We would be overrun by frogs…

The username associated with every vote, up or down, is available through the ActivityPub API. If your instance doesn’t show them (and I believe lemmy instances don’t by default) some helpful soul has built a tool to view them. Sometimes it fails for reasons unknown, but it lets you see who’s up or down voted a particular post or comment. I believe nom-lemmy interfaces like kbin also show you that information.

Fair point, I wasn’t sure it was the equals, hence my initial question. Drawing boxes with the box drawing characters does make a lot more sense.

The #define = line would mean the = would be effectively removed, rendering the for a syntax error. That is, assuming it is an equals sign they’ve redefined, and not similar looking character.

Have they #defined out the equals symbol? I don’t think that for loop is going to compile.

Stamets@lemmy.world
deleted by creator

Does that mean Stamets was the child all along?

If your doctor manages that, you are definitely ending up as the subject of a paper in a prestigious journal.

Scrapers have been a problem for a lot longer than LLMs have been an issue. Fighting them has always been a pain in the proverbials, but theres been some entertaining work recently on deliberately getting them lost in a maze of made up pages. The problem is that they never stop or go away. They’ll just keep trying, and new ones keep springing up.

Try writting ‘Deceased’ on it and return it. At the very least it’ll give any human who sees it a momentary pause, and maybe they’ll take it more seriously.

Thank you for a thoughtful reply, and my appologies for only responding to what appear to be the key points, life has decided to get busy.

You are correct in saying that the animal behaviours discussed are largely evolutionary, the question is what the driver is. Maybe I am being too cynical, but in each example I see a behaviour that is tailored to the benefit of the individual and their genetic line, rather than to the benefit of the group as a whole.

The horses forming a defensive ring have their young on the inside, and are acting to protect them, not the young of others. The person acting to put out the fire at a neighbour’s house seeks to stop it spreading to their house (look at reports of historical fires in cities for many examples) or to encourage others to help them in times of trouble. Kittens playing together rather than attempting to kill their siblings benefit directly from the play, and lack the necessary strength to kill anyway. Other species’ young are not so delicate. Any altruistic behaviour can be framed as selfish when you consider the benefits the individual gains, both in terms of a positive feeling and in terms of social ‘credit’ for want of a better term, although that take may really be too cynical for most.

One of the most obvious ways to see how selfish these behaviours are is to see what happens when they don’t work out for some reason, say lack of resources, or where a larger benefit can be gained by acting differently. Lions kill each others cubs, in many species the strong will monopolise resources to the detriment of weaker members of society, others will steal cached food from members of their own kind. Even herd animals will leave the slowest members behind if it means personal survival.

As I said, I do think humans would benefit from much more cooperation, but I think Kropotkin’s point is weak and mostly relies on the reader thinking the animals mentioned are cute and fluffy, or majestic, rather than thinking about their behavior. I think his point would have been better made by comparison to either bees or ants, which clearly operate communally, with little regard to individual benefit. They’re perhaps not so pleasant a comparrison, and are notably hierarchical with a ‘queen’ as the topmost tier, but, to me, they seem to fit his argument better.

“OK, you caught me. I get to keep the egg though, right?”

The problem with that passage is that every behaviour that he attributes to ‘a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy’ can more readily and obviously be seen in terms of self preservation and individual gain. This is not to say that every instance of these behaviours in every species is selfish, but his explainations do nothing to disprove that. Neighbour’s house on fire? Put it out before it spreads here. Ruminants being attacked by wolves? Form a circle to protect your sides and rear. Woleves hunting as a pack? More members bring down bigger prey so there’s more food per member, and less personal risk of injury. Kittens play to hone their hunting abilities, and to start to form dominancy hierarchies. Birds flock together because it’s more efficient to follow another bird, rather than lead. And so on.

None of this is some gotcha that proves that cooperation is somehow unnatural, or that selfishness is more natural, but to assume the opposite is hopelessly naive.

More cooperation and working towards the common good would do wonders for the human race, but it’s fighting against a lot of instincts, both old and new.

This whole thread has been a hoot, but your comment properly sent me into fits of giggling. I can picture the nice old lady perfectly.

Bah! Young’un! ;) Installing Slackware off of a stack of 5 1/4" floppies and trying to work out your harddrive’s geometry without switching the machine off to look at the label was a challenge. Doubly so if you were trying to dual boot.

That was always ‘fun’. Trying to find things like the ‘front porch’ timings was an exercise in frustration at times. Then put it all together and try it, hoping it either worked, or at least didn’t go too badly. The ‘boiinng’ noise sone monitors would make was always a bit alarming.

I ended up soldering together an adapter to convert from VGA to a monitor that took separate red, green and blue inputs with a sync pulse on green. Working out the timings for that was interesting, but I doubt any other PC OS could have driven it.

Tickle the belly, that can’t possibly go poorly.

More. Nukes.

Failing that we use those roboroaches they developed a while back to lead the other roaches to live in the crater. They can have that bit. The inevitable plague of supersized mutant cockroaches we’d suffer in a few generations is a problem for later.

Interesting. The last panel in particular looks more like an execution in gladiotorial combat, but all four panels seem to depict one-on-one combat that you might expect in the arena. I wonder if that’s because that’s what the artist knew, or to make more familiar to the people viewing it, or whether I’m imagining things.

P.S. In b4 obligatory ‘Is this loss?’

Clearly fake, it says there’s a tty number in the top left corner and there isn’t.

We can try your idea after the whole area is a glowing crater. I’m sure it’ll work out juuuust fine that way. The first rule of scifi nuke vs. parasite club is: you don’t listen to the advisor counselling caution.