Octopuses Like to Punch Fish | Hacker News Reader

Octopuses Like to Punch Fish

gizmodo.com

Gizmodo is an ad riddled mess on mobile. Is there a better link for this?

Edit: found two original sources, no good summary article yet though https://twitter.com/octoeduardo/status/1340076579108646913?s...

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy....

Edit 2: the original study PDF is only 8 pages and is an easy read; dunno the policy on linking to scihub here but here you go, I’ll delete if needed https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2020-12-19/fd/10.1002@ecy.3266....

It’s absurd how some pages can’t be consumed any more, because of the insane number of ads.

Doubly absurd that they tend to be near the top when I "google" a thing as well.

Check out the supporting information on your second link, some very nice videos there, freely available.

Thanks I missed those the first go-around.

It's a lot better using a DNS based ad blocker but we still see large pieces of white space where ads should be.

I actually didn’t even notice until I read this thread. I love my pi-hole, it makes the mobile web usable.

Now that we're being force-fed DoH (DNS over HTTPS) we're going to have a rough time with DNS-based blocking.

"Gizmodo is an ad-riddled mess on mobile."

Make a mobile-friendly, text-only version with no ads:

   x=$(echo y|tr y '\004');
   z="<p class=.sc-77";
   curl  https://gizmodo.com/octopuses-like-to-punch-fish-new-research-suggests-1845929379/amp \
   |sed "s/$z/$x&/g"|tr '\004' '\n'|sed -n "s/<\/p>.*/<\/p>/;/^$z/p" > 1.htm

   firefox ./1.htm

Or just don’t bother clicking it.

That honestly is a tool that should be used more often.

"Oh, Twitter is a cesspool!" Agreed, don't use it.

"Oh I hate Instagram influencers!" Don't use it.

"Fuck Facebook." Great, don't use it.

"Windows 10 is awful." Other alternatives are available.

I know what people will say. "Hurr durr, I can't quit it for XYZ reason". Fine, you can judge that for your own life. But I will say that life is SO much better when you are able to deploy this absolutist hammer with a force of an anvil. I DON'T use Facebook or Twitter or Instagram so I just don't know how much of a cesspit those places really are. There is SO much life to live beyond staring at a rectangular lamp. As my mum says, if it's a chronic problem, either accept it or find a coping mechanism.

When it comes to influencers...

For over a year I was bombarded IRL with ads in public spaces promoting some influencer instagram.

Sometimes you can't escape.

Agreed, sometimes you cannot. Hence my comment about being able to judge for yourself.

I am just railing against the (perceived) lack of consideration given to the all-in solution of not using services that are not satisfactory. I think people have way more agency in the matter than they appreciate.

I swear half of the Twitter posts I see are just people disparaging Twitter... I hope your downvotes are just for tone, not content.

Yes, it is a shame people don't take action in their lives to fix all these supposed problems. "I can't quit for XYZ reasons" is bullshit. Unless we're talking life critical systems here, you absolutely can quit. Period. People's inability to do inconvenient or uncomfortable things is the main problem. Their lack of willpower does not absolve them from being complicit in continuing the supposedly terrible, toxic systems.

That's simplifying it a lot. Things can be really bad, but still be the best/only way to achieve some goal. If you wat to play games on your PC, Windows is your best bet, regardless how bad it is. If you want to keep up with acquaintances, you gain a lot from Facebook, even though it might be terrible.

It's crazy to think that you are not allowed to complain about things if you are using it. Arguably that's the most valid critique.

I'm saying too many people don't even consider the idea of "Could I possibly quit playing video games?" I've found an enormous amount of liberation in using that line of thinking. It's a kind of Zen "Eliminate the Inessential" freedom that comes through this attitude; "I just don't use facebook, and let the leaves fall where they may".

That was true in the past, but at least for me Steam Proton has completely removed my need to use Windows for games.

It’s a point where you can apply aforementioned anvil (something I frequently make use of) and just not buy/play any game that doesn’t work on linux.

Proton is a compat layer, and it often incurs performance cost or glitches. In a few cases games are not even playable. Granted, some games work perfectly.

Nonetheless, I've done my fair share of Linux gaming, and I'd never ever recommend an average gamer to put Linux on their rig.

Then why are you here?

I like HN.

> "Fuck Facebook." Great, don't use it.

I agree, but sometimes you just cannot. In facebook case - it basically killed most of internet forums as people switched to facebook groups. My experience is with car restoration/old car aficionados forums that were replaced by fb groups, but I'm sure it also aplies to other. So now you cannot find anything as they are not indexed by google, facebook search just sucks and if you set up you own forum then people just don't use it as it's "to much hassle" to open one more tab. And if you're in market for some exotic part fb is your only choice nowdays. Second thing, I don't remember where (maybe here?) I've read article how guy missed his childhood friend's funeral, because he has no faceboook account, and it was the only way that family informed his friends - by posting on fb that he died.

Nice. Safari didn't know it was UTF-8 so wrapped boilerplate HTML around it to get <meta charset="utf-8">

Next time the topic of "advertising funds the the internet"^1 comes up on HN, remember that this ad-riddled mess disguised is the "content" that advertising "is paying for". As I recall the early www, this sort of survelillance submarine "content" was absent in the time before such "funding" was available.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2551106 Bloggers, journalists and their believers refer to the www as "the internet".

The reader button on firefox (at least on android) also removes ads.

Blockada on Android and Firefox uBlock origin's DOM element hiding to remove the sticky video. That's on Android too.

I use the DuckDuckGo browser on iPhone and Brave on desktop, and Gizmodo (along with most of the web) is not bad. Occasionally, I have to do something from my wife’s computer, and it’s astounding how crippled the web experience is without a decent browser.

Blokada app works on Android.

Nextdns + Firefox reader mode makes it ok. Couldn’t find any other way to get rid of this “what’s new in macOS” video that was taking up half the page otherwise.

All those ads are shown by scripts. No scripts - no ads.

Seriously, per-domain javascript blocking in uBlock Origin (Firefox Mobile) is amazing.

It's open-access, mate. Sci-Hub isn't even needed: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002...

(That being said, it's a good opportunity to update my list of Sci-Hub domains – just to make sure I don't accidentally use any, of course.)

It's amazing that people don't use adblockers. uBlock Origin on desktop, also works on mobile such as Firefox Android, Kiwi browser, etc. On iOS you can use AdGuard, Edge with adblockers, Wipr, etc.

Also, SponsorBlock for YouTube to block sponsors inside videos, and even uMatrix if you want to globally disable JS and select which sites do use JS.

Octopus is a super interesting animal. There is a beautiful movie on Netflix called My Octopus Teacher, well worth your time.

I was surprised to learn that as intelligent and resourceful as they are, common octopuses only live a couple years.

Same. But even more curious is that it's not as if they die of old age or anything typically...the parents both seem to commit suicide of sorts after having offspring. So that leaves the bigger question of why? Does reproduction doom them for death internally? Population control mechanism? Really interesting.

In some species at least, it’s not really suicide, more of an all-in reproductive strategy. In these species, a female will stop eating so that she can spend 100% of her life tending to the egg mass, protecting it from predators as well as using her arms to circulate water around the eggs for proper oxygenation (the mass is stationary, usually adhered to rock or an otherwise sheltered crevice).

Unlike fish eggs, octopus eggs generally take several weeks to hatch once fertilized. Going this long without food basically starves the brood mother to death (or makes it exceedingly unlikely that she will be able to recuperate on her own).

I realize you still could describe this as suicide with extra steps, per your comment.

> octopus eggs generally take several weeks to hatch once fertilized. Going this long without food basically starves the brood mother to death

Birds solve this problem by having the male bring food to the female.

Only if they would stop eating the males; males sharing more caring attributes could have produced more offspring and furthered the trait

There is a gland behind their eyes that helps kick off senescence as well. I vaguely remember that removing this gland increases life span.

It also prevents them from caring for their eggs.

Most cephalopods and, I think, all octopoda are semelparous--they procreate once, and then usually die not longer after. I wonder if this is their Great Filter, preventing the emergence of more cooperative, social behaviors among themselves that could potentially put them on the path humans found themselves on.

Certainly I think octopus and squid, along with covids and some other groups, show that intelligence is rather easy to come by so long as it's adaptive. Human-level intelligence is probably only adaptive given other factors that preceded leaps in our intelligence. For example, I bet nascent (but theretofore unseen) altruism and culture emerged and created an ecological environment into which our intelligence could profitably expand, after which the process probably accelerated and became more dynamic.

> octopoda are semelparous--they procreate once, and then usually die not longer after. I wonder if this is their Great Filter, preventing the emergence of more cooperative, social behaviors among themselves that could potentially put them on the path humans found themselves on.

The fact that they are solitary is a much, much bigger obstacle than the fact that they die quickly.

Right, but my point is that the former might be a consequence of the latter.

Bees procreate and die immediately. (The males do.) They're social. The bees you see never procreate at all.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180925140402.h...

Did you mean to respond somewhere else?

It was related to the discussion of octopus being condemned to a loner existence by cannibalism and their "death-spiral" after procreation. A meaningful observing of octopus culture would only be possible if this was fixed.

In my eyes their solitude and their short and fragile lives are what caused them to evolve to such a fascinating creature. Just like the human's fragility: no inherent armour, no inherent weapon, no inherent speed. If you can survive under those conditions, you'll certainly be interesting.

Wouldn't it make more sense that the fragility, lack of armor (fur/thick skin) or claws etc. Came after tools made them redundant, like how our bowels are shorter than apes' because they atrophied after the invention of cooking- a digestive system capable of processing raw good being less efficient overall in that new environment?

Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith has some interesting thoughts about this.

The gist is that because they have such (relative) short lives, their lessened need to be defensive allows them to be more curious.

>Certainly I think ... covids and some other groups, show that intelligence is rather easy to come by

Oh shit I hope not!

corvids :) a funny mistake

When the name COVID-19 first came out, I found myself frequently fighting back the urge to smile and think about 19 crime-fighting crows and ravens (Force Corvid-19).

> squid, along with covids

Spellcheck has eaten the R in corvids. Another reason to hate 2020.

I wonder if there are more pro-user friendly spellcheckers out there that allows for on-the-fly customization.

That's a bird of another feather...

The ocean is their great filter. Ocean animals are very limited in their tool use - there's not much in the way of rocks or sticks to be had. Some shells and corals. And fire is off the table. I would expect it to be true that any technological civilization has to live on land at least part of the time.

No fire means no energy or metals which means no technology more advanced than the Stone age.

One could conceive of a species that makes its own tools the same way it makes its own shells, and uses energy from hydrothermal vents, but yeah, chemistry and metallurgy would be pretty difficult underwater.

There are two things holding back octopodes from world domination: their short lifespan and solitary nature. Both of which should be curable. If instead of curing cancer in mice every week, if we fixed these two issues in octopodes, we will probably have our own aliens in our oceans.

What could possibly go wrong?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816440.War_with_the_Newt...

So nice to see a Czech SF classic mentioned here :-)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40376072-children-of-rui...

Yes, that's a good one. Always good to see a sci-fi author work hard on a different model of intelligence.

And that's a good thing, because if they lived as long as we do and worked out how to get along with each other they'd be running the planet, and most likely farming us for food.

They're really terrifyingly smart.

It’s pretty hard to rule the land from the water. Even with all of our technological might, do you think we could wage war on an ocean-bound technologically advanced species? They have the same disadvantage. In all likelihood we would coexist.

Do you get a technological society without air?

Cooking and metallurgy are both pretty important, and we got them incrementally, starting from fire being pretty easy to do.

I don’t have a good answer to “what does underwater technological progression look like?” I just want to point out that we are under a heavy survivorship bias. Just because we are where we are does not mean there aren’t other plausible histories.

Sure, you can't identify path dependence from 1 data point.

Moving back to the land-sea war, we know how to make bombs and stuff, so they better have something like steel and know how to come attack us on land and so on if there is any notion of it being a contest.

there is some pretty good sci-fi about intelligent octopuses[1], one of the coolest ideas is how a society might evolve in a way that reflects the animal's nervous system, i.e. more of a distributed thing than our centralized one.

(Though one should put in the time to also read the novel of which this is a sequel, which is about intelligent spiders, and is also pretty nice.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky#Children_of...

Children of Time is awesome. I haven't read the sequel but the prospect of intelligent octopuses certainly whets the appetite.

They would need to solve the problem that was easy on land: how do you release an energy from one resource to thermally pricess other resource (food at first but then metals).

Not everybody thinks that this movie is beautiful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24788275

That is valid criticism, for the most part. Thank you for the link.

I've never heard of this youtuber but I'm really digging her videos. I'm now on my 4th video of hers. They are long and I cut out about half/quarter-way in but thoroughly enjoying her reviews.

If these videos are real-time and not slowed down, I think the word “punch” is a little hyperbolic. It’s more like a push or a nudge. Saying that “octopuses punch fish” makes it sound violent, but it doesn’t look like the octopus intends to harm the fish at all.

agreed. they don't even have fists. it's more like a human involuntarily batting a fly out of its field of view

These videos may be out of context. Some fish behave perfectly nice while eating, but are obnoxious most other times. The person recording this may have never seen the fish before, but an octopus has incredible memory and may have a hate on for something it did before. They certainly remember humans.

So you are saying that octopus wasn't just punch some fish, but it was punching Jeff, that guy that won't stop doing that one thing.

These punches are thrown to “prevent exploitation and ensure collaboration." Best quote from from the article. Reminded me of "The Three Stooges" The world would be a better place if you could slap a selfish idiot when they are doing something idiotic. Or maybe not.

Octopuses are the best animal. Punching fish out of spite is hilarious.

I’ve kept ornamental fish for many years and certainly octopuses are not fish but it looks to me that it’s only keeping others away from its territory like many fish do.

Sure, who hasn’t wanted to punch a fish from time to time?

This is the best thing I've seen all year.

Do we call it octopunch

All octupi are bastards!

A chance to use the word Octopi squandered...

punches fish

I'm not sure if there is a deeper meaning in your comment I'm missing, but octopi, whilst being a word that people use, is strictly speaking wrong (in a prescriptive sense).

Octopus is a 3rd declension noun in Latin coming from Greek. If one believes nouns should be pluralised according to their origin - which someone using the second declension latin -i plural would likely be - then it follows that one should say octopodes. [0]

Of course this can be solved in a rational way by using the English plurals as they used in the article to both avoid unusual sounding words and technical incorrectness.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus

Today I learned.

The 3rd declension, sure; But right around the second one you lost me.

Octopodes? That’s even cooler! this site is awesome. Your style of party poopin is why problems like me can’t stay away.

I heard of an octopus in a marine biology lab that was able to work out that the feeder was controlled by an app on the postdoc's phone, and the cephalopod was able to sneak the phone out of the postdocs pocket, unlock it, and activate the feeder, then place the phone back, multiple times before the postdocs wised up.

That sounds pretty fantastical. Any chance you have a source?

I saw that in a cartoon.

This doesn't even make sense. Even if it connected the phone and the food it also figured out how to navigate an unfamiliar operating system? A good portion of humans get stuck on that

I can believe it’d learn to associate the phone with rewards—-and maybe try to grab it but the rest seems like a legend (how would it see the screen, which was presumably faced the human user).

That said, I worked with a macaque that learned how to trip a treat dispenser by shorting it out. Took me and an EE nearly two days to figure out how he was doing it.

And then everyone stood up and clapped.

Knocking at door

Woman, alone, at door: Who’s there?

Voice, behind door: Candygram…

I'm not super experienced with cephalopods but I've me a postdoc or two and so I can say this seems believable to me.

Alright people, i admit, i made this up for this thread for fun. Interesting to see everybody's reactions....wow, fascinating!

Honestly tho, I do believe an octopus could learn to do this.

not cool, dude.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com