pavement

Maybe the ant is simply reacting to sensations of cold temperature, and maybe it goes blind, setting off reactions to wander away from the ground, search for bright areas to warm up when in dark unfamiliar tunnels.

It doesn’t mean a little person reclines in a hammock there, but I’d wager that there’s a resonant, sensation-event-sensitive waveform, that has a primary focal node looping through a region very close to the pituitary gland in normal, living human beings (with similar analogs in all other mammals, and also many other vertebrates), also hinted at by the pituitary’s role in endocrine governance.

But furthermore, you deny your own agency, if you refute me. I suppose maybe you are simply a bot on the internet, then. In which case, I'm deeply disturbed to find entities on the internet telling me I'm not sentient. Maybe having humans inform me of the same poorly rationalized fallacy is worse?

All class divisions and duties are contrived, and artificially forced by what amounts to oral tradition and other communicative habitual norms like handwriting, long after invention of the wheel and mastery of fire by prehistoric humans. It is artifice, that can be wiped away if we fail to learn the craft of language by adolescence.

Liken this to hunting patterns among cetaceans, which we’ve only recently noticed with intensive study. Few animals are capable of language, but that emergent detail alone, remains an extremely ephemeral quality of social organization, capable of being destroyed by large-scale disagreements resulting in what we call war. Refugees can be reduced to orphanage and stone age civilization in a conflict severe enough.

Ants and other eusocial insects are not quite so vulnerable to having their classified reproductive divisions destroyed in less than a generation, simply because a small number of them have rationalized and chosen to dispose of a way of life. Forces of nature and other outside actors would have to opportunistically disrupt their biological qualities which seem baked in once hatched.

  it seems a Victorian concept like "seat of 
  organizational sentience" is rather obsolete.

Last time I checked, here I am. One person, one voice, one field of vision. If I were to use my fingers to point to where I, myself, am, then it’d be somewhere between my ears and my eyes.

But I suppose that person is somehow... quaint?

Ants surely seem sentient, even if still lower-order animals. Is it just an emergent detail of aggregate reflexive behavior across all members? How (and why) would soldiers know to build a bridge with their bodies, to cross a water barrier, seemingly from birth?

Maybe the level of recognition and internal modelling, on a per-organism basis is a clue to self awareness and emotional involvement in individual perception and experience. With all ants, maybe this quality is low, and mostly instinctual, embedded in gene expression.

Same deal right? Always-on microphone constantly polling an audio signal?

The queen is dependent on the drones being as obedient as your fingers and tongue might be to your brain, with your brain being the queen organ, for your hundred(s of) pound(s of) tissue. We know that the surface ants support the colony, which supports the queen, and overall, the biomass of the ant colony is less than any single mammal, and we know that any signaling is provoked by scent, based on attack behaviors at a minimum.

Meaning that reaction to scent wafts through colonies quickly, engaging behavior as quickly as it is noticed. Ants seem to drop everything, and move, unanimously, when a signal is given. The signals must be pretty complex, with pointers hooked into fixed physical actions on some level. The ants probably don't think very much about what they should do next, as much as constantly listen or smell for a prevailing vote on what to do. Attack, forage, assemble into a formation, wait for further instructions, and so on.

In ant studies, an ant colony is segmented into chambers, each having odors, the most conspicuous being the colony's waste dump, so you have to figure that the colony survives, and expects the surface soldiers to go permanently missing once in a while, when scent signaling is disrupted.

These fungal organisms probably interact with a degree of equilibrium, when exposed to healthy ant colonies. Usually a parasitic relationship with a host is balanced to not completely destroy the host population, according to an almost intuitive self-preservation instinct among parasites. So the fungus probably only disrupts soldiers at the periphery of the colony, without destroying the core of the hill.

You can get a sense of this, based on the fact that the affected ants are driven away from the hill, toward environments more opportunistic to the fungus. If a version of the fungus were to grow opportunistically within the colony, it might invade and drive the ants to extinction, which might turn out to be, in effect, suicidal for the fungus too, and not just the ant.

The colony is really the organism, and the soldiers serve it, abiding by prevailing odors, likely without very much free will. Or at least as much free will as your arm has, to reflexively recoil from a burn, or lash out at some unassessed threat when reacting in fear.

This fungus probably is basically "numbing" the arm, but the wild part of seeing your arm suddenly behave with a mind of its own, would be an observation from the perspective of the queen, and is probably more or less like seeing a junkie or crackhead stumble around like a zombie, as far as the colony-as-organism is concerned.

So, if the ant is "fighting" the "will" of the fungus, it's probably more likely that the ant is receiving strong scent signals compelling it to act a certain way, and the sauce that the fungus is producing as an override to the biological signals in the ant's circulatory system (remembering that insect circulatory systems are primitive, and probably easily hackable fluid systems) might be weak, or the infectious load might be light, resulting in a noisy, conflicted signal at the neurological level. Maybe like a junkie, not completely ruined by dope.

tl;dr soldier ants follow their nose without a whole lot of agency, because they are born to serve the colony, selflessly. Thus they likely are unconcerned by a "loss of self," and perhaps might be more emotionally invested in failing the colony, if soldier ants have emotions.

The tier of management matters here. The boss you are eye-to-eye with should put pragmatism before sunshine. The boss' boss and above are all probably better off being pathologically positive in front of their direct report's subordinates each.

Your immediate boss really should tune into the personality of their team members both individually and in aggregate in group settings. With luck, you were hand-picked by your boss and that means aspects of your personality are preferred, aka: culture fit. Sardonic cynical attitudes are reasonable, when trading humor and letting off steam, which boosts morale, but as with all performance, timing is everything, and good teammates understand this implicitly.

If shit is getting real, people owe it to each other to deliver solid news and not bullshit whitewash, but in group settings rumor mills are deadly, and information has to be controlled to prevent panics.

Good captains go down with the ship. They signal when to use the life boats. Would you rather have a boss who is sunshine all day, right up until the moment they fly the coop, and are never seen again? In practice this is almost invariably a really bad thing. Because even if your boss sucked, their boss will fill the intervening position with almost anyone (declining in-group promotions), and permit them next manager to reshape their team of direct reports as needed, which can disintegrate into a slow motion bloodbath of firings.

The reverse of a manager's disappearing act is the mass layoff, surprising a large class of subordinates (your boss disappears because, in fact, the company disappears as you lose your job). The inverse of a manager's disappearing act is he subordinate rage-quitting (a single subordinate employee disappearing, without other employees depending on their role is reasonable and conscionable, although stress is still induced by such an event).

But, did they call it an infographic to get me to click it? Did I just prove signs work?

Inspection of the skeleton for specific details, and genetic tests prove that while interbreeding is possible, this other group was separated by geography for generations. That's not something that would be immediately obvious by unaided observation.

Their vocalization is different, but a detail like that would be quickly challenged, if put forward as proof on its own.

It's interesting that these subtleties permit the identification of a distinct species. I would have thought deeper, more obvious difference would be required, but I guess this level of taxonomy is mostly just for the sake of utility, when examining specimens.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/10/31/1734232/google-docs-i...

  a measurement of user initiated actions
  how to pull that off

Traffic is traffic, and it’s no one’s business whether I’m watching a video, clicking a button, issuing shell commands, or typing a reply to a message.

No thank you, to the idea of changing protocols, or forcing people onto the application layer, in furtherance of analyzing our already-over-analyzed activities with an electron microscope.

  Hey, we’re buying helicopters, and we’re shipping them here. 
  Surprise! They get shipped somewhere else.

Meanwhile, the intended purpose was to mingle with South Korean vehicles of the same make and model, over the DMZ, by matching paint jobs, so as to be extra confusing, opportunistically.

The article seems to exclude details regarding a mysterious entity named “The Semler Brothers” which are mentioned twice, but uh... wait, who?

Out of nowhere that name is dropped, and why? Who are they? Is this some kind of hamfisted redaction bleeding through from the research for the article? Slightly mysterious.

  GAN = Generative Adversarial Networks

And I never claimed I was good at anything. But I did intend to point out that with advanced persistent threats in the mix, and nation state actors operating with effectively unlimited resources, failing to notice the difference between two vaguely similar nonces (in a situation where it matters) is going to get you hanged, depending on what you're trying to fly below radar.

You aren't being attentive enough for high risk activities. You lack proper verification channels, to confirm authenticity, which matters in this context. You lack the situational awareness to proceed safely.

Admit that you might not be cut out for what it takes to maintain a secure posture on the internet, if that's what gets you. Just stop pretending to try.

You could own shares in such a company, purchase a subscription to summon vehicles at a rate, or buy a vehicle and resell its autonomy, offsetting the expense. One might view some of these options as a form of collective ownership, and so it might not just be you owning one on your own, but maybe contributing to the partial ownership of one or more vehicles.

Removing a tick mark from an infinite number line would just cause all the other tick marks to slide closer together like billiard balls, no?

Or is the question really about what happens if we render six as a forbidden, unaddressable element? Maybe equations normally resulting in an integral six, or involving an integral six return an error stating: undefined? Not unlike a divide by zero error?

Consider rationalizing division by zero. One could interpret the outcome of such an operation as always resulting in zero, instead of an error, but what would that mean when modeling real world events? If you have zero, and you want to divide it into N number of parts, well, you’d still have zero things, and so what? But what if you had somethings, and you wanted to divide them all into zero parts? Does that mean the operation represents the total annihilation of those things?

We can imagine a situation where total annihiliation by division is possible, but is it worth building that interpretation into most models, when an operation like that isn’t often applied to circumstances, and such an outcome is rarely requested?

Self driving cars, owned by faceless organizations can be silently converted after the fact, effectively subverting the psychological ploy of keeping-up-with-the-joneses style peer pressure, which has held a death grip on the lifestyles of puny materialistic mortals for decades now, as demonstrated by beer advertising, cigarette advertising, vacuous fashion trends and so on. In fact, apply this principle to pretty much every bad habit you can imagine.

You’ll probably need the backing of a nuclear power, although off-world representation of earthly countries might not turn out to be particularly credible threats (enough to intimidate new emerging space-based powers), or remain truly politically cohesive with their root terrestrial counterparts, depending...

Would that not provide bonuses to absorbed effective wattage? There’s probably some constructive interference producing fortuitous signals, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yippie

Offering up every last conduit one could possibly expose on a general purpose platform, so that competing interests on the other side of the wire are all fighting on a level playing field to harvest all the imaginable minutia of every quiver of flesh (whether voluntary or reflexive) against a piece of smartphone glass, in an effort to line pockets, starts to feel a little obscene after a while.

And if any quarter should be given, the big bad companies will pack up their wares and refuse to conduct business in the commons, leaving the web to disintegrate and decompose back unto what geocities, myspace and aol used to look like? Not sure that’d be so terrible, tbh.

  In people with the condition, the 
  cells were arranged in matching 
  patterns in both eyes, which may 
  be to blame for confusing the brain 
  by producing “mirror” images.

Wow. Weird. Of all the things. A rare moment when symmetry in the human body turns out to be a bad thing. I guess if it was going to a problem, optics would be the rational place where that sort of issue to seems to crop up.

Or is it just that some might find it contentious with Printed Circuit Board?

Three letter acronyms are always suffering from name space collisions, in mixed or broad context.

It’s really a symptom of using three letter acronyms at all, rather than any one acronym being reasonably preferable to another under any circumstances. When you only have a symbolic trigram combining any of 26 letters, reuse is not just inevitable but frequent.

Worse still, if that inter-historic era never occurs due to the persistent presence of intelligent machines.

At that point, all bets are off, as to whether even remnants of our pollution might remain, in the face of pervasive systems engineered to keep ecosystems free of the detritus of human civilization, and automatically recuse themselves from pristine areas that require no further stewardship.