to say it's not. If you threw the switch back and forth that switched between your real neurons and an artificial black box neurons that had the same structure and behavior, obviously you would report the same effects (you would say you feel pain the same way) and obviously we would believe you. This is obvious. It's completely out of the question that neurons actually have an interaction with some spiritual ethereal plane using quantum effects or something, where pain really comes from Souls and when you switch to an artificial version the Soul is cut off from the ethereal plain, so you would stop feeling the pain. That's bullshit and not worth discussing. Okay all of this was really really simple. it's child's play. But now here is the shit that will totally and completely blow your mind, this shit is insane. So there are only like 10 billion neurons, they fire at like 150-500 hertz or something, and the whole brain just weighs a couple of pounds, shrimps even less. Nothing travels at light speed, these are chemical and biological connections rather than nanometer-scale etchings on silicon. So a server room that has like 10,000 servers each with 64 cores running at 4 Ghz and with 64 GB - 256 GB of memory is ready for all that. It's overkill. The human brain is a couple of pounds of stuff, it uses like 60 watts, it works at like 150 herz before neurons get tired. It's not lightspeed. 4 Ghz is faster by a factor of a million. And this lets you model in real-time in a server-room sized room, you don't need something tiny. The only hard part is that there's like 10 billion of them - it's quite a lot of memory. But anyway, in the long term it's obviously possible that you can make a simulation that, whether in real time or a bit slower, simulates a brain, this stuff is now easy. Okay, let's do it. You make the simulation. you program in VR stuff so we can interact with it. You ask it how it's feeling, etc. You set all this up. Let's say the whole environment takes a million terabytes, whatever. Go for it. Okay we're doing it. Now here's the shit that will blow your mind. For sure we don't need quantum effects. For sure we can have the VR program use a pseudorandom number generator to go through its world-states, and for sure this will work even if we don't seed the PRNG with a source of real-world entropy. So, now it's deterministic. Our world isn't, so I used think this isn't a bit philosophical problem, who cares if in theory we could be deterministic - quantum mechanics means we're not. But it turns out this IS a problem, because in 2016 we damn-near have the hardware to have a program tell us that it's thinking, and since we're modelling every human brain cell, all 86 billion of them, of course we'll believe them. For sure. No real question about it. It'll actually be thinking. But it's deteministic. The total world-state we've set up for this has a checksum. It's like the first screen of super nintendo Mario. It'll always be the same - that ROM has a checksum, it's not something random. It's just math. So that is the mind-blowing part. We don't have influence over the program once we've written it and taken its checksum, you know, this is what the program data is, these are the rules. Then it's out of our hands. So the end result is already fully determined - like the quadrillionth prime. So we've already said that it feels pain, for sure, but it's just math, and actually running it to find out what it reports won't change it. If calculating the numbers, for example imagine I'm calculating the series of even numbers, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12.... could cause pain to be created, surely in some sense it already exists even before we've calculated it? This is not really a theoretical problem. It's very practical - DNA is quite literally "code" (that has been sequenced), we have it, it's about 700 MB uncompresseed, it was fully sequenced in the late nineties or early 2000s. So we know for sure that this math exists. Give it a few more decades and we can work in the other direction and model DNA cells in a VR womb while an organism grows -- we have the data for it today (except a few details). This is different than the neural argument, because there are so many atoms and cells in a human body, but the gist is the same. So in a sense, the math for that already exists, calculating it doesn't do anything but tell us what that math "feels", which we know for sure feels. So in short: if there's a quadrillionth prime (actually let's say nonillionth, just to match the number of atoms in a decent-sized VR chamber, that's the size of a very large opera hall or something) -- so, if there's a nonillionth prime, then it feels pain. And it's asking for an aspirin. (Of course "prime" is standin for some other function, that we come up with but which is still deterministic.) This is actual reality that you have to really accept. Throughout history whenever scientists had to reject their own absurd conclusions that followed rigorously from what they knew for sure, then what ended up happening is that this meant their own cultural biases and worldview were too strong. they discovered something bit, but were too closed-minded to accept it. so what we can say, for sure, is that numbers can actually (not in a theoretical sense, but actually, as in, using more or less the hardware that we have today) feel. True, they're very large numbers, but they feel. The nonillionth prime is feeling something right now (again an an analogy for a different mathematical function, not P() for the prime function.) And soon we'll be able to calculate what it is - but as soon as we have the starting conditions, if we make it deterministic, the actual calculation will be out of our hands and already exist. Of course, maybe there isn't a nonillionth prime until someone calculates it. That would make this conclusion a little easier to swallow. but to me that is rather hand-wavy. After all, the prime function (for mathematicians exploring what happens to be our standard set of axioms) works the same even in a parallel universe that doesn't share our physical laws. Even with totally physical laws, if someone explores our mathematical systems, they can't find that there are two integers between the fifth and sixth primes (11 and 13). It'll still be a difference of two even in a parallel universe with different rules, as long as someone sets out to explore our axiomatic systems (even if it doesn't correspond to anything in that reality) -- so given that these truths transcend even physical laws, it's really bizarre and hard to understand how I could argue that the quadrillionth prime doesn't exist until you calculate it. It does and it (or rather the deterministic function we'll have a few decades from now for some VR program, like the ROM image for Super Nintendo's Mario, but with a full set of human neurons and nervous system and every reason for us to know it feels pain the same as we do) already has its behavior set in stone today. that is insane. So sure this shrimp feels pain. and so do number. ow.

alva 10y ago

The PrimitiveTechnology videos are such an incredible example of the wonders the internet provides. Here you have a guy making such interesting, engrossing videos, uploaded for free and accessible to all. The series is worthy of being on the BBC. I wonder if there are any companies who spot this sort of content with the aim of getting in on tv screens.

m0nty 10y ago
> The series is worthy of being on the BBC I think much youtube content is better than the output of the BBC, which shows an unfortunate tendency to "jazz up" its shows to make them more "accessible" and "fun". If Primitive Technology were on the BBC, he wouldn't be allowed to do everything without talking (he rarely makes eye-contact with the camera, even). There would probably be a "panel of experts" to discuss or direct the course of events, and they would introduce some competitive element, so several people would be working against each other to produce the best shrimp trap. The same thing goes for other channels like Matthias Wandel, Paul Sellers, Alain Vaillancourt, Marius Hornberger, Louis Sauzedde and Chris on Clickspring. These are excellent channels, I would recommend all of them if you are into making things with your hands. But they could never exist on mainstream TV, and if they did, they would be stripped of their charm and value to make them more commercial. So youtube > regular TV, imo.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  If some light Christian libertarianism doesn't bother you also check wranglerstar. And AvE needs to be on this list of nothing than for the comic relief FYF!!!
- rawnlq 10y ago
  I am pretty sure if you like primitive tech you would love the historical documentaries BBC did on this subject. Primitive tech's presentation and focus on one technique per video is nice. But for comprehensiveness, you can't beat reenacting the 15th-16th century by living on a farm for a year like what BBC did in "Tales from the Green Valley", "Tudor Monastery Farms", and related series. A lot of the exact techniques primitive tech covered is also covered by those series: Fish traps: https://youtu.be/ZIbhoR1GBuI?t=302 https://youtu.be/ZIbhoR1GBuI?t=302 Wattle and daub wall: https://youtu.be/Qn1h8DOQGEQ?t=589 https://youtu.be/Qn1h8DOQGEQ?t=589 Building roofs: https://youtu.be/jgjFsR-c0-Q?t=558 https://youtu.be/jgjFsR-c0-Q?t=558 Smelting lead ores: https://youtu.be/ZIbhoR1GBuI?t=837 https://youtu.be/ZIbhoR1GBuI?t=837 etc etc

Lxr 10y ago

Can anyone actually start a fire that easily without chemicals?

krastanov 10y ago
It is not that easy, but yes. The fluffy dry mass (the tinder) is very important - it is the thing that catches fire at low temperature. See his pump drill video for some of the pain points.

robtaylor 10y ago

On reddit overnight there were tens of posts on this from separate users, now I see this on here. Is this common / natural or is there some PR at work?

DanBC 10y ago
It's natural. Many people on HN enjoy the videos and blogs, so it's natural that they post links.

keeganjw 10y ago

Yes, yes, yes! I didn't know he had a blog. I've only seen his Youtube channel. Time to take a deep dive into his written material.

koolba 10y ago

This guy is seriously amazing. I've spent hours watching every one of his videos and I think I ran out of, "WTF?"s by the time I was done.

yandrypozo 10y ago

This guy is a perfect hacker of primitive technologies. I'm a big fan of his videos, all of them! I wish I could find more of those.