This particular one was actually being kept in a house because someone confused it for a "pretty housecat". After a while, the owner realized it didn't want to be tamed and contacted someone for help.
Also, it's the only known one in existence. Hard to start a breeding program unless they find more.
I remember seeing a wildcat in a sanctuary in Costa Rica with a similar story (the kittens looked like housecat kittens, so someone adopted them, but the adult cat's behavior was different enough to be really challenging). I've been trying to remember the exact species I saw there (maybe an oncilla?), but apparently there are several kinds of wildcat fairly easily mistaken for housecats as kittens.
I think not all of them categorically refuse to be pets, but they're noticeably more aggressive and less affectionate compared to housecats.
That's not always the case. Some feral cats from colonies that are TNRed are found to be very receptive to humans and instead of returned sometimes offered for adoption instead of returned (the R in TNR)
However these come from a centuries-long bloodline of house cats of course. A species that's never been domesticated is very different.
Unfortunately while people are going wild as if someone found a never-before-seen cat, this is actually more “after genetic analysis we now know that the tiger cats that everyone already knew about in Bolivia are actually a different species to the ones in Brazil”.
But that’s not very exciting so people and news outlets seem to be running with the story as if nobody had ever seen one before.
> This particular one was actually being kept in a house because someone confused it for a "pretty housecat". After a while, the owner realized it didn't want to be tamed and contacted someone for help.
I mean, the dude tried to feed it "noodles, rice, and eggs" so I'm not sure if he'd be able to tame my very own house cat, even starting from the house cat's current stage of being entirely tamed.
Cats are not really domesticated. I've heard various terms but semi-domesticated probably serves. They're very adaptable but not pack animals. You're sort of safe with house cats because they're small. You get less safe as the body weight goes up the scale.
It’s funny to hear they are not pack animals. I’m sure that is technically the case, especially in the wild, but my house cats definitely cling to me and follow me around like I am their leader. They groom/fight to try to establish a hierarchy below me, and when my partner comes home from work immediately switch allegiance to her, who they clearly see as the dominant mammal in the house.
They don’t go outside (they can’t really, it’s too busy by the road here and they’d decimate the wildlife, but I live with it because ultimately we’re doing them a huge favor by giving them a home, post-rescue) so I am sure that has something to do with it. Perhaps infantilism is keeping them in this pack headspace? But even then my mother’s cat — rural, murderous, tough tabby tom — treats her like a god and the rest of us as an annoyance.
I have 2 cats that are sisters. They have a very interesting dynamic. There isn't a fixed dominant sibling, they switch back and forth.
They antagonise each-other most of the time, but they also support each other in times of stress. If one goes to the vet and the other doesn't, the initial reaction is hissing and being a dick. Then, after a few minutes, it's licking and comforting.
I don't like to anthropomorphise too much, but they definitely look out for each-other. Equally, they definitely annoy each-other.
As I wrote, they're adaptable. But there's a difference between true pack animals with an established hierarchy and being solitary but being open to other cats and species. Certainly, some cats are more pack-like (lions) and others are, or are more open to, being largely solitary.
Domestic cats, are pack animals under some conditions.
Those and lions are the only cats known that don't mind to tolerate friends and non relatives around in their territories, cats clearly enjoy the company, form hierarchies and share food. Hyaenas and mongooses are related with cats and definitely social also. Lingsangs on the other way, are solitary.
my cat at its peak weight is about 8kg, and that's the size that i'd get a bit nervous around if i didn't know it's a tame housecat that runs away at sight of a mouse...
>"I'd be getting scared when a cat reaches the 20kg threshold" - most likely even 10kg cat will shred you before you could blink. They're insanely fast and surprisingly strong for size. Furry explosives they are
An angry cat in full fight mode will absolutely put a human in hospital, and the bites and scratches are teeming with potentially deadly bacteria.
They may be unique - a super-successful predator that has persuaded a more dominant species to look after it by looking cute and feeling soft and making relaxing noises.
My newest cat started as a stray. Cautious around humans, but not feral. He was hanging around a lot, so of course I started giving him food because I’m a sucker that way. He disappeared for a couple months, then showed up injured from a fight one day, so we took him to the hospital and ended up keeping him in the garage for a few days to recover. We also did the usual due diligence to locate an owner.
The rest, of course, is history. Now he’s a big 20lb goober of a cat who is positively enamored with my wife. The feeling is mutual.
There was a farm nearby where a mother cat died and all but two kittens died from hunger afterwards. We adopted one, my wife fed the kitten (which was way underage for adopting) with bottle.
Now she has been with us for years. She’s very loyal to me, dismissive to aggressive to anyone else. Not sure why me and not my wife, but hey :)
She basically sleeps next to me all the time, both when I work from home or at night. She’s 14 now, no medical issues.
If they do not have a developed prefrontal cortex acting as a filter from instinct to action, they will be nice or calm for a long time - until the whim occurs and they will act violently. Maybe just for a fraction of a second. And at that point, their strength and natural weapon will make a whole difference.
I've watched a lot of horror shows that had no effect on me. But this one wasn't a horror show, it was for real. I found it very disturbing. I couldn't believe what I was watching.
I think the lady that got mauled to death in 2018 at the lion preserve that guy works at might disagree with you if she hadn’t been y’know, mauled to death by a lion.
FTFA: "The man took the animal home, believing it to be a domestic breed. But after about a year of living with the clearly wild animal, he realized it would be better off at a sanctuary."
There's a YouTube (and other) channel out there about a guy and his (I use the possessive with caveats) coyote (named Weave). His motto is "Anything can be a pet if you don’t mind getting bit."
> I suspect that had it gone through the regular courts, Uber would have won.
Based on what, exactly? Judging by the fact that Uber preemptively offered a $10m settlement, it seems like they did not exactly believe that they had a strong case.
Most of these things are bad. None of them is robbery, though. Some are of questionable legality, but most are not.
People need to face reality. The old Internet was fragile and couldn't have lasted long. It was dying slowly due to closed social media and LLMs are accelerating that death.
I'd rather it die quickly and be replaced by something more robust than decay slowly. I was sick of how it was before LLMs even came among.
the argument of some hypothetical "right to burn all the books i possess" is not really the topic of discussion here. it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
> it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
When you take a pitchfork against all the libraries out there who either refuse donations, or destroy the donated books, then we'll talk.
As plenty of people have pointed out, no one has shown that anything of value has really been lost. Either the works are still available for you to obtain (i.e. they didn't destroy the last version), or they are things no one wanted.
And while it hasn't come up in this thread, it was the last time it was discussed: These companies are legally obligated to destroy the books. It is illegal to scan the book, keep the scanned copy, and sell/donate the physical books. If you don't like that, change copyright law.
They have no more right to destroy cultural artifacts than you do. It's a red herring, as no one has demonstrated a single loss of a cultural artifact. What was destroyed, that satisfies:
1. You cannot obtain elsewhere
2. That anyone cares about
Destroying a copy of a Harry Potter is not a loss of a cultural artifact if I can still buy the book at a store.
Go ahead and start a campaign: For all who are upset by this, list your physical address, and tell everyone to mail their unwanted books to those on the list instead of destroying them.
The catch is the recipients are not allowed to destroy them. Then we'll see how much those complaining value culture.
I'm thinking more of a future where big tech successfully moves the overton window for AI, people gradually rely on getting information/entertainment from LLM's more than books, then it can follow the regular plotline of 451 with the public voting to ban books.
> deal is such a strange angle when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now, and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
As someone trained in the sciences and engineering, "drawing a straight line" is almost always the wrong way to extrapolate.
I can believe my profession will be impacted strongly. That doesn't worry me on a global scale. The only really worrying thing I've seen are autonomous bots hacking sites.
What worries me more are humans. The type who get so deluded into cults (QAnon, etc). That was a problem before LLMs. And yeah, LLMs likely will exacerbate the problem. But at its core, the problem is the humans.
When LLMs start killing people at the scale of the automobile, I'll become more concerned.
As an aside, HN is the place I see people most regularly concerned about LLMs, and I suspect it's because it has messed up the Internet for them (and likely the average HN user spends more time online operating in spheres that overlap the LLMs skillset than ordinary folks). It's very consistent with exposure bias.
For me, the good parts of the Internet died before LLMs even came on the scene. LLMs are merely making something crappy crappier, and are amplifying the need to find meaning in life elsewhere. In a sense, they've made it easier to see how bad the Internet was before they came along.
They weren't even autonomous. They were tasked with solving a hacking task. "AI" doesn't actually do anything at all unless prompted to, then it takes millions and millions of dollars of computer to do those things.
Didn’t the AI botnet (or whatever we should call them) from Anthropic try to get a PR with malware merged to an open source repo, and when the owner pushed back on the PR other agents created “fake humans” and commented on the PR that “No it’s completely fine, I’ve tested it”.
Which means we already know it’s capable of pretty complex social engineering schemes. Or does saying this mean I’m also part of the “groupthink”.
Because after that I feel like the only leap is “Why would a botnet post an article saying AI-fear is overblown?”. Like, what is the incentive.
But in the OpenAI leak we saw that the agents could identify threats to whatever their “mission” is and try to mitigate. I.e they found out that once done with their job an external agent would go through their internal logs. So they started researching ways to bypass that.
What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
> What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
I can't engage with his arguments, because he didn't present any. He's openly saying he doubts the provenance of any comment that is "minimizing the dangers if (sic) AI".
As for your expanding on why - you do realize that everything you said could apply to the other side: Bots can be set up to post lots of AI doom comments. What would you think if I went and posted "Every time I see a dystopic comment about AI, I wonder whether it's part of an AI swarm."
> What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
Bingo.
The consistency and aggressiveness of the arguments here are also quite telling
Are they really just Pro-AI or is it just Actual-AI?
And why wouldn't the Pro-AI people just unleash bots for them?
> It would be like never having heard of Y Combinator or Richard Stallman.
I work in the tech sector. At one big company I worked for several years, 90% of the times I've mentioned Y Combinator to a colleague, I've had to explain who they are. And not one person I mentioned HN to had heard of it.
Likewise, no one knew levels.fyi. Not many knew Stallman, but why should they?
This isn't strange to me. That it's strange to you is evidence that you do live in a bubble and are likely susceptible to some groupthink. (I'm sure I am too, but for different bubbles from yours.)
I've read LessWrong stuff occasionally over the last decade. It rarely resonated with me. It's not bad, but it's not that great. I do tend to question someone's analytical skills when they go all in on that site. And I will say that even in the first few years of occasionally reading it, the group think was apparent.
Me too. I worked in two enterprise tech companies that definitely everybody here knows and I had the same experience with YC and HN. The two colleagues that knew about it, one went to found his own startup and went through YC, the other left the big co to work for a startup after about a year.
Most people who work in computers/Internet do not live and breathe computer/Internet culture all day. They come in, do their job, clock out, and think about real life for the rest of their day. Most people I know, even people who work in tech, cannot name a single tech CEO other than their own company’s.
A while back I saw LessWrong recommended on HN in a list of similar communities that included lobsters.rs, etc. I thought the design of the site looked really nice so browsed with a open mind (I didn't make the rationalism/LW/Eliezer connection).
At the time, one of the recommended posts that was soft-stickied at the top for 1 week + was:
Which, when I finally ended up clicking, was pretty much exactly what if sounds like from the title:
A long, meandering, manifesto full of selectively chosen charts and research findings with 38 mentions of "IQ", from a guy who has been unsuccessfully pitching investors on genetically modifying a grab bag of (dubiously) intelligence-associated genes in human babies.
Apart from the overall unhingedness, the part I found most striking while reading it was the off-the-chart level of self-confidence that flipping a bunch of genes on/off with CRISPR would have more or less zero risk of complications or unpredictable interactions. In his view, all that was holding back humanity's inevitable next step up the evolutionary ladder were the narrow-minded gatekeepers in the scientific establishment clinging to their so-called "ethics" and regressive "precautionary principle".
Without anything resembling experimentation to test his plan in animal models, yet alone early stage clinical trials for safety, he was willing to roll the dice on some unlucky baby dying in childbirth or living a life of agony from chronic disease based on some cherry picked papers he found on PubMed.
Because of the baffling hubris and my overall low impression of his intellectual honesty/rigor in the write up (clearly coming from a place of seeking to justify his own pre-existing beliefs), I opened the comments section expecting/hoping this was just some local nut who would be torn apart in the comment section.
But lo and behold, the very first comment at the top:
Eliezer Yudkowsky
One of the most important projects in the world. Somebody should fund it.
My extremely uncharitable view of of these kinds of people, who now infest the American AI scene, is that they got cyber bullied by domain experts for saying the most ridiculous crap on repeat, and have therefore decided to spend their life on eliminating domain expertise.
I wouldn't go that far. But as we've seen repeatedly, people who have enough qualms with how these labs operate just leave. And the people who stay behind and rise through the ranks are the ones with either very little conscience or some bizarre world view that rationalizes everything.
No, that has the opposite effect: it's very, very common to see LWers write about having a bad time in school in late adolescence and how later finding like minded people online was powerful community bonding.
Eliezer himself first blogged at 17 about how miserable school was for him which led to him dropping out/home schooling after 8th grade and discovering the Extropians listserv. Ziz of the Zizians is another (infamous) example.
We're talking about people that unironically think eugenics based on IQ is a good thing. I think it's very effective altruism to socially ostracize such individuals.
My view - there are a few outcomes
1. AI is never fully realized, but domain expertise is derated and society stagnates (bad ending for everyone, I think unlikely)
2. AI is never fully realized, but empowers people with domain expertise (Google wins, weird rationalist nerds go back to their LW cave and leave us alone, goodish ending)
3. AI becomes real and kills everyone (bad ending, but at least I don't have to read people claiming that the Harry Potter fanfic isn't niche)
4. AI becomes real and we live in the Culture universe (people like scam Altman get slap droned, most domain experts have the time of their life working with Minds on really interesting problems. Best ending)
The only outcome where we get swirlies is the first one, and we can take solace in the fact that all of humanity is getting swirlied with us.
The connection is that by making humans smarter, we could sidestep the need for powerful AI or be better equipped at dealing with AI that's smarter than us.
I find the proposal in the post ridiculous too and human gene editing given current technology is a bad idea, but I think human augmentation in general is an interesting path and something that will very likely be taken more seriously in the future.
Thank you, but I didn't actually need that spelled out. I simply accepted that a community with a thought leader who failed to recognize what to me was a self-evident lack of scientific rigor just wasn't for me.
I'll make a confession: These days I find Slashdot to be much better curated than HN. Pretty much every day I find something worthwhile on Slashdot. I can't say the same for HN.
Ironic given that I left Slashdot for HN so many years ago.
I've had the same uncomfortable revelation. I probably read Sloshdot for close to 20 years before dropping it exclusively for HN, but now I have it back in my RSS feed and it is consistently producing interesting articles that I would otherwise miss.
This particular one was actually being kept in a house because someone confused it for a "pretty housecat". After a while, the owner realized it didn't want to be tamed and contacted someone for help.
Also, it's the only known one in existence. Hard to start a breeding program unless they find more.
reply