6 ms·
Design and evaluation of a parrot-to-parrot video-calling system (2023)
- duxup 1y ago> others would want to show another bird their toys Reminds me of what some people who worked at a facility that took in parrots and similar animals whose owners couldn’t care for them. They described the birds as little kids, except they can fly and have powerful beaks. Some of them have very strong "destructive" urges too / they want to take everything apart and so on.
- slfnflctd 1y agoI have great respect for anyone who does this type of work. Far too many people acquire animals that they aren't able or willing to take proper care of, and parrots have very long lives.
- duxup 1y agoAgreed, I respect those folks a lot, not exactly a high paying job / seems like a very personal calling kinda job. They also get to know the birds in a very personal way it seemed. One bird was "upset" with one of the handlers so she didn't want to participate when we met the birds that day. Apparently that handler had broken up a fight between upset bird and another that morning. Upset bird took that personally. At the same time upset bird didn't want to miss out on meeting everyone so she came along with two other birds who met us.... upset bird just sorts of sat on the periphery and made sure that everyone knew she wasn't participating. She wanted folks to know she was there, but was not going to perform.
- gadders 1y agoI was on a zoom call with a colleague and we were both WFH. His dog started barking, which made my dog start barking as well. Not sure if they were conveying any information to each other, but they seemed to enjoy it.
- andrewstuart 1y ago“I’m here!” “I’m over here!”
- mdp2021 1y agoThere was a gag from Gary Larson depicting the inventor of dog-to-human language translator: he walked on a street where dogs were all shouting, "Hey! Hey!". ...Found it: https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Far-Side-Dog-Translator.jpg https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
- wpietri 1y agoI was reading some scholarly work on raven calls. It got into a ton of detail, but it opened with the notion that the fundamental message of every call is "here I am". There were often other messages on top of that (e.g., "here I am near a hawk", "here I am near food", etc), but somehow I'd never realized that was always the base.
- jbattle 1y agoNot being snarky - most social media content is also essentially someone saying “here I am!” (Near a beach, near food). Maybe ravens share some existential angst with humans. Or maybe they are just more physically spread out and need to keep in touch.
- CalRobert 1y agoVery cool! But was the video client open source? https://kottke.org/11/10/richard-stallmans-rider https://kottke.org/11/10/richard-stallmans-rider
- srean 1y agoYou be good. I love you. https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510/ https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510/ Corvids, parrots are extremely intelligent. How so or why so, considering their brain size relative to their body, is not well understood. If you can do grab a copy of Alex and Me. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3018307-alex-me https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3018307-alex-me
- syndeo 1y agoThat was great, thank you for sharing.
- srean 1y agoPleasure's all mine. It's one of my favourite short stories.
- jstrieb 1y agoIf you liked that story, you should really read the full anthology, called Exhalation. Ted Chiang is a wonderful writer, and there are a lot of great stories in that book. I think my favorite was The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.
- srean 1y agoYes indeed. Merchant ... was such a delightful story.
- dinfinity 1y agoA bit offtopic, but it's funny how people call parrots/birds "extremely intelligent" and AI/LLMs "just stochastic parrots devoid of any intelligence", even though their capabilities are very obviously far more like the inverse of those qualifications (show me a video where someone has even a basic extended back and forth conversation with a bird). There is a pretty clear double standard there. Looking at the numbers: Grey parrots have almost 1 billion 'forebrain' neurons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons#Forebrain_(cerebrum_or_pallium)_only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n... ). Estimates for the average number of synapses per neuron range in the thousands, so a conservative estimate for the total would be 1 trillion synapses. If you assume that LLM parameters are comparable to synapses, then such a bird brain is similar to the frontier LLMs in size ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models ). Yes, the bird brain is far more energy efficient, but with regard to intelligence modern AI absolutely smokes birds.
- rwmj 1y agoFeels like they need to develop a parrot-friendly input device and a little automation to complete the call.
- tonylemesmer 1y ago...and that might even yield a better product for humans :)
- xrd 1y agoI worry the next step will be to create a social media site for parrots and then they will be just as lonely and angry as we humans.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mdp2021 1y agoParrots communicate in a realm of which we can suppose that the possibility for the expression of gratuitous stupidity is limited. -- There remains the visceral - which instead is a potential part of that realm: > The study involved experienced parrot handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior - at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls Solution learnt: building a social network where interactions are interpolated by an assistant.
- micromacrofoot 1y agoI wish this concept would develop a little more nuance, there's a lot of good that happens via social media and we can maybe separate that from the somewhat perverse incentives social media companies foist upon people to become valuable.
- g-b-r 1y agoThere's a lot of good that happens via internet communication, social media is inherently toxic. Despite some crazy wider definitions I ran into, social media traditionally meant things similar to Facebook, so real names, over-sharing of your life, falsehood, data collection, and what that leads to. Anything good that might happen on social networks, is a result of a large portion of the population (disgracefully) being on them.
- andrewstuart 1y agoSocial networks for birds: Bird Roulette BeakBook CagedIn Instasquawk And ……….. Twitter
- jamager 1y agoThis made my day, thanks!
- benob 1y agoI wonder whether they used a mirror or simple recordings as baseline
- gmoore 1y agoFinally - a good use for technology!
- bArray 1y agoI have a male Barraband (Superb) parrot [1] and he can scroll videos on Youtube, select the ones with birds in and play those. People are in disbelief when the bird starts watching bird videos on his tablet. His "screen time" is not every day and limited to a few hours. I would love for him to be able to call other birds, he is smart enough to be able to pull that off right now. I have noticed some new behaviours recently: 1. If I'm eating the bird will beg me for food. I have been able to get him to try any foods that he sees me eating. 2. My bird has a high demand for proteins, which he gets somewhat in nuts (limited due to fats) and he will steal meat whenever possible. The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he will steal it when he can. 3. He now makes a wider variety of noises, far beyond any video I have seen of his species. I believe he is trying to replicate human speech and gets close in tone. We talk to him regularly and I think he tries to talk back. Anybody else experience strange behaviours with their birds? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superb_parrot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superb_parrot
- firefax 1y ago>His "screen time" is not every day and limited to a few hours. Are you worried if you give him excessive screen time he won't be able to focus on his studies or something? ;-) (Cute story, thanks for sharing.)
- bArray 1y agoI think my bird already has a difficult time focussing, he acts like he has ADHD. He'll happily sit their doom scrolling watching birds. The other concern is that when he gets too much screen time he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
- indrora 1y agoA friend of mine has a parrot and I asked what having one is like and he just sent me this video [0] and the comment "Either peaceful and quiet or like this, wall to wall, no in between." [0] https://youtu.be/T8C8iJm_2gc https://youtu.be/T8C8iJm_2gc
- deadbabe 1y agoCrows are pretty smart, I befriended one after offering it cashews daily as I would sit in my patio working on my laptop. Now he pecks on my keyboard to generate code with AI to resolve simple Jira tickets.
- imglorp 1y agoIt wouldn't be hard to set up a service like this experiment so birds can socialize whenever they wanted. > They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird And I really hate to bring AI into it, but "bird chat bot" doesn't seem too hard to train on a bunch of behaviors for live interaction. It could offer a palette of avatars.
- peterleiser 1y agoIn the past I had parakeets and lovebirds. I think the app is great, but my first (joking) reaction was "Now let's setup a control group by putting the tablet in selfie-mode to simulate a mirror".
- NoToP 1y ago"Is this really a bird I'm communicating with or is it just a statistical parrot?"
- mncharity 1y ago> for other parrot owners [...] not be wise to [...] Zoom [...] handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior—at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls. [...] offer an appropriate level of support to empower their parrots but also help them avoid any negative experiences So to scale, hmm. Visual sentiment analysis of parrots. Parrot-accessibility. And... some kind of chaperone role... Is there a name for UX design which prioritizes non-negativity of experience over task completion and not leaving? Note that parrot-centered design may have unfamiliar properties, like say, stronger association with the physical location of the device, which say might then require a second device elsewhere to emulate a hypothetical "I'm avoiding you and going away to hang with friends" flock UX.
- teddyh 1y agoMaybe they can take over twitter.com, now that it’s unused.
- Zobat 1y agoSlightly off topic but somewhat related I've heard of a person (Richard Campbell, can be heard on the podcasts "Dot Net Rocks" or "Run as radio") who taught his parrot to use his voice to control the light at it's cage. The surprising result was that it became obvious that it wanted to go to bed earlier than they thought. It turned off the lights much earlier than the timer had before it gained control and would shut it off again directly if a human turned in on again.
- cies 1y agoIt proves that keeping animals in cages hurts them badly.
- mncharity 1y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664219 (215 comments); https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38493299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38493299 (16 comments)
- mncharity 1y agoFwiw, this[1] turned up when teasing AIs with "what is the latest news in visual sentiment analysis for parrots?". [1] Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial update 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877086/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877086/
- thimkerbell 1y agoVideo did not strike me as convincing.
- TZubiri 1y agoTZ: "How many types of eye cones do birds like parrots have, what are their colors?" CGPT: "...birds do have an RGB system that's roughly analogous to ours..." So this works with parrots, unlike dogs who have two color cones and wouldn't see very well on the screen. https://chatgpt.com/share/681a8524-59e4-800f-8bff-a673910c07bc https://chatgpt.com/share/681a8524-59e4-800f-8bff-a673910c07...
- rkagerer 1y agoThe story is neat, but the level of ads on that page is toxic... when overlays started popping up partway through the video I had to leave.