• Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 days ago

      I saw him at a festival! He went up onstage to play, then realized all of the equipment was fucked. He then proceeded to play an impromptu improv set and it was one of my favorite sets I’ve ever seen. Liberal use of vocoder. He’s so talented!

  • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    I hate that starling are invasive because I love them so much. There’s one near us that always perches on our neighbor’s roof and says WEEEW at me when I leave for work. Naturally I reply in kind.

  • spacesatan@leminal.space
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    10 days ago

    This would be great for an “oh fuck off” plot point in a cyberpunk thriller or something. ‘What do you mean the only copy of the ____ is on the corpo’s pet raven’

  • BabyVi@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    It would be interesting to know how long these signals can persist in birdsong before the information is lost to the bird telephone game. Could it be possible to encode a secret message into birdsong long term?

    • dmention7@midwest.social
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      10 days ago

      What if our memes are just super-intelligent aliens storing a backup of their critical knowledge in the collective consciousness of billions of humans?

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      I’m more intrigued by all that and the potential for a mesh-net that shuttles discrete ‘memes’ like this around.

      I would bet that research would show that it’s possible, but there’s bound to be pruning and errors in the payload as the ‘song’ gets passed around. So the actual practical amount of storage for a network is going to be a lot smaller. At the same time, data could be optimized to better match the bird’s memory, behaviors, and vocal limits. One might also employ different encoding strategies too, based on that fidelity information.

  • Noxy@pawb.social
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    10 days ago

    I was pretty enthralled by a lot of the stuff in this video. Kinda wanna try birdnet-pi now!

    a very minor nitpick: it’s not a PNG at all, it’s a lot fuzzier than being an actual image format. but I get that he’s gotta dumb down the video title so it’s not really a big deal

    • zqps@sh.itjust.works
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      10 days ago

      The original file was a PNG. It stopped being a PNG when it was encoded as spectrogram of an audio file. Obviously in the bird’s memory the data is neither png nor any other machine-readable file format, but electrochemical signals.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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        10 days ago

        And when recovered, the image resembles a drawing of a bird with quite a bit less detail, but also a somewhat horizontal line through the middle of it.

        I’m guessing one could make about 250 drawings that can be reliably distinguished in the bird’s call, storing one byte with decent reliability, which can be boosted at scale with Reed-Solomon. The “hundreds of kilobytes of uncompressed data” claim is ridiculous, I can “make” 4 MB of data by taking a 16MP photo of a 10-byte phone number.

    • SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      His other video on audio surveillance is eye opening. Stuff like that is relatively accessible to a layperson nowadays, it’s scary to think what’s possible on the cutting edge of things.

  • mrbn@lemmy.ca
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    10 days ago

    How many bits of data can a Starling “carry” and is it faster to have a starling fly data across the country to deliver data than it is for the data to be downloaded?

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      It’s no station wagon full of tapes, but we can probably get there. It’ll be like Johnny Mnemonic but with birds.

    • phobiac@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      He does a quick calculation in the video and concludes that in this case it was ~176KB of uncompressed information, working out to about 2 MiB/s of bandwidth given that time it took to sing out the data.

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
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      10 days ago

      Ideally you can teach the starlings as a group and get distributed storage with a high replication factor for free.

      Just make sure to store your data with an error correcting coding.

      And if the birds continue to propagate your data to their young, that’s even better security.

      Someone should teach Starlings those DeCSS numbers.

  • rtxn@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    The media-centric broadcast extension to IP-over-avian we’ve all been waiting for.