Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots: study | Hacker News Reader

Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots: study

news.northeastern.edu

480 pointstosh215 comments

All: I know the website is annoying but please follow the HN guideline which asks commenters not to post about annoying websites: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The reason is that otherwise we get a thread full of comments about website annoyances—which is even more annoying. There's no good solution here but let's at least work on a local optimum.

https://archive.is/5EQSa

I'm curious to how the parrots perceive the video images ... with cameras, codecs and screens tuned to a human visual system.

While our eyes have three primaries (red, green, blue), birds have four and can see into the ultraviolet — which is missing. The "cones" in their retinas also have additional colour filters, which allows them to notice differences in hues, and thereby quantisation in the codec's colour planes easier than humans. Birds' eyes are also faster, so they might find the frame rate to be irritatingly low, and PWM-driven backlight would need to use high frequencies so as to not be perceived as flickering.

The paper does mention these issues and finds that the birds seem to cope — but I anticipate that they would give criticism if they could. :)

We need to improve our understanding of parrot languages. :)

Not language but rather physiology. Don't you sympathize the birds which are annoyed by our flickering displays?

Why not language? We could then ask them how they feel rather than just assuming. People themselves usually prefer receiving informed, accurate sympathy rather than sympathy based on crude assumptions.

And physiology alone seems unlikely to tell us how they “feel” about it.

Perhaps they are so amazed by the technology that they couldn’t care less about the flicker :)

We can barely do this to apes (gorilla Koko and maybe few others).

Best cognitive interaction what the best educated birds can perform is to count 2+3 verbally (some African grey parrot).

We can't teach language to apes. Chimps can learn words, but a sentence isn't a bag of words, and they don't use recursion or even ask questions. Parrots actually do better.

There's no grammar, and thus no arbitrary construction of concepts beyond the fixed literal vocabulary. Without meaning in word order, there's no difference between "what the cat ate" and "what ate the cat". I wouldn't call it "language" for the same reason I wouldn't call HTML "programming". It does something adjacent, has some superficial similarities, but its limited in what it can ultimately be used for.

Some words, like “language”, are often used in the common sense rather than the technical sense. Sometimes for simplicity. Sometimes for humor. And sometimes it happens on Hacker News.

But, if we’re being pedantic, I should mention that there are languages that do not require ordering for meaning but instead use declensions and conjugations (though ordering may still be used for further expressiveness). Though maybe you include this in your “fixed literal vocabulary”.

Edit: A quick search suggest parrots can indeed use a basic grammar via sentence structuring. One of a few relevant search results: https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/polly-wants-a-con....

We've already jumped to assuming the birds are annoyed?

What if it's more like using an old telephone or a black-and-white TV? A hindrance, but better than what came before?

> We've already jumped to assuming the birds are annoyed?

If our displays flicker to them, which is a highly probable, it is annoyance by any definition. It may be not annoying to spiders which have a tiny brain and live in a world of mechanical sense, but birds are smart and most of their brain is shaped for visual data.

> A hindrance, but better than what came before?

How can this statement be applied to birds? They neither expect nor desire all these technology and the only reason they are not scared of it is a professionalism of their caretakers.

> If our displays flicker to them, which is a highly probable, it is annoyance by any definition.

Well, an annoyance by your definition. Not sure how you managed to declare it universal.

If you name me at least one source of flickering available to parrots in the wild, I consider my assumption wrong. You sound like a superoptimist advising to drive a screw with a hammer. And you know the superoptimist is not totally wrong because it is really possible in some circumstances.

So your working definition of annoyance is "that which cannot be found in the natural world"?

That oscillation which can not be found in the natural world.

Especially if it is not possible to escape from this oscillation (caretaker want the parrot to interact with the display).

Especially if it is in the animal's favorite kind of sense (mechanical oscillation of a spiderweb is a working way to annoy the owning it spider).

Most people rather like music.

> nor desire all these technology

Are you sure? Parrots are highly social creatures. Very possible that they do desire if not the technology, but the connection it gives them.

> the only reason they are not scared of it is a professionalism of their caretakers

Maybe. Maybe not. You have way too much confidence for something we do not know enough about.

I don't disagree, but the trend is to teach parrots our language, with some degree of success [1].

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)

They don't have languages per se, more like expressions of emotion. They also imitate human expressions (and maybe learn our language, for bigger birds)

You comment about 'expressions of emotion' reminded me to tell this story.

We have had wild Rainbow Lorikeets visiting us for over 20 years. In our recently previous home we were up to 5 generations of birds, then we had to move.

There was one who was obviously out of her usual flock, and at the edge of desperation, who allowed me to hand feed her, and she was the first wild bird who decided to come inside and have food.

For over 10 years she came every day, met a mate after about 2 years, and taught him to come and sit beside me on the couch in the afternoon.

Then, over the next 8 years we had many families join us.

She grew to understand us, even appearing to understand us when we were happy, and when we were sad - that little Lorikeet really appeared to be empathic..

When she flew off to die (just last year) she told us in her own way, to look after her husband. The next day, her hubbie turned up disconsolate.. He didn't want water.. He didn't want food.. He just sat in his spot on the top of a chair and cried..

This went on for a week, with us force-feeding him (well not really, but hand-feeding). Over the next few weeks, his visits became less frequent - but at least he was eating.

Smart parrots like Lorikeets somehow appear to share so many similar 'feelings' as us. We even had one who spoke English and had a great sense of humour who understood context.

what a wonderful story.

Having a bird, I'm sort of amazed how people just don't understand just how complex and deep things can go.

I speak to other folks with birds and am amazed. I met one lady picking her cockatiel up at the vet and she told me it was so convenient that her bird can say yes and no. But she couldn't talk. So I asked how it worked. She said the bird could choose between two different color cards - one was for yes, the other was for no. Then she would answer questions "Do you want to go to bed?" "are you hungry?" I didn't know how the bird was taught, the lady said the previous owner had taught her, but this kind of stuff is common.

Also, more in line with your experience, you might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Parrots_of_Telegraph_...

Thanks for the link to the movie - will check it out on the weekend.

Where can I learn more about this stuff? Also for other animals.

I remember reading that a fly's "framerate" is so high, it doesn't see an image on TV, just the dot created by the electron beam slowly making its way across.

> A new study shows that their rapid vision may be a result of their photoreceptors - specialised cells found in the retina - physically contracting in response to light. The mechanical force then generates electrical responses that are sent to the brain much faster than, for example, in our own eyes, where responses are generated using traditional chemical messengers.

https://phys.org/news/2012-10-eye-mystery-insight-flies-fast...

Ed Yong just put out a book, “An Immense World,” all about animal senses and how they experience the world. It’s magical.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/an-immense-world-how-animal-sen...

If you like this, you’ll love learning about “Imaginary Colors” aka “Impossible colors”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color?wprov=sfti1

Also don’t miss the Mantis Shrimp eyes:

https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/211178-rip-rainbow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp?wprov=sfti1

Mantis shrimp eyes, it turns out, aren't as extraordinary as you might think. Yes, they have twelve different color receptors... which means they can see twelve different colors. Near as I can tell they can't integrate all the input from their compound eyes into a single, cohesive image. Rather, different sections of their visual system are tied directly to ganglia that recognize features or movement characteristic of predators, prey, or other mantis shrimp.[0]

It really is the simplest possible visual system that could work for a mantis shrimp. It's like the first engineer from Do-While Jones's story about the breakfast food cooker[1] designed the mantis shrimp's visual system, and the second engineer from that story designed ours. (Of course as far as Do-While Jones is concerned, both animals had the same designer.)

[0] https://ryanblakeley.net/p/mantis-shrimp-eyes

[1] http://www.scienceagainstevolution.info/dwj/toaster.htm

This got me thinking: what would we see if we implanted (with a futuristic tech) cones that can see ultraviolet? Would we see a new color? Or perhaps our brain would recalibrate and ultraviolet would be the new purple?

there are already some people in the population who have enhanced visual perception. i believe they have a fourth cone.

Yes! It's called terachromatism, and I gather they perceive color nearly the same except the subtle differences between colors is more pronounced.

*tetrachromatism

Terachromatism would be pretty extreme.

Our cones can already perceive ultraviolet. The lenses of our eyes filter UV out. That is why we are prone to cataracts; the UV light the lens absorbs clouds it over time.

People who lack eye lenses have been reported to see ultraviolet as a light, bright purple. Maybe if you had a tetrachromat with no lens, she would see it differently, I don't know.

There can also be male tetrachromats apparently.

I’ve heard people argue that Monet could see UV light after having cataract surgery as his lens was removed.

Others argue that this wasn’t the case, but it’s interesting either way.

https://www.quora.com/Could-Monet-really-see-Ultraviolet-lig...

This made me wonder how long we have been doing cataract surgery...

> In 1753, Samuel Sharp performed the first documented intracapsular cataract extraction (ICCE).

I would not have guessed 1753.

Interestingly, this entry would indicate much earlier;

[1]>Cataract surgery was first described by the Ayurvedic physician, Suśruta (about 5th century BCE)

in Sushruta Samhita in ancient India.

Most of the methods mentioned focus on hygiene.

Follow-up treatments include bandaging of the eye and covering the eye with warm butter.

References to cataracts and their treatment in Ancient Rome are also found in 29 AD in De Medicinae,

the work of the Latin encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus.

Archaeological evidence of eye surgery in the Roman era also exists.

Galen of Pergamon (ca. 2nd century CE), a prominent Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher,

performed an operation similar to modern cataract surgery.

Using a needle-shaped instrument, Galen attempted to remove the cataract-affected lens of the eye.

Muslim ophthalmologist Ammar Al-Mawsili, in his The Book of Choice in Ophthalmology, written circa 1000 CE,

wrote of his invention of a syringe and the technique of cataract extraction while experimenting with it on a patient.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract#History

That is mind-boggling. It is hard for me to imagine how much humans had over the centuries given my reliance on technology.

I don't know about Monet specifically, but the ability to see UV light after having cornea replacements that aren't tinted is pretty well-documented.[1] Our retinas don't have dedicated UV receptors, though, so it's not like getting an additional primary colour beyond red/green/blue.

[1] I first read about it years ago at https://www.komar.org/faq/colorado-cataract-surgery-crystale...

I know our brains are already capable of rendering impossible colors produced whenever certain cone cells are intentionally fatigued

Egan wrote a short story ("Seventh Sight", collected in "Instantiation") about a subculture of otherwise blind people that hack their optic protheses to see ultraviolet.

Excellent as usual, if you like Egan.

Color vision is based on two signals, one that varies between red and green and one that varies between yellow and blue.

So a cone integrated normally would probably just come across as further blue and a better purple, not something notably distinct from existing colors. Getting the full use out of more cones would require a significant rework to how our optical nerves work.

> if we implanted (with a futuristic tech) cones that can see ultraviolet?

The information also needs to make it from the retina to the brain. Surprisingly, there are no separate red/green/blue channels for the different cone types. Instead, there is a channel for the difference between red vs green, and another for the difference between between blue vs (red+green).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2826135/

So adding a new cone type would not be enough, it would also have to be represented in one of these channels, or a new channel.

People with cataract replacements can see UV and in fact this capability has been used in military situations to see special lights/signals at night.

I was dubious but found this great writeup.

https://www.komar.org/faq/colorado-cataract-surgery-crystale...

If anything I would say their ability to cope with the poor medium indicates even more complex levels of understanding.

They are able to reason that it is a real bird, it is not physically present, doesn't sound perfect, doesnt look right but they still engage despite all of that friction.

What’s worse: My parrot will happily attack the screen when I’m talking on FaceTime and he deems it’s been long enough or doesn’t like the human on the other end.

For example he lets me talk to my sister but attacks my mom’s video immediately.

If your mom visits in person, then how does he behave?

Kill on sight. But he loves my sister.

We think it’s because he first met my sister as a baby and only met my mom when he was older. Although it’s been a while for pandemic reasons so I don’t have any recent data.

Your parrot sounds like a riot. Give him a pat for me.

Humans took pictures and watched movies and TV in black and white without any issue. High def colour is nice but not a must have to communicate.

You can go further back to the art created by our ancestors: cave paintings, carved stone figurines and cubism can all be understood by modern humans who are 99% of their time confronted with a high resolution environment.

They did, but not without a lot of tricks to compensate for the uneven color sensitivity of early black and white film. Standard makeup didn’t look right on film so they adopted some very extreme styles just so things would look “normal” on screen [0].

The point is, there’s no “objective” version of black and white, or full-color, or full-color-except-for-ultraviolent. They’re all tuned for our specific visual perception and may look bizarre past the point of recognition for other species.

0: https://cosmeticsandskin.com/aba/max-and-the-tube.php

Looking bizarre is still ok in this context though. The birds are socially starved captives and just seeing the shape of another bird, along with the sounds, is likely highly stimulating.

I’m thinking of when my phone is in high contrast mode, it looks bizarre but it’s still totally usable for all purposes. If it was the only mode, FaceTime would still be usable to paint a general picture of what you looked like even though we have never met.

This reminds me of how game designers in the 80/90's took the screen into consideration for their pixel art, and why old games don't look as good on modern screens

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/167804/did-retro...

I've seen some color behind-the-scenes photos for b&w films, that was really interesting to see; Can't find a link now though.

But also, Alice in Wonderland must've been as big an experience as people's first 3D films were (it starts in black & white but transitions to color, one of the earliest color films)

other humans used red-blue glasses to watch 3d movies. If you've ever tried this, after a while your eyes sort of adapt the red and green out of each eye and you stop seeing the wildly contrasting colors.

A video with some (sadly pretty short) excerpts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHcAOlamgDc

Short but lots of them, a good summary, thanks - much much better than TFA

>A few significant findings emerged. The birds engaged in most calls for the maximum allowed time. They formed strong preferences—in the preliminary pilot study, Cunha’s bird Ellie, a Goffin’s cockatoo, became fast friends with a California-based African grey named Cookie. “It’s been over a year and they still talk,” Cunha says.

It would be fun if they get some of the birds to actually meet the birds on the other side!

Birds see very differently to humans [0] and standard RGB displays aren't able to reproduce the full experience for them. I wonder if the results would be any different if we could produce something more realistic to them.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/parrots/comments/7itlyx/can_budgies...

Budgies will try to socialize (in vane) with extremely unrealistic plastic budgies. Parrots actually recognize each other by voice, the colors of the feather doesn't matter hardly at all (maybe for mating...), we know that because certain species do have different colors in different breeds.

I think RGB displays are fine for this particular purpose.

I don't have the context of the research you read, but I've seen my budgies try to socialize and play with all of the following in a similar fashion:

- other budgies

- my green cheek conure (who isn't sure what they're doing exactly, but still tries to humor them)

- cuttlebones

- my fingers and tip of my nose

- my wife

- various parts of their cage

- toys

Honestly, I think budgies are happy go lucky little birds that like to play with anything and everything

Yes, let's be clear: I'm not saying it's the worst animal cruelty there is, just that animal welfare has to be seen on a spectrum.

Our avian medicine professor said that budgies will get frustrated from trying to socialize with plastic birds or people. How bad you think this is is up to you. I'd compare it with an immigrant in a country with extremely different culture and language. And it's worse because birds can't relearn certain innate things.

The paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3544548.3581166

now get some footage of their communications, and let's finally put that to some unsupervised learning algorithm so it distills some patterns in their audio/visual communication and then builds parrot2vec. Then you perform clusterisation analysis, and obtain some characteristic patterns. At least we'll have the vocabulary size with some precision. The vocabulary of bored domestic animal, therefore reduced to some degree..

I'm not sure if you mean this as a joke or not because this actually sounds plausible; I'm sure we'll see AI tools used to try and learn communicating with animals.

Skype for parrots - what a great startup idea! If parrot is in a cage and not sleeping and not talking to other parrots then consider him online. A large sensor display in a cage with image of online parrots, you just peek a bird and go. And of course, any time you are online somebody might call you.

The New York Times had a good interactive on this [0] (non-paywalled[1]).

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/21/science/parro...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230421235932/https://www.nytim...

Thank you, that's a much better link.

Great UI. I thought originally the comments here about the UI were about the Times site. Ha! Seemed like a tough crowd!

Generally curious, how do you measure: "the findings suggest that video calls can improve a pet parrot’s quality of life."

Parrots are very expressive, and if you live with one for months/years, you'll learn its moods. Not hard to see how a parrot responds to something new.

They also have clear signs of depression (eg plucking their feathers). They are really amazing animals, but non trivial to keep as pets.

I have three, and they are a lot of work. Assume a couple hours a day. We make toys for them every day. The noise, the mess, the neediness. It’s a lot. They are a joy, but I don’t really don’t suggest others to get any.

From the look of his face, that parrot looks very happy.

I think it's very hard to objectively measure and give it a concrete number, but anyone who have kept a pet (dog, cat, parrot, pig or otherwise) can usually tell if their companion is happy or not, as they have bunch of signals they give us throughout their lives. With dogs, you can usually tell by the ears if they're curious or defensive, while the tail tells you if they're happy.

> the tail tells you if they're happy.

I like some of the other tail signals.

Pointing - ‘there is something in that hedge.’

Confidence wag - ‘I’m going to win this coming fight.’

Scared/ashamed tuck - ‘I’m sorry.’

Zoomies tail tuck - ‘look how fast I can corner.’

I have a parrot. She cannot talk. But she speaks and socializes on speakerphone and facetime. She definitely recognizes some callers and interacts with them during the call. It makes her happy - though at some point she'll sort of run out of attention and start doing her normal bird stuff.

Nevermind AI, parrots can take a bunch of jobs now!

Seriously, if someone wired parrot up to ChatGPT-4 who knows what will happen.

Poly would get lots of crackers.

That’s really interesting actually. Has anyone tried training a LLM on e.g. whale speak? I wonder if we could end up translating it by interacting with the whale model, that would be very cool.

There is some work in the area: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900422...

Disclaimer: I have not read the paper, so I can't judge about its contents.

First question in my mind was: How did they stop the parrots from destroying the devices? But the species they used is quite small, so...

Wait til we teach parrots to deny prior authorizations and insurance claims.

Seriously though, parrot (and corvid) behavior is fascinating. There’s a known relationship between primate brain size and the size of social groups. These birds are typically social creatures too. It’s kind of amazing what they manage with relatively small brains.

I guess bird brains are on 3nm while primates are 130nm

Very much so:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bird-brains-have-...

Remember where they came from: Dinosaurs.

In fact, I have been told that calling birds "dinosaurs," is actually accurate. The lineage is pretty much a straight line.

It also makes me wonder what it must have been like, back then. A lot of speculation is that dinosaurs (especially theropods) were extremely smart.

That's right. Just like current macOS is not "Unix-like" or a descendant of Unix, but an actual Unix operating system, modern birds are actual dinosaurs.

Wikipedia quote: Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs.

Are these the statistical parrots everyone keeps talking about?

My instance laughed (^_^)

As commented by everyone already, it is amazing how far they have gone here to ruin tye viewing experience.

Wait till the parrots get addicted to social media and start to develop mental illnesses.

I trust they are too smart to fall into such an obvious pitfall.

Many pet parrots are already mentally ill. It's not really kind to keep them in captivity.

Said the person from their workstation. :)

I want to see the tiktok dance challenges as adapted for parrots.

Parrots are Facetiming each other and they give us a 3s clip. Thanks for that.

Am I the only one to find this sad? It just means parrots are not meant to be raised alone in homes. Pets should be outside, with their own pet friends

Could say the same thing for people, I find remote work super isolating sometimes.

Yeah, the whole idea of keeping birds seems painfully sad to me - taking creatures that have this amazing power of natural flight, with agency to explore vast landscapes and see amazing things, and then keeping them inside (and/or sometimes with clipped wings).

And added to that how difficult it can be for long-lived birds when their caretakers die and they can be left with somebody who doesn't really like them (or whom they don't really like), or donated to a zoo... a family friend's parrot was given to a (very good) butterfly house when she died and he just seems so sad every time I see him now

Maybe I'm just being narrow-minded, and the exact same thing is true for dogs & cats

It’s why the symbolism of caged birds is a recurrent literary device for a long as the history of literature.

Do you feel differently about fish who can swim?

No fish is so intelligent as the simplest bird.

I would not bet my money on it. In some areas fishes can score higher than many other vertebrates for sure, including big apes

Anybody keeping an aquarium knows that many fishes are surprisingly smart. Specially predatory fishes. They have a good long term memory and can recognize individual caretaker humans.

The brain/bodyweight ratio of some species is bigger than humans. This mean that they have a bigger brain that most birds, lizards and rodents of the same size. Sharks are pretty clever for example.

A very good question - I do feel differently about fish, and I think it's the relative level of intelligence.

As you suggest, it's clearly not just because birds have an ability to explore an environment natively that humans don't.

I'm sure that's a bias towards similarities with human intelligence - to communicate, solve puzzles, and use tools (e.g. crows and parrots) because it would be very sad if people were regularly keeping octopuses in home fish tanks.

For those like me who thought clipped wings meant exactly that, at least from what I have learned it usually just means removing 1 or 2 large feathers at the wing tips, not amputating an actual part of the wing.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone else but for me this thing seemed way worse than it actually was.

For some pet parrots, yes, flight feathers are trimmed as they come in to temporarily prevent or reduce flight, but traditionally, ducks and geese being raised for meat and feathers do have part of the outside wing joint removed to permanently prevent flight - this is called pinioning.

At least they won't be hungry, getting fed more than they would eat on their own [0]. That seems to be called gavage.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force-feeding

While that's good to hear, what disturbs me about clipping wings is robbing a bird of their ability to fly

As long as they're not fully clipped, they can still fly, but they don't get a ton of lift. Parrot owners typically do it so they don't accidentally fly outside and end up in a worse situation than a few clipped feathers that grow back in a few months. Birds get spooked by the most random things, so it's hard to know what will trigger them to fly into danger

Fully clipping their flight feathers is cruel, dangerous and can result in injury when a bird falls more than a few feet. Also causes muscle atrophy and makes the birds dependant on their humans

The one I saw flew fine, for short distances and indoors at least.

Domestic cats are another story. Mine actually prefers inside and is not very social even with other cats. Prefers solitude, sleep, cuddles and eating. My dog, on the other hand, a 70lb Husky mix requires a great deal of activity outside as well as socialization with his pack of friends from the dog park. 2+ hours of physical activity and socialization a day keeps him happy but, you have to be a responsible pet owner, listen to your pets and give them everything they need and more. Your pet shouldn't just be surviving, they should be thriving. It's your responsibility.

They're not "pets", they're "animals". And social function is one of their primary instincts.

But as long as we force them to be pets, they're in fact meant to be raised alone in homes. And they compensate for it by bonding with their owners, which are away most of the time.

It's casually cruel, but also I don't think there's such a construct as "pets outside with pet friends". Ideally we'd just let nature handle itself and we stop trying to productize it as home decoration & entertainment.

We have several birds, they mostly like the company of other some other birds. But they really like people too. Even the ones always raised around birds grow attached to their people.

It's much more complex than "leave animals to the wild". One of our birds is a rescue and had found himself a new family when he had gotten loose. He clearly prefers people over birds, every time. Even with a wide selection.

Clearly if you are not home most of the time - don't get birds. But if you are, they are quite good companions if you are also up for their care. And don't mind losing the occasional keyboard to fun time...

They tend to be quite happy when they have some even small space to fly and extensive contact with both their people and others birds. I'll often have two on me while coding, by their choice. The others have other preferences for time use.

When they get out, and it's happened a few times. They very much prefer to be back in their home with their clearly loved social circle.

Flying is nice, it's fun and good exercise, but it's also a means to an end. Being with those they love, finding food, toys, and nesting sites.

Do you have any durable evidence to back up those anecdotes?

My best summary from years of experience and observations and learning from several birds. Learning to read their likes and dislikes. Also exposure to others who do the same, bird people.

It is what it is, whatever you may choose to call it. You may also take it or leave it.

The preference of people over birds is not a good sign. Usually means he wasn't well socialized or even misimprinted. Breeders do that intentionally because people want people-focused parrots. But it's not good for them.

Sometimes that damage can be undone with very careful training and resocializing...

I don't think interaction with people is bad for parrots, but it shouldn't be their only means of scratching their social itches.

Don't know his history. He is clearly old. He doesn't mind other birds, but he loves and takes great delight in people. Just who he is.

Sure, there's history there. But I don't see it as "damage". He is clearly quite happy when he is with his people.

His other great delight is figuring out how to open his palace in the morning to get out early. Every time he manages it he struts around for quite a while looking like he just won the Superbowl.

I'm not saying these birds can't be happy. Some certainly aren't resocializeable, and there's nothing wrong with keeping them as happy as possible regardless.

One of the most objective criterion for animal welfare is how much of their natural behavior they can fulfill. People don't talk like birds, don't act like birds. Only parrots of pretty much the same species can fulfill some things. I'm not even talking about mating and all the behavior around that, more like everything else.

> I'm not saying these birds can't be happy

That's pretty much the only criteria I'm really interested in.

All our birds have other birds of the same species with them, which they all do enjoy I can confirm. Well, generally :). When one is being obnoxious to others they can flee to their people.

> The preference of people over birds is not a good sign. Usually means he wasn't well socialized or even misimprinted. Breeders do that intentionally because people want people-focused parrots. But it's not good for them.

How are you deciding what is "good" for a parrot?

A preference for humans is certainly not natural for a parrot. However, I don't think there's anything natural about the way most humans live their lives, and I quite like modern technology. Perhaps parrots similarly appreciate being in a safe environment with loving caretakers. (Or perhaps they don't—but I don't see how we could know either way.)

Put another way, I'm not convinced that living in the wilderness and having to scrounge for food and avoid predators is necessarily a better life than living with a loving human who cares for you. Both are certainly imperfect in different ways, but unfortunately we can't ask the parrots which one they would prefer.

Those comparisons are meaningless, because this bird is living in Human care through Human decisions (at some point...).

What is less meaningless is the idea that animals should be able to fulfill the full spectrum of their natural behavior. For parrots that means conspecific company. People don't talk like parrots and don't act like parrots. That is consensus among experts, by the way.

It is sad. Mainly our approach to other animals is based on disregarding their right to self actualization. Merely saying this makes one seem like a kook or zealot. But it's just pointing out that taking a human-centric approach to other intelligent organisms is easy to do because we are the apex predator. I don't blame or judge anyone but it disturbs me all the same. A thought experiment I really like is how I would feel about doing something if I wasn't part of a group of apex predators. It's simplistic, but personally I find it provides clarity.

Once again, The Onion news was just 10 years too early

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkWS4t4l0k

(Sorry low effort comment but I couldn’t resist)

I was expecting this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sh3kx9Qa3UU

The very concept of pets is unethical towards animals.

I'm on this boat as well.

Keeping other life captive for your own sporadic amusement is pathologically self-centered.

Adopting injured animals sometimes leaves them dependent. We have an aviary of deceive pigeons. They each have a different issue. Is letting them die kinder?

I’d say that it is sometimes, but it gets complicated fast.

Some animals-turned-pets developed/evolved symbiotically with humans, and continued through selective breeding (inevitably, and with mixed virtue).

The classic example is wild dogs to work dogs to pet dogs. I think this is healthy and remains symbiotic.

And the classic example of excess is all the sad purebred dogs, developed by bad people to accentuate some aesthetic values with inadequate regard for the (sometimes life-long) pain and discomfort caused by side effects of the genetic selection.

Agreed on birds though. They are pretty and entertaining, but how can it not be cruel to cage a bird?

Do all those African Grays who amuse and seem to enjoy their humans really just suffer from Stockholm Syndrome?

I don't know, but I don't trust that the humans have thought about it in a non self-serving way.

And don't get me started on zoos... :(

The initial existence of pet and worker breeds may be symbiotic and natural, but the way people treat them like a slave species and perpetuate them is arbitrarily done for the convenience of humans.

I can’t stand when I see “my fur baby is lost!” when describing the escape of large adult social dog. No, that dog knows how to get home. It escaped its prison.

> I can’t stand when I see “my fur baby is lost!” when describing the escape of large adult social dog. No, that dog knows how to get home. It escaped its prison.

That dog may know how to get home initially and enjoys the freedom having slipped the leash and exploring. But there's no guarantee that when the dog decides it would like to get home that it can, nor is it making an informed decision about the risks that it faces.

I get where you're coming from in the extreme, but animals do get lost or into situations they can't get out of. We took in two stray kittens as outdoor cats and we'd occasionally have to go around the neighborhood to find them because they'd be behind a wall in someone else's yard and forget how to make it back.

As soon as they saw our faces over the wall they'd follow us to an opening or the gate and then find their way home.

Ultimately, one of them met an untimely end from some stray dogs. But that's life.

Say that to dogs, who have co-evolved with humans over thousands of years to a level that not only do they look completely different from wolves, but they can happily digest food that a wolf cannot.

Dogs like to be with people. Even free-roaming street dogs will usually live in close proximity to people. A well-cared for household dog or cat is one of the most happy, pampered beings who ever lived, often cared for at a level akin to human children.

Absolutist anti-pet thinking is how PETA ends up euthanizing 97% of the pets it receives at its shelter.

My conviction comes from having owned a dog, and realizing after a couple of years that it will never have the life in a pack roaming the lands that it obviously craved (“obvious” after observing its behavior for long enough). I don’t think a healthy co-evolution can be claimed when the animal is not free to act independently, i.e. without being coerced (like being taken on a leash or otherwise physically constrained). I’m more sympathetic to cats as pets, if they can come and go as they please.

Your conclusion may have been correct about your dog, but extending that to all dogs is pretty large and ridiculous leap. Dogs view their people as family members (which is what a pack is), and many other people’s dogs get to have a healthy group of dog friends as well. You sound like a person who just failed to keep a happy dog and developed a rationalization that all dog ownership is morally wrong.

Dog domestication is generally thought to be an example of commensalism, and potentially mutualism. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2021.6623... In other words, it only happened in the first place because a group of wolves benefited from association with people. Pleistocene hunter-gatherers did not have the physical ability to force a grown wolf to be captive if it did not want to be.

A dog that requires a leash or an active restraint to prevent it from running away is not representative of dog ownership in general. My dog has no interest in running away and the only time I have to use a leash is when it’s imposed by local ordinance.

If your dog wanted to run away it probably had a shitty life.

Different breeds, and different dogs within those breeds, have different drives.

I know some well-trained dogs that will still gleefully run away and explore the woods if given the chance... and then return sheepishly 20-30 minutes later. If they ever do get lost, or someone else "finds" them, etc, it'll be a tragedy.

They also tend to come back covered in thorns, with cut-up paws, etc, etc.

My nextdoor feed is filled with run away dogs. I think your experience might be slightly less common than you think.

Survivor bias. Your nextdoor feed doesn’t have posts about the orders of magnitude more dogs that aren’t running away.

For those as confused as I was, Nextdoor: some sort of social thing.

Not a feedlot nextdoor to OP.

It really seems like a trade off. Animals seem “happy” and “free” out in nature, but are they?

They have to be on guard every single second because something might eat them. If they get injured, that is an absolute death sentence. There is no safety net. They have to weather harsh weather conditions. They are at risk for being eaten alive and enduring a slow agonizing painful death by other animals that do not care one iota about their well-being

At least in captivity they are safe. I don’t see how we as humans are all that different in how most of us choose to live our lives

This is a fundamentally misguided take.

An equivalent comparison would be jailing all humans to keep them safe from each other. Humans having a home for occasional safety from environmental hazards is not the same as free-flying birds being caged in isolation forever.

Maybe we should ask the pets about that, instead drawing random lines in the sand that feel just like parroted BS

Do chicken feel that being the most successful bird in the planet is unfair?

It's actually illegal to import parrots into the United States now. Nearly all the ones that are here are not going to live out in the wild and survive. I see this discussion about freeing them all the time, but that ship sailed when they were taken from their habitat and bred in capitivity. Best we can do is minimize the damage by dissuading ownership and reduce the number bred for pets

That said, I dissuade everyone that tells me they want a parrot from getting one, not for the reason you gave, but because most people treat them like cats or dogs and that doesn't work. They're more like toddlers and approaching them like that usually works better.

I have several smaller parrots I rescued from someone that let them go outside and didn't want them back (conure and some budgies) and they're quite content. They're usually more interested in interacting with my family than each other. I love mine, but they require more attention than most people want to give

They get plenty of open space indoors to fly around, but not every parrot likes to fly. Quite a few would rather climb, because it's a lot of effort to get lift with a bulky parrot body.

I can't help but think of course video calls would help a social animal that is solitary except for their human owner and maybe another species of pet. Someday I hope we will rethink how we live with animals and give them the compassion and habitat that we would want for ourselves if we were in their position. I would much prefer to visit a wonderful parrot habitat I help conserve where I can view happy flourishing parrots in the wild then own one and potentially give it Zoochosis.

Would it be reasonable to re-title this to ‘Scientists Teach Parrots to Push a Button’?

I believe the parrots enjoy this experience but do the parrots understand that they are placing a video call?

The interesting issue is not whether the parrots understand they are placing a video call, but rather if they understand they are interacting with another member of the species - apparently they do.

Note that the only reward for pushing the button was a video call.

So it'd be fairer to call it "Parrots will push the start call button repeatedly and then pay attention to the call"

If Petra can order from Alexa, anything is possible.

https://youtu.be/K2UMYqa9BC8

That is absolutely adorable. We need to start doing that for other pets. I want my dog to call up other dogs.

I think dog vision is too bad, and their socialization too scent-based, to make such a thing practical. Howling is a thing, but as far as I know, is more of a "here I am" thing than having a chat.

This is the content I come for on HN

Dear scientists, don't teach parrots to Tinder, spare the birds!

Bird-Roulette-as-a-service in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

Person: Woaah good girrrllll

Parrot: AAAHHH!!!

Rip headphone users.

“Who’s a petty boy!”

Everybody's so worried about AI they forgot about the parrots!

I am sure the parrots get a lot of value out of this lol

Parroulette?

Got a cookie banner with the only option being "Accept", that covered most of the screen on mobile. Figured I'd actually follow the link to the "Privacy Statement", to learn what sort of dark pattern is used and how I could actually consume the content without opting in to the tracking. Once I got there, however, I got an even bigger banner that also had accepting whatever they want me to as the only option, to the point where I can't even read their statement.

Commenting this because I've never actually had that happen before - accepting something being the only way to actually figure out what it is that I'm accepting. If it wasn't deliberate, it'd be quite the ridiculous UX failure. I actually recall some sites just telling me that users in EU aren't allowed to access their content, which somehow felt better because they were honest about it.

Might need to look for a plugin for mobile Firefox to automatically set the correct preferences.

Seems like the Web Archive copy has the same issue: https://web.archive.org/web/20230422100711/https://news.nort...

The UI was optimized for Parrots.

They want you to install the "Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on" provided by Google itself. Which is kinda pointless on iOS.

Regarding the "you cannot view this content as EU citizen": I find it sad. I miss the old days of the web where it was a web.

>I miss the old days of the web where it was a web.

Everything is a trade-off. A partitioned culture is worse for exchange, but this is good when there is a risk of memetic infection. I suspect the best case is a softly partitioned culture, with barriers surmountable by intellectuals with the time and energy to learn a new language, and also a rational immune system and the good sense not to bring contagions home, but which remains partitioned for most people.

I cannot recall any occasion were I brought home a flu from visiting a page on the interwebs. Maybe you have a point with what you are saying, but I would not translate that to the internet.

They are trying to say we are too stupid to be allowed to freely consume the internet and need someone to protect us from misinformation.

And yet the arrogant position is to believe you know how human society works so well that you can say with confidence that obliterating a hundred thousand years of cultural isolation has no downside.

The burden of proof is on the one who wants to change things, and the burden is higher the more you want to change things. In 2023 US democracy is falling apart, we are on the brink of civil war, in part because of these effects, so I think they are worth questioning.

Things change naturally. There is no “burden of proof” unless you are making an argument to not allow things to naturally happen, whether that is to purposely change something or purposely keep it the same.

>Things change naturally

That's a statement so empty as to not even exist.

The worst attrocities and bad developments happened "naturally" too. Climate change also occured naturally (since in your use, naturally includes the acts of societies and people).

We definitely should not allow things to just "naturally happen". We should steer things towards a better future, and be able to see which "naturally ocurring" developments are good, and which are bad.

The term "natural" is basically meaningless here, and the rest of your comment implies that humans are incapable of saying "no" to change. The Amish, and Richard Stallman, are both counter-examples. We don't have to do anything, and anything that arises we don't have to accept, promote, or integrate into our lives.

We "naturally" made fluorocarbons, and then realized it was a bad idea and stopped.

The notion that free and open informational borders is an unalloyed good has risen to the level of dogma for many in SV, and I think that's a naive mistake. Making bomb making material accessible to an unhappy teenage boy is a bad idea; letting professional manipulators "flood the zone with shit" to perform a coup in a democracy is a bad idea, too, and for similar reasons. Letting it happen to satisfy a dogmatic position is a good way to let your civilization die. And a dead civ has no positions.

Alternatively, GP is suggesting these barriers are part of the “natural” change and can have their own positive effects. We can fight them if we wish, naturally, and doing so brings about a necessary balance. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that we are necessarily “doing good” in relation to the other. And we shouldn’t believe that achieving the extreme, the unbalanced, is necessarily “best”.

“Freedom-of-information fighters” are always simply fighting for a belief and a desire, not a truth. And in turn bringing balance or potentially imbalance depending on one’s assumptions regarding “Mother Nature’s Grand Evolutionary Scheme” or whatever we want to call it. Just as all fighters have been doing throughout time.

Every human decision is nature and natural.

> In 2023 US democracy is falling apart, we are on the brink of civil war,

Both of these statements are bullshit. People voted based on terrible information 50 years ago as well (a couple of TV appearances for the “informed voter”).

The political discourse is shitty again, but we aren’t anywhere near a civil war. The discourse and violence back around the Vietnam war was far worse than anything today.

I'm using uBlock origin on mobile Firefox and was able to just hide the banner with the element picker.

It doesn't really solve the problem though, since continuing to use the site is the same as accepting the cookies

Are you saying that the cookies are set before the user clicks accept?

"Reader" view on Safari (Desktop) made all the bad go away.

I set Safari to enable it by default on many, many sites now.

Does it automatically accept or decline consent or what?

It just extracts text content covered by all the pop-ups and shows it with some readable styling applied.

Reader Mode on Chrome does the same thing

https://archive.is/5EQSa

Thanks :)

Formula 1 website (*on iOS/iPhone) has the same issue right now once you hit customise the literally 100s of options appear but the accept/reject/save appears for a microsecond and disappears as it loads. Hitting the X doesn’t save.

I find the other archive produces more readable pages.

This one still has the banner but it's glued to the end of the page.

https://archive.ph/5EQSa

Life pro tip: Disable JavaScript.

Yeah, NoScript can be kind of a pain but it's less annoying than all of the banners and popups that don't appear because it's effectively blocking them.

Also, Reader mode helps a lot.

I was able to read privacy statement without cookie banner on iOS using brave browser

Click the Reader Mode icon in the URL bar to bypass this.

I just had an idea.

I should call up my local privacy-contrarian legislators (I'm in a purple state) and ideate cookie banners as being a populist tool of the opposing party. And if that doesn't get them, as a tool for foreign powers to slow American tech startups and innovation. Bombastic take, but something you could plausibly sell.

The hope would be to get our lawmakers to put forth legislation banning the use of cookie banners and popups on US websites entirely. That's a cross-cutting solution that would force websites to immediately remedy their frontends.

If it ever came to pass, web operators would be doing a version of the "two buttons" meme wondering which jurisdiction to comply with. Hiring lawyers to determine if IP geolocation is a viable out, but how to respect EU residents abroad, etc.

Disable JS. Refresh. Start reading.

Thank-you. Disabling JS may help with reading many other pay- or other-walled submissions.

It really can! The flipside is you tend to lose images but I'm okay with that. Good luck with your new-found kryptonite

I recommend consent-o-matic on desktop. It'll be good to see it appear on mobile, though I have my doubts that it'll appear soon since the entire ecosystem of plugins seems to have been hobbled on mobile.

Regarding EU users not being allowed on certain websites.. well, frankly, I'd rather they do that than have to deal with people who refuse to comply with a very simple legal requirement for user autonomy. It is a basic moral failure not to offer that autonomy, really.

There's a reason stuff like that is called webshit.

Here's a "remove sticky" bookmarklet that worked flawlessly:

    javascript:(function()%7B let i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3B for (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7B if(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed' %7C%7C getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'sticky')%7B elements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B %7D %7D %7D)()

the entire website is unbearable

shame on you Schuyler Velasco and northeastern.edu

Please, for the love of god, can this scroll-hijacking (or whatever it's called) trend just die already. Just give me a video I can scroll past or watch fluently instead.

Besides that, I love paper titles which don't take themselves too seriously: Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together

I would have liked sound, too. Mystified.

Unpopular opinion but I didn't mind it on this site. Reading this on a phone it's like scrubbing through a video for part of the article. I usually agree it's annoying though.

It looks pretty stupid when you scroll with a scroll wheel with smooth scrolling off. But I guess as long as it looks good using a macbook touchpad then the designer is happy.

Well-done parallax scrolling libraries do just fine with scroll wheels and no smoothing. This one just isn't very well done - I bet accessibility features don't work either.

Had to refresh the page more than a couple times as I was not able to scroll passed the first “video” only to realize I have to keep scrolling to get to the article. I genuinely thought the website is broken

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is a great.

But the article was totally ruined by trying to be clever and reinvent some basic interaction design principles.

Just use a video to show what the parrots are doing rather than having to scroll down to advance to the next frame.

At first I thought 'Why is the video not working?'

Whoever the designer was... why?

But yes - parrots (and other birds like corvids) are pretty amazing - how much intelligence is packed into such a small brain ;)

This site with the "scrolling videos" is fucking horrible.

Then the parrots could make a better UI than that website

On Firefox mobile, I don’t even get a consent banner. The video just goes full screen and doesn’t let me scroll anywhere so I can’t read the article.

No, it’s working. When you scroll the video plays. The article is below the ‘video’

I know Dang has warned about this topic, but this is a new horror for me. Apple does a similar thing with their new products and animations that move as you scroll, but this is next level.

Twitter for real

But with video.

The website is terrible.

Horrible Website, who likes this sh*

Much better than the guardian link

Reply on news.ycombinator.com