Finally, USBird storage
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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I give it 2 weeks before some goofs have made the birds sing the shape of a penis.
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
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Was gonna say, birds are lossy as fuck.
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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!
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!
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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!
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…
@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
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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.
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.
just add a shitload of error correction!
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.
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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!
Tap for spoiler
"I ran" - A Flock of Seagulls
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.
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Avian steganography
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.
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Time to make something dial-up like optimized for birds to actually store digital data.
Fake news. Birds aren't real.
The media-centric broadcast extension to IP-over-avian we've all been waiting for.
Birds are ~~not real~~ unreal!
Benn Jordan's videos are great.
someone needs to post this in a meshtastic group, we'll have lora store and forward bird routers
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