Hm relatively similar? A chicken has the awareness of a bug. Conditions for a higher mammal vs a chicken might reasonably be very different for the same level of stress.
I strongly disagree. We treat chickens quite poor.
Laying hens for example, we throw most male chicks into a shredder because they can't produce eggs. That's beyond cruel regardless of their mental capacity.
Another example. Chicken debeaking is a practice used to prevent chickens self mutilating or destroying their eggs or each other.
> we throw most male chicks into a shredder because they can't produce eggs
They also fight viciously amongst each other. You can only have up to a specific ratio of males and females if you want to avoid outright carnage.
Most debeaking is just taking the point off the top of the beak. This is so when they peck, it simultaneously jolts their jaw. They learn to stop doing that, and every time they try, they get that jab reminder. The amount removed isn't even deep enough to hit any nerves.
Maybe some farmers overdo it, but I haven't witnessed that around any farms I've been to.
You must know some smart bugs. Birds tend to be surprisingly bright for their brain capacity.
"Research has shown that chickens have some sense of numbers. Experiments with newly hatched domestic chicks showed they can discriminate between quantities. They also have an idea about ordinality, which refers to the ability to place quantities in a series. Five-day-old domestic chicks presented with two sets of objects of different quantities disappearing behind two screens were able to successfully track which one hid the larger number by apparently performing simple arithmetic in the form of addition and subtraction.
Chickens are also able to remember the trajectory of a hidden ball for up to 180 seconds if they see the ball moving and up to one minute if the displacement of the ball is invisible to them. Their performance is similar to that of most primates under similar conditions.
The birds possess self-control when it comes to holding out for a better food reward. They are able to self-assess their position in the pecking order. These two characteristics are indicative of self-awareness.
Chicken communication is also quite complex, and consists of a large repertoire of different visual displays and at least 24 distinct vocalizations. The birds possess the complex ability of referential communication, which involves signals such as calls, displays and whistles to convey information. They may use this to sound the alarm when there is danger, for instance. This ability requires some level of self-awareness and being able to take the perspective of another animal, and is also possessed by highly intelligent and social species, including primates.
Chickens perceive time intervals and can anticipate future events. Like many other animals, they demonstrate their cognitive complexity when placed in social situations requiring them to solve problems.
The birds are able to experience a range of complex negative and positive emotions, including fear, anticipation and anxiety. They make decisions based on what is best for them. They also possess a simple form of empathy called emotional contagion. Not only do individual chickens have distinct personalities, but mother hens also show a range of individual maternal personality traits which appear to affect the behavior of their chicks. The birds can deceive one another, and they watch and learn from each other."
Not the OP, and I disagree with their assertion that chickens and bugs are of similar intelligence, but there ARE some very intelligent spiders. (which I know aren't technically "bugs")
>Besides having the capacity to make plans, act on the basis of object permanence, represent specific goals and solve novel problems, Portia often has to confront more than one other spider at the same time. [0]
>Our findings suggest that Portia represents 1 and 2 as discrete number categories, but categorizes 3 or more as a single category that we call ‘many’. [1]
We seem to naturally have a strong tendency to disregard the intelligence and emotional lives of animals. (which if you think about it, was probably strongly selected for at some point in the past)
“We seem to naturally have a strong tendency to disregard the intelligence and emotional lives of animals. “
It makes ethics much simpler if you deny that an animal can suffer.
To a degree this also happens on conflicts between humans. It’s much easier to kill others if you deny that they may have reasons for doing what they are doing but instead just call them mindless fanatics that can’t be helped.
I think the OP's comment is just right. Some "bugs" (spiders are "bugs" but they are not insects) have surprisingly complex behavior, and chickens can be surprisingly stupid for animals with actual brains. For instance, they will stay in their coop and drown in a flood, even if they can easily jump over its fence to evade you in other times. It's really incomprehensible.
Sure, I was speaking hyperbole. But the differences between chicken awareness and higher mammals is profound. Blurring that is just anthropomorphizing chickens.
The critique of anthropomorphisis, doesn't really make a hell of a lot of sense, if you are comparing chickens and higher mammal's relative awareness. And what about it being blurry don't you like? I mean, it is a bit blurry if you start looking for a very smart chicken and a particularly stupid monkey.
>A chicken has the awareness of a bug
I this true? I thought that all birds were highly intelligents. Although they don't have any pack instinct, chicken still have a peck order, that mean that they recognize individuality. Thus they probably have a sense of self. If consiousness is an illusion created by senses, they probably have a conscience too then.
All my young life. They have very marginal responses to their environment. They see a threat, they respond. They turn their backs on the threat, seconds later they are back to pecking at the dirt.
I spent a lot of time with chickens when I was a kid. The ones I dealt with had quite distinct personalities, some were friendly, some fearful, some brave and they also seemed to respond to stress. Obviously they are different from humans but I thought they had quite a range of behaviors.
I don’t know much about chickens but look after some bees. The awareness and organisation of a colony is striking. The bar is perhaps a little higher than the OP intended it to be.
Isn't that anthropomorphizing right there? Maybe more correct to say "The evolved stimulus reactions in individuals resulting in complex group behaviors is striking"?
Bees are a great example of mindless creatures with no awareness. They die a horrible death when they sting someone (their internal organs ripped out of their bodies with the stinger) with no obvious awareness of what they're doing.
You're quite correct. My team just inherited a large node codebase that had proxy sprinkled everywhere, complete with a custom undocumented dsl written using proxies. It was a nightmare to learn, hard to extend without breaking and resulted in quite a few refactoring sessions.
I think proxies have their place, but most apps don't need them imo
This seems quite odd to me. I work with people remotely and on site, and it's amazing how much better communication is when both parties turn their webcam on. Body language conveys things that tone, and words don't
While i'm not 100% remote (i'm part of a small regional office that has a massive head office in another part of the country, but I can work from home). Something i've found incredibly important is jumping on video chat. There's something about seeing someone in a video while you talk to them that reminds you "hey i'm working with other humans, i should respond with a level of empathy i'd expect in return"
Beyond that, I'd say the ease with which a video chat can be initiated is important so that the annoyance of starting one does not become an impediment to using them when they are appropriate. My team uses Sococo which, while not without its problems, does allow for one-click video chats and screen sharing with 1 or more co-workers. It's really nice to have the option to jump into a 5-minute video chat/screen share with the click of a button to work through something that would otherwise be a 25-minute chat conversation.
Are these individual or group chats? What kind of solution do you have?
I work in a small office of a big company and have a 10 hour timezone difference to my most important co-workers. We chat on the phone but I don't really enjoy it. I'm not sure video chat would help, but I might be willing to try.
But it would be slightly inconvenient because of the timezones. We might have 10-20 people from 5-10 locations around the world. This means that many participants call in from home before work in the morning or after work at night.
That said, I'm quite happy working remotely mostly from home.
I feel that travelling occasionally and meeting the people in person (and having lunch, dinner, beers together) makes it much easier to work together. There's no substitute for human contact.
If you're ok with the Google machine and spending way too much money on a computer that does basically nothing, there are these from Google[0] which have been great for me and my team.
We have a Hangout open all day in the office, displayed on a 60" TV. Anyone that's working remote can jump in whenever and it's somewhat like they're in the office. Audio is my only complaint. Sometimes it is difficult to be heard
Yeah, hangouts itself is a completely free service. I am not familiar with too many others doing this.
I've heard a couple other stories like ours. One I remember specifically was a company with a 50/50 mix, they did ALL meetings from their own desks on a hangout so that everyone had the same presence, the remote people didn't feel left out, because everyone has to fight for the same one audio track.
As for bandwidth, it hasn't been anything that we've been troubled by. Been using it for nearly 2 years now. The client on the remote machines has some hiccups from time to time and is somewhat of a resource hog. But if you keep it in the background it isn't too bad.
They are both types of chats. We use a combination of skype for business and zoom (zoom supports external people far better than skype, and actually works better in all regards).
Our time zone difference isn't as extreme as a 10 hour difference. We have offices -1 and +1 from our current time zone so it makes it easier.
A talk I attended earlier this year had a similar setup to yours and what they did was record all meetings and had a culture of always doing the meeting regardless of wether people could join. Then if you missed the time you chimed in later after you watched the video. Decisions were handled in a similar async fashion.
Even for quick conversations, video chat is much better than a phone call because it has higher quality audio and you can see the visual cues of when it's your turn to talk.
There are plenty of easy browser-based video chat applications using WebRTC like https://appear.in/. You can send people URLs to your video room and there's no software to install.
I have pretty much moved over to appear.in 100% now, I find its latency is much better when working with remote teams (I am based in Australia and the stakeholders are in the USA (East and West coast) - Appear in is flawless, have had 8 people on a call and it just works, hangouts frequently craps out unless bandwidth is perfect!
My experience so far is, i've made more opportunities for myself going to the bar/pub/coffee shop after a meet up to shoot the shit with my peers than anything i've ever put on my resume.
Your degree is largely just a way to break the ice with some companies, hiring manager x went to school y so he knows that you must be as good as him. Simplified greatly obviously (you still have to know your stuff), but networking is hugely important
Requiring apple hardware to develop for ios is a pretty big reason to prefer mbp over pixel. Even if you aren't an ios developer, a development shop that does mobile will most likely deploy macs to their developers.
Similarly, if you develop cross-platform, having a MacBook Pro that can do Windows, Mac, iOS, Android & Linux development all from one device is really compelling.
I've seen the extremes of 100% tdd and 0 tests, and the most efficient projects/applications are the ones that are somewhere in the middle, you don't need tests for every single thing in your application and it becomes harmful to include them at a certain point.
My Personal preference is to focus on testing "critical" things like business logic, utilities,etc. Then have just a few end to end tests that skate the most important flows. In the end you have fairly tested application and you haven't wasted time asserting trivial pieces.
I do agree with the rest of your statements though. Beef farming is far kinder then any poultry farming