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.

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

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

The fixed eye contact makes me think the cat is sending a message, “I require snacks, or else”.

We fix it with rockets. Circularize the orbit and set it to an integer number of days that’s divisible by 28.

That only gives you 364 daya per year and we need just fractionally less than 365.25. You end up needing an extra day every year, and if we want to keep midnight in the middle of the night, and extra full day every four years (except when we don’t). Adding those sorts of bodges onto an otherwise elegant system would be awful to work with.

Instead, I propose we build giant rocket engines pointing straight up on the equator, and adjust the Earth’s orbit until one orbit around the sun takes exactly 364 days.

Terrified, confused and has no idea who the human is, but will definitely take that cuddle thankyouverymuch.

Yes. We normally count in ‘base 10’, which means each digit can go from 0 to 9 as we count up, then the digit to its left increases by one. The rightmost position is the units, the next the tens (because we use base 10), the next hundreds (or 10 times 10), and so on, with each position worth 10 times the one to its right. So the number 12 means you have 2 units plus 1 ten. 123 means 3 units, 2 tens, and 1 hundred.

Binary is ‘base 2’, so as we count up each digit can only go from 0 to 1 before incrementing the position to its left, and each position is worth 2 times the one to its right. So 1 still means one, but 10 is 0 units plus 1 two, and 100 is 0 units, 0 tens and 1 four, totalling 4.

I couldn’t agree more. Occasionally I’ll use an appimage where something is not packaged for my distro version and I only need it temporarily.

Maybe I’m just long in the tooth, but linux used to be a simple, quite elegant system, with different distros providing different focuses, whether they were trying to be windows clones, something that a business could bank on being there in ten years, or something for those who like to tinker. The common theme throughout was ‘the unix way’, each individual tool was simple, did one job, and did it well. Now we seem to be moving to a much more homogenous ecosystem of distros with tooling that tries to be everything all at once, and often, not very well.

100 myths. Perfect.

This is an interesting prompt. Critically it seems like you definitely aren’t omnipotent, so whilst you can try to influence and teach the new inhabitants, there’s nothing stopping them simply ignoring you and doing something else.

Rather than some wanting to just not contribute, I’d be more concerned by a group deciding to focus their efforts on building weapons and simply taking what they want from others.

Fully automated luxury gay space communism is certainly an ideal, but it is extremely vulnerable to hostile forces until it gets large enough and willing enough to excert eqivalent force in return. Hostile forces can be military, ideological, or resource limit based. Responding to all of those, is a massive challenge.

Well, that’s just bleak.

The way I look at it, parent processes know they will outlast their children unless they deliberately turn them into daemons, traditionally by double forking them. Daemons live on, even when the parent dies.

Thanks for constantly bringing us these fascinating tidbits. I always enjoy them coming across my feed.

SIGKILL again? That implies it’s been KILLed before and either survived, or come back. Either way, we don’t like zombie processes in these parts.

/me fetches the really big process remover/cattle prod.

“I am mighty hunter! I kill it! I kill it with my teefs!”

I was going to say that not every four panel cartoon is loss, but now that I look at the expressions, they sort of make sense…