Starling.png

Finally, USBird storage

bit lossy, innit?

Well yeah, but this is just in development. In production you would implement a starling with error correction.
- First you need approval and a Jira ticket. Then they're gonna approve you for a pigeon at best.
The compression is a bit rough but the network speed is an improvement over a traditional IPoAC system
Was gonna say, birds are lossy as fuck.
Lossy image storage was one of the things that brought the internet to the masses.
and yes... ;)

The original video about this is from Benn Jordan, and like all his videos, it's incredible.

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!
Benn*

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'

Officially stolen for my Cyberpunk Red campaign. Thanks, Satan!

I give it 2 weeks before some goofs have made the birds sing the shape of a penis.

Still more compatible than webp

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.

It thinks y'all are gonna mate
- 🥵
- and it ain't wrong!

https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo

@kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
In response to your “can it run doom” question, I think the next step is to get one of these microphones, train the birds to use a computer to access food by making specific noises then eventually storing programs on them.
I think the sample in the video was about 66% of Doom being transmitted per second, so you could probably teach them a song with Doom in it
- So a bird can store doom, there's enough memory...
bless you

You wouldn’t download a bird!

Would if they were real.
This joke makes no sense in this context you idiot! Oh it’s me…

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?

What if our memes are just super-intelligent aliens storing a backup of their critical knowledge in the collective consciousness of billions of humans?
- Please don't give Hideo Kojima any ideas.
- 42 is the answer
just add a shitload of error correction!
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.

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

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.
- 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.
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.

Can the bird sing the epstein files though?

Sadly the bird killed itself before it could repeat the message.

We downloaded a whole country to a bunch of birds!

Avian steganography

But will it run Doom?

You want to run DOOM on a flock of birds now?
- I think not of what we should do, only what we can do... to a flock of birds.

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?

It's no station wagon full of tapes, but we can probably get there. It'll be like Johnny Mnemonic but with birds.
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.
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.
More importantly, can we train a bird to fly around singing porn sans age verification?
- a bird sang your nudes onto my phone
  This is the insane poetic future i wanted.

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

Time to make something dial-up like optimized for birds to actually store digital data.

Now I want to know if a bird can trick a modem into connecting
- Certainly not. Even the signals of ancient, pre-AOL dialup technology was hundreds of bauds (symbols per second). Unless some weird species of bird can make actual full on different sounds that fast (more than just frequencies or modulations), there's no chance in hell.