I have a male Barraband (Superb) parrot [1] and he can scroll videos on Youtube, select the ones with birds in and play those. People are in disbelief when the bird starts watching bird videos on his tablet. His "screen time" is not every day and limited to a few hours. I would love for him to be able to call other birds, he is smart enough to be able to pull that off right now.
I have noticed some new behaviours recently:
1. If I'm eating the bird will beg me for food. I have been able to get him to try any foods that he sees me eating.
2. My bird has a high demand for proteins, which he gets somewhat in nuts (limited due to fats) and he will steal meat whenever possible. The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he will steal it when he can.
3. He now makes a wider variety of noises, far beyond any video I have seen of his species. I believe he is trying to replicate human speech and gets close in tone. We talk to him regularly and I think he tries to talk back.
Anybody else experience strange behaviours with their birds?
The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he will steal it when he can.
Most "seed eating" bird are opportunistic carnivore. Even the hummingbird with it's extra specialized beak supplements his diets with small insects!
Oh and my 12yo bourk's parakeet really like chicken and madly love poutine. Its so funny seeing her taking a bite of French fries followed by a bite of cheese.
I think my bird already has a difficult time focussing, he acts like he has ADHD. He'll happily sit their doom scrolling watching birds.
The other concern is that when he gets too much screen time he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
Or alternative interpretation: Parrots are highly social creatures who love hanging out and socialising with other birds. Even a relatively happy parrot who is kept with a few other birds to keep them company, and has access to rooms to fly can feel under-socialised and under-stimulated. (This is not a dig to the commenter in particular. Even if you are richer than a king, and have an aviary zoos would be jealous of probably your parrots are not getting as much stimulation as they would be getting in the wild.) As a substitute to the real socialisation it is craving it finds watching bird videos agreeable.
Basically i wouldn’t call a starving man begging for scraps “addicted”. They just have an unfulfilled need. They found a way to fulfill that need (more or less) and they are pursuing what they found to work for them. This might be bothersome for the keepers of course, but it is not the bird who choose to become their captive pet.
(I want to emphasise here that I assume that the commenter is a lovely, dedicated, bird-loving person who provides a large flock of friends to their parrots and all the enrichement they can think of and money can buy. This is not a comment on them doing anything wrong. Simply an observation that there are some parrots whose needs are neight impossible to fully meet in captivity.)
If the comment would be about the parrot neglecting feeding, sleeping, or socialising with other real birds when they are provided ad libitum with bird videos that would be much more of a sign to me about the addictiveness of the videos.
Unfortunately he is isolated from his species (they are quite rare and endangered - we look out all the time for a female for him), but he flies a lot and socialises with other hook beak birds.
> If the comment would be about the parrot neglecting feeding, sleeping, or socialising with other real birds when they are provided ad libitum with bird videos that would be much more of a sign to me about the addictiveness of the videos.
He eats well (and varied), sleeps well, socialises with other birds and he plays games with us too. He hasn't got feather loss and he's not getting into weird psychotic behaviours. He has certain routines in his day where he waits for example to be let out in the morning and he puts himself back into his cage.
I will say that when you eat near him, he gets excited and seems to be begging (or demanding) food. And when I say "aggressive" with mobile phones, I mean that he lands on you and pecks you (not nearly at full force) until you put on something he wants to watch. It's still not clear to me if it's addiction or just basic need.
>The other concern is that when he gets too much screen time he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
Do you lock him up when this happens? I care for a bird, if it acts out when we let it roam, we lock it up the next day and it has quickly learned to enjoy it's limited freedom.
If he starts behaving like this we push him off and he flies away. He communicates his boundaries quite clearly by opening his beak (a warning before a peck), and we communicate ours by pushing him away.
I should say that he generally behaves himself, but a little like a child, sometimes he is in "that mood" and is almost looks for trouble.
A friend of mine has a parrot and I asked what having one is like and he just sent me this video [0] and the comment "Either peaceful and quiet or like this, wall to wall, no in between."
Yeah pretty much, they are either just doing their own thing or they are fully engaged with destruction and chaos. You can kind of tell what mood they are in if you spend the time to read them.
Not sure, but it is difficult to imagine where these new sounds are coming from. I have never heard another bird quite like some of the sounds, one particularly clear one sounds like "eel" but it's as clear as a human would pronounce it.
He also cycles through a pattern (probably for attracting a mate) and it gets more and more complex as time goes on. He keeps adding to the noises and pattern, but it's very predictable.
I have a double yellow headed Amazon. He doesn’t seem too interested in other birds (not very interested in my sister’s dove or the wild parrots that fly over head). I’ve put on Blue Planet or YouTubes videos before and he likes to listen to the bird songs/talk, but seems more interested in the sound than the video.
My parrot is interested in my dog though and has picked up of few of my dog’s training commands. He started to say the release command for when my dog sits for his meals so now I get my parrot to use the command on cue, and get the bird to release the dog (and the dog gets dinner and he gets a treat).
If I’m giving attention to my dog, he sometimes wants to come and sit with us on the couch and get some pets himself. He also used to like to drop food for my older dog (who passed), but my younger dog isn’t a huge fan of vegetables so the bird stopped doing it. If my dog seems like he wants to go out the bird will say “you wanna go out?”But most of the time they kind of just ignore each other.
His language is very situational. When I uncover his cage in the morning, he says good morning, when I leave for work or to go out, he says goodbye. He makes water pouring sounds when I pour water, and call himself a good bird when he knows he’s done something good, or say ‘mmmm’ when I’ve given something he likes. He’ll say “wanna go out” when he wants out of his cage. He’s not overly loud for a parrot but does like to belt out some opera regularly.
He learned most of his phrases/words within his first 2-4 years, but I’ve had him for 6 now and he’ll add a new word/phrase into his vocabulary from time to time.
My bird also loves high protein and fatty foods (nuts and coconuts). I’ve never really allowed him to eat my food, but more recently he’s become interested in any food that I’m eating that he knows he’s allowed to have (nuts or popcorn etc), and will say “hello” over and over until I’ve gotten him his unsalted versions of them. I make him do tricks for them usually and that keeps him pretty polite about it. He’s a pretty big bird at 17”.
He used to be a lot more adventurous about food, but he knows what he likes now and usually sticks to his favorites. He also likes to dip each of his kibbles into his water before eating them.
I’ve never expected to get a parrot, but he sort of dropped in my lap and I rescued him. These parrots live as long as humans, so it’s quite the commitment. But he’s a very smart and sweet boi and he’s managed to charm his way into my life.
My parrot is very particular about food, but will try most things. He likes his sweetcorn cooked, peas cooked, carrot uncooked, etc. He also drops dog food down to the dogs and watches the dogs eating it, and then likes to eat some of the dog food himself (the dog food is mixed with boiling water and cooled so that it is more soggy). He has also successfully trained a young budgie to copy him.
We try not to feed him too many fats. He has access to seeds all of the time, sometimes we put millet in the cage, and occasionally we break up peanuts for him. He is rather partial to a cashew, but they are very fatty. He's not a big bird and smaller birds have more trouble with fats.
He's about 1 year now and seems to be sexually mature, we're hoping we can get him to either do tricks or talk, but not sure about how to train him.
My African Grey (21m) also dips his kibble in the water. He's done it for at least the past two decades and changing his water is more frequently required than filling up his food bowl. It's interesting to hear your Amazon does it too. Perhaps it's just logical and "cereal without milk" is universally disliked.
Slightly off topic but somewhat related I've heard of a person (Richard Campbell, can be heard on the podcasts "Dot Net Rocks" or "Run as radio") who taught his parrot to use his voice to control the light at it's cage. The surprising result was that it became obvious that it wanted to go to bed earlier than they thought. It turned off the lights much earlier than the timer had before it gained control and would shut it off again directly if a human turned in on again.
A bit offtopic, but it's funny how people call parrots/birds "extremely intelligent" and AI/LLMs "just stochastic parrots devoid of any intelligence", even though their capabilities are very obviously far more like the inverse of those qualifications (show me a video where someone has even a basic extended back and forth conversation with a bird).
There is a pretty clear double standard there.
Looking at the numbers: Grey parrots have almost 1 billion 'forebrain' neurons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n... ). Estimates for the average number of synapses per neuron range in the thousands, so a conservative estimate for the total would be 1 trillion synapses.
If you assume that LLM parameters are comparable to synapses, then such a bird brain is similar to the frontier LLMs in size ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models ). Yes, the bird brain is far more energy efficient, but with regard to intelligence modern AI absolutely smokes birds.
I think it's a difference in expectation. For some reason, people are surprised that birds have the same intelligence level as a human toddler. However no one wants an AI assistant that's as dumb as a toddler.
uh.. AI/LLMs were created to be smart, and they sometimes meet that expectation. We did not create parrots, we just get surprised when they show off intelligence
> How so or why so, considering their brain size relative to their body, is not well understood.
One factor is neuron size. Bird neurons are around 0.4 the length of mammalian neurons, so you can pack in around 8 times the neurons in a given volume.
A large parrot has the same number of neurons as a medium sized dog.
If you liked that story, you should really read the full anthology, called Exhalation. Ted Chiang is a wonderful writer, and there are a lot of great stories in that book. I think my favorite was The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.
Crows are pretty smart, I befriended one after offering it cashews daily as I would sit in my patio working on my laptop. Now he pecks on my keyboard to generate code with AI to resolve simple Jira tickets.
> others would want to show another bird their toys
Reminds me of what some people who worked at a facility that took in parrots and similar animals whose owners couldn’t care for them.
They described the birds as little kids, except they can fly and have powerful beaks. Some of them have very strong "destructive" urges too / they want to take everything apart and so on.
Agreed, I respect those folks a lot, not exactly a high paying job / seems like a very personal calling kinda job.
They also get to know the birds in a very personal way it seemed. One bird was "upset" with one of the handlers so she didn't want to participate when we met the birds that day. Apparently that handler had broken up a fight between upset bird and another that morning. Upset bird took that personally.
At the same time upset bird didn't want to miss out on meeting everyone so she came along with two other birds who met us.... upset bird just sorts of sat on the periphery and made sure that everyone knew she wasn't participating. She wanted folks to know she was there, but was not going to perform.
It wouldn't be hard to set up a service like this experiment so birds can socialize whenever they wanted.
> They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird
And I really hate to bring AI into it, but "bird chat bot" doesn't seem too hard to train on a bunch of behaviors for live interaction. It could offer a palette of avatars.
In the past I had parakeets and lovebirds. I think the app is great, but my first (joking) reaction was "Now let's setup a control group by putting the tablet in selfie-mode to simulate a mirror".
> for other parrot owners [...] not be wise to [...] Zoom [...] handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior—at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls. [...] offer an appropriate level of support to empower their parrots but also help them avoid any negative experiences
So to scale, hmm. Visual sentiment analysis of parrots. Parrot-accessibility. And... some kind of chaperone role... Is there a name for UX design which prioritizes non-negativity of experience over task completion and not leaving? Note that parrot-centered design may have unfamiliar properties, like say, stronger association with the physical location of the device, which say might then require a second device elsewhere to emulate a hypothetical "I'm avoiding you and going away to hang with friends" flock UX.
I was reading some scholarly work on raven calls. It got into a ton of detail, but it opened with the notion that the fundamental message of every call is "here I am". There were often other messages on top of that (e.g., "here I am near a hawk", "here I am near food", etc), but somehow I'd never realized that was always the base.
Not being snarky - most social media content is also essentially someone saying “here I am!” (Near a beach, near food). Maybe ravens share some existential angst with humans. Or maybe they are just more physically spread out and need to keep in touch.
There was a gag from Gary Larson depicting the inventor of dog-to-human language translator: he walked on a street where dogs were all shouting, "Hey! Hey!".
TZ: "How many types of eye cones do birds like parrots have, what are their colors?"
CGPT: "...birds do have an RGB system that's roughly analogous to ours..."
So this works with parrots, unlike dogs who have two color cones and wouldn't see very well on the screen.
Parrots communicate in a realm of which we can suppose that the possibility for the expression of gratuitous stupidity is limited.
--
There remains the visceral - which instead is a potential part of that realm:
> The study involved experienced parrot handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior - at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls
Solution learnt: building a social network where interactions are interpolated by an assistant.
I wish this concept would develop a little more nuance, there's a lot of good that happens via social media and we can maybe separate that from the somewhat perverse incentives social media companies foist upon people to become valuable.
There's a lot of good that happens via internet communication, social media is inherently toxic.
Despite some crazy wider definitions I ran into, social media traditionally meant things similar to Facebook, so real names, over-sharing of your life, falsehood, data collection, and what that leads to.
Anything good that might happen on social networks, is a result of a large portion of the population (disgracefully) being on them.
I don't think social media is inherently toxic — I remember early time-based social media feeds and problems felt a lot smaller (though of course audiences were smaller). Even looking back at livejournal as social media, things were sometimes dramatic, but also a lot different.
Maybe it's impossible to make monolithic social media non-toxic because of all the levers also required to make it profitable via engagement.
It's very hard to distinguish social media from the algorithms that certainly reward toxic behavior today. You can look at Mastodon as a possible less-toxic counter-example, but we're now in a place where the audience demographics diverge so it's hard to be certain either way.
Parents have written of setting up a local minecraft server for kids, and their friends, a neighborhood, or a school. Is setting up a local social media server also a thing?
I believe you can do this with Mastodon, you can turn off all the federation features and have an individual twitter-like social network you can invite your friends to join.
More commonly people are using groupchats on WhatsApp, Discord, or Slack for this... it's easier than maintaining it yourself (but there are also plenty of self-host options for chat networks too).
I have a male Barraband (Superb) parrot [1] and he can scroll videos on Youtube, select the ones with birds in and play those. People are in disbelief when the bird starts watching bird videos on his tablet. His "screen time" is not every day and limited to a few hours. I would love for him to be able to call other birds, he is smart enough to be able to pull that off right now.
I have noticed some new behaviours recently:
1. If I'm eating the bird will beg me for food. I have been able to get him to try any foods that he sees me eating.
2. My bird has a high demand for proteins, which he gets somewhat in nuts (limited due to fats) and he will steal meat whenever possible. The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he will steal it when he can.
3. He now makes a wider variety of noises, far beyond any video I have seen of his species. I believe he is trying to replicate human speech and gets close in tone. We talk to him regularly and I think he tries to talk back.
Anybody else experience strange behaviours with their birds?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superb_parrot
Oh and my 12yo bourk's parakeet really like chicken and madly love poutine. Its so funny seeing her taking a bite of French fries followed by a bite of cheese.
This is not limited to birds.
Deer, horses, etc will do the same to small mammals and birds.
>His "screen time" is not every day and limited to a few hours.
Are you worried if you give him excessive screen time he won't be able to focus on his studies or something? ;-)
(Cute story, thanks for sharing.)
I think my bird already has a difficult time focussing, he acts like he has ADHD. He'll happily sit their doom scrolling watching birds.
The other concern is that when he gets too much screen time he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
> starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
Its even psychologically addicting for birds.
Or alternative interpretation: Parrots are highly social creatures who love hanging out and socialising with other birds. Even a relatively happy parrot who is kept with a few other birds to keep them company, and has access to rooms to fly can feel under-socialised and under-stimulated. (This is not a dig to the commenter in particular. Even if you are richer than a king, and have an aviary zoos would be jealous of probably your parrots are not getting as much stimulation as they would be getting in the wild.) As a substitute to the real socialisation it is craving it finds watching bird videos agreeable.
Basically i wouldn’t call a starving man begging for scraps “addicted”. They just have an unfulfilled need. They found a way to fulfill that need (more or less) and they are pursuing what they found to work for them. This might be bothersome for the keepers of course, but it is not the bird who choose to become their captive pet.
(I want to emphasise here that I assume that the commenter is a lovely, dedicated, bird-loving person who provides a large flock of friends to their parrots and all the enrichement they can think of and money can buy. This is not a comment on them doing anything wrong. Simply an observation that there are some parrots whose needs are neight impossible to fully meet in captivity.)
If the comment would be about the parrot neglecting feeding, sleeping, or socialising with other real birds when they are provided ad libitum with bird videos that would be much more of a sign to me about the addictiveness of the videos.
Unfortunately he is isolated from his species (they are quite rare and endangered - we look out all the time for a female for him), but he flies a lot and socialises with other hook beak birds.
> If the comment would be about the parrot neglecting feeding, sleeping, or socialising with other real birds when they are provided ad libitum with bird videos that would be much more of a sign to me about the addictiveness of the videos.
He eats well (and varied), sleeps well, socialises with other birds and he plays games with us too. He hasn't got feather loss and he's not getting into weird psychotic behaviours. He has certain routines in his day where he waits for example to be let out in the morning and he puts himself back into his cage.
I will say that when you eat near him, he gets excited and seems to be begging (or demanding) food. And when I say "aggressive" with mobile phones, I mean that he lands on you and pecks you (not nearly at full force) until you put on something he wants to watch. It's still not clear to me if it's addiction or just basic need.
The bird is captive and isolated from its fellow birds so of course it craves socialization.
>The other concern is that when he gets too much screen time he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
Do you lock him up when this happens? I care for a bird, if it acts out when we let it roam, we lock it up the next day and it has quickly learned to enjoy it's limited freedom.
If he starts behaving like this we push him off and he flies away. He communicates his boundaries quite clearly by opening his beak (a warning before a peck), and we communicate ours by pushing him away.
I should say that he generally behaves himself, but a little like a child, sometimes he is in "that mood" and is almost looks for trouble.
A friend of mine has a parrot and I asked what having one is like and he just sent me this video [0] and the comment "Either peaceful and quiet or like this, wall to wall, no in between."
[0] https://youtu.be/T8C8iJm_2gc
Yeah pretty much, they are either just doing their own thing or they are fully engaged with destruction and chaos. You can kind of tell what mood they are in if you spend the time to read them.
Could his new variety of vocalizations be imitating what he sees on his tablet?
Not sure, but it is difficult to imagine where these new sounds are coming from. I have never heard another bird quite like some of the sounds, one particularly clear one sounds like "eel" but it's as clear as a human would pronounce it.
He also cycles through a pattern (probably for attracting a mate) and it gets more and more complex as time goes on. He keeps adding to the noises and pattern, but it's very predictable.
Every generation of parrots just parrots what the last generation of parrots said about them.
Parrot parents parrot their parents
I have a double yellow headed Amazon. He doesn’t seem too interested in other birds (not very interested in my sister’s dove or the wild parrots that fly over head). I’ve put on Blue Planet or YouTubes videos before and he likes to listen to the bird songs/talk, but seems more interested in the sound than the video.
My parrot is interested in my dog though and has picked up of few of my dog’s training commands. He started to say the release command for when my dog sits for his meals so now I get my parrot to use the command on cue, and get the bird to release the dog (and the dog gets dinner and he gets a treat).
If I’m giving attention to my dog, he sometimes wants to come and sit with us on the couch and get some pets himself. He also used to like to drop food for my older dog (who passed), but my younger dog isn’t a huge fan of vegetables so the bird stopped doing it. If my dog seems like he wants to go out the bird will say “you wanna go out?”But most of the time they kind of just ignore each other.
His language is very situational. When I uncover his cage in the morning, he says good morning, when I leave for work or to go out, he says goodbye. He makes water pouring sounds when I pour water, and call himself a good bird when he knows he’s done something good, or say ‘mmmm’ when I’ve given something he likes. He’ll say “wanna go out” when he wants out of his cage. He’s not overly loud for a parrot but does like to belt out some opera regularly.
He learned most of his phrases/words within his first 2-4 years, but I’ve had him for 6 now and he’ll add a new word/phrase into his vocabulary from time to time.
My bird also loves high protein and fatty foods (nuts and coconuts). I’ve never really allowed him to eat my food, but more recently he’s become interested in any food that I’m eating that he knows he’s allowed to have (nuts or popcorn etc), and will say “hello” over and over until I’ve gotten him his unsalted versions of them. I make him do tricks for them usually and that keeps him pretty polite about it. He’s a pretty big bird at 17”.
He used to be a lot more adventurous about food, but he knows what he likes now and usually sticks to his favorites. He also likes to dip each of his kibbles into his water before eating them.
I’ve never expected to get a parrot, but he sort of dropped in my lap and I rescued him. These parrots live as long as humans, so it’s quite the commitment. But he’s a very smart and sweet boi and he’s managed to charm his way into my life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow-headed_amazon
Thank you for sharing.
My parrot is very particular about food, but will try most things. He likes his sweetcorn cooked, peas cooked, carrot uncooked, etc. He also drops dog food down to the dogs and watches the dogs eating it, and then likes to eat some of the dog food himself (the dog food is mixed with boiling water and cooled so that it is more soggy). He has also successfully trained a young budgie to copy him.
We try not to feed him too many fats. He has access to seeds all of the time, sometimes we put millet in the cage, and occasionally we break up peanuts for him. He is rather partial to a cashew, but they are very fatty. He's not a big bird and smaller birds have more trouble with fats.
He's about 1 year now and seems to be sexually mature, we're hoping we can get him to either do tricks or talk, but not sure about how to train him.
My African Grey (21m) also dips his kibble in the water. He's done it for at least the past two decades and changing his water is more frequently required than filling up his food bowl. It's interesting to hear your Amazon does it too. Perhaps it's just logical and "cereal without milk" is universally disliked.
Nice, he is developing big brain
Slightly off topic but somewhat related I've heard of a person (Richard Campbell, can be heard on the podcasts "Dot Net Rocks" or "Run as radio") who taught his parrot to use his voice to control the light at it's cage. The surprising result was that it became obvious that it wanted to go to bed earlier than they thought. It turned off the lights much earlier than the timer had before it gained control and would shut it off again directly if a human turned in on again.
You be good. I love you.
https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510/
Corvids, parrots are extremely intelligent. How so or why so, considering their brain size relative to their body, is not well understood.
If you can do grab a copy of Alex and Me.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3018307-alex-me
A bit offtopic, but it's funny how people call parrots/birds "extremely intelligent" and AI/LLMs "just stochastic parrots devoid of any intelligence", even though their capabilities are very obviously far more like the inverse of those qualifications (show me a video where someone has even a basic extended back and forth conversation with a bird).
There is a pretty clear double standard there.
Looking at the numbers: Grey parrots have almost 1 billion 'forebrain' neurons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n... ). Estimates for the average number of synapses per neuron range in the thousands, so a conservative estimate for the total would be 1 trillion synapses.
If you assume that LLM parameters are comparable to synapses, then such a bird brain is similar to the frontier LLMs in size ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models ). Yes, the bird brain is far more energy efficient, but with regard to intelligence modern AI absolutely smokes birds.
I think it's a difference in expectation. For some reason, people are surprised that birds have the same intelligence level as a human toddler. However no one wants an AI assistant that's as dumb as a toddler.
uh.. AI/LLMs were created to be smart, and they sometimes meet that expectation. We did not create parrots, we just get surprised when they show off intelligence
> How so or why so, considering their brain size relative to their body, is not well understood.
One factor is neuron size. Bird neurons are around 0.4 the length of mammalian neurons, so you can pack in around 8 times the neurons in a given volume.
A large parrot has the same number of neurons as a medium sized dog.
That was great, thank you for sharing.
If you liked that story, you should really read the full anthology, called Exhalation. Ted Chiang is a wonderful writer, and there are a lot of great stories in that book. I think my favorite was The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.
Yes indeed. Merchant ... was such a delightful story.
Pleasure's all mine. It's one of my favourite short stories.
Crows are pretty smart, I befriended one after offering it cashews daily as I would sit in my patio working on my laptop. Now he pecks on my keyboard to generate code with AI to resolve simple Jira tickets.
> others would want to show another bird their toys
Reminds me of what some people who worked at a facility that took in parrots and similar animals whose owners couldn’t care for them.
They described the birds as little kids, except they can fly and have powerful beaks. Some of them have very strong "destructive" urges too / they want to take everything apart and so on.
I have great respect for anyone who does this type of work.
Far too many people acquire animals that they aren't able or willing to take proper care of, and parrots have very long lives.
Agreed, I respect those folks a lot, not exactly a high paying job / seems like a very personal calling kinda job.
They also get to know the birds in a very personal way it seemed. One bird was "upset" with one of the handlers so she didn't want to participate when we met the birds that day. Apparently that handler had broken up a fight between upset bird and another that morning. Upset bird took that personally.
At the same time upset bird didn't want to miss out on meeting everyone so she came along with two other birds who met us.... upset bird just sorts of sat on the periphery and made sure that everyone knew she wasn't participating. She wanted folks to know she was there, but was not going to perform.
Maybe they can take over twitter.com, now that it’s unused.
Feels like they need to develop a parrot-friendly input device and a little automation to complete the call.
...and that might even yield a better product for humans :)
It wouldn't be hard to set up a service like this experiment so birds can socialize whenever they wanted.
> They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird
And I really hate to bring AI into it, but "bird chat bot" doesn't seem too hard to train on a bunch of behaviors for live interaction. It could offer a palette of avatars.
In the past I had parakeets and lovebirds. I think the app is great, but my first (joking) reaction was "Now let's setup a control group by putting the tablet in selfie-mode to simulate a mirror".
> for other parrot owners [...] not be wise to [...] Zoom [...] handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior—at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls. [...] offer an appropriate level of support to empower their parrots but also help them avoid any negative experiences
So to scale, hmm. Visual sentiment analysis of parrots. Parrot-accessibility. And... some kind of chaperone role... Is there a name for UX design which prioritizes non-negativity of experience over task completion and not leaving? Note that parrot-centered design may have unfamiliar properties, like say, stronger association with the physical location of the device, which say might then require a second device elsewhere to emulate a hypothetical "I'm avoiding you and going away to hang with friends" flock UX.
"Is this really a bird I'm communicating with or is it just a statistical parrot?"
I was on a zoom call with a colleague and we were both WFH. His dog started barking, which made my dog start barking as well.
Not sure if they were conveying any information to each other, but they seemed to enjoy it.
“I’m here!”
“I’m over here!”
I was reading some scholarly work on raven calls. It got into a ton of detail, but it opened with the notion that the fundamental message of every call is "here I am". There were often other messages on top of that (e.g., "here I am near a hawk", "here I am near food", etc), but somehow I'd never realized that was always the base.
Not being snarky - most social media content is also essentially someone saying “here I am!” (Near a beach, near food). Maybe ravens share some existential angst with humans. Or maybe they are just more physically spread out and need to keep in touch.
There was a gag from Gary Larson depicting the inventor of dog-to-human language translator: he walked on a street where dogs were all shouting, "Hey! Hey!".
...Found it: https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
It works for a lot of animals, although sometimes it's "HEY!", sometimes it's "heyyyy".
And an SMBC comic, perhaps inspired by Larson, where all the animals are shouting "Do me! Do me!"
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/springtime
TZ: "How many types of eye cones do birds like parrots have, what are their colors?" CGPT: "...birds do have an RGB system that's roughly analogous to ours..."
So this works with parrots, unlike dogs who have two color cones and wouldn't see very well on the screen.
https://chatgpt.com/share/681a8524-59e4-800f-8bff-a673910c07...
Fwiw, this[1] turned up when teasing AIs with "what is the latest news in visual sentiment analysis for parrots?".
[1] Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial update 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877086/
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664219 (215 comments); https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38493299 (16 comments)
Very cool! But was the video client open source?
https://kottke.org/11/10/richard-stallmans-rider
I wonder whether they used a mirror or simple recordings as baseline
The story is neat, but the level of ads on that page is toxic... when overlays started popping up partway through the video I had to leave.
Social networks for birds:
Bird Roulette
BeakBook
CagedIn
Instasquawk
And ……….. Twitter
OnlyFan[tail pigeon]s.
OnlyFeathers was right there!
Video did not strike me as convincing.
Finally - a good use for technology!
This made my day, thanks!
It proves that keeping animals in cages hurts them badly.
I worry the next step will be to create a social media site for parrots and then they will be just as lonely and angry as we humans.
Parrots communicate in a realm of which we can suppose that the possibility for the expression of gratuitous stupidity is limited.
--
There remains the visceral - which instead is a potential part of that realm:
> The study involved experienced parrot handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior - at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls
Solution learnt: building a social network where interactions are interpolated by an assistant.
That would feel dystopian for a human: at the first sign of emotion, your browser tab closes
At the first sign of harmful interaction / insults / threats, your browser tab closes
I wish this concept would develop a little more nuance, there's a lot of good that happens via social media and we can maybe separate that from the somewhat perverse incentives social media companies foist upon people to become valuable.
There's a lot of good that happens via internet communication, social media is inherently toxic.
Despite some crazy wider definitions I ran into, social media traditionally meant things similar to Facebook, so real names, over-sharing of your life, falsehood, data collection, and what that leads to.
Anything good that might happen on social networks, is a result of a large portion of the population (disgracefully) being on them.
I don't think social media is inherently toxic — I remember early time-based social media feeds and problems felt a lot smaller (though of course audiences were smaller). Even looking back at livejournal as social media, things were sometimes dramatic, but also a lot different.
Maybe it's impossible to make monolithic social media non-toxic because of all the levers also required to make it profitable via engagement.
It's very hard to distinguish social media from the algorithms that certainly reward toxic behavior today. You can look at Mastodon as a possible less-toxic counter-example, but we're now in a place where the audience demographics diverge so it's hard to be certain either way.
> monolithic
Parents have written of setting up a local minecraft server for kids, and their friends, a neighborhood, or a school. Is setting up a local social media server also a thing?
I believe you can do this with Mastodon, you can turn off all the federation features and have an individual twitter-like social network you can invite your friends to join.
More commonly people are using groupchats on WhatsApp, Discord, or Slack for this... it's easier than maintaining it yourself (but there are also plenty of self-host options for chat networks too).