I was born and grew up in sight of this lock where the fish doorbell is, 61 years ago.
I never knew we had this many fish swimming by until this camera perplexed me.
My boat was moored 30 meters away.
My ISP offices where a little further upstream.
2000 Years ago the city of Utrecht grew around this river branch, now called the Kromme Rijn/Vecht but originally it was the main river Rhine. It started out as a Roman frontier fort at the river crossing.
Let's hope we don't see any 'brown trout' in there :-)
Seriously, though, I love a nice green algae for some good old oxygen.
I just saw some all along the shore of a small tributary at a local park that had tons of little (but not tiny) bubbles all over it. I thought it might be oxygen.
That's cool, but what I want is an ROV that will let me prowl around a lake or stream or the ocean and see what's in there.
Of course, not getting snagged on something is a problem, as is losing power, as is murkiness, but I'm not gonna build the thing -- I just want to use it.
Me too, and then I pressed the doorbell but the page said "there's no fish in this image" (because it swam away), so I didn't send the photo. Am I supposed to wait for a fish that will hang out in the frame? It's a bit unclear.
Guess: It's not useful to open the door for a fish that is not (in effect) waiting around to get through, hence the additional "check image for a fish" requirement.
"People do so enthusiastically every year. In 2024, the Fish Doorbell attracted around 2.7 million viewers, from America to Brazil! The project has gained global recognition, helping people worldwide learn about fish migration and Utrecht’s underwater world."
I don't think solving the problem is the goal, it's attracting attention while solving the problem, which is a different goal
I bet it was a conscious decision to crowdsource it instead of automating it in order to get people more interested in the fish. It seems like it's drawing a pretty substantial fan base!
Some of the very best moments of my life have come from those moments when I feel like I a part of something bigger than myself. Act in a play. Be the 30th person in a start up. Sing in a choir. Ring a bell.
It appears to me that far from enhancing these moments, in general the internet has inhibited them. The focus of our current internet is Me. Instagram where you can show people how beautiful you are. Facebook, where the important thing is what you like. And who you follow. Me. Me. Me.
So it seems natural that the "next big thing" is something that will make the internet even less hospitable for a sense of community - for the We. No doorbell, just an AI.
But maybe that is a good thing? This internet with all the tracking and lack of civility can become just a place where AI's can spend hours tracking and targeting other AI's. Far out!
We could use some Complex Adaptive System architecture to create galaxies. Or we could call them Gestalts instead of CAS.
In gestalts
entities,
use rules
to interact with a read/write message bus.
Ants. Pheromone trails. Write when you find food, not if you don't.
We have the pieces for this. Entities - people. We have a r/w bus - the internet. What we don't have are rules. We can think of rules - the kind Wolfram talks about in NKofS - instead as a language. A language in the sense of Sapir-Whorf. "Twitter and Tear Gas" (Zeynep Tufecki) is a good illustration of Sapir-Whorf in internet languages. (Available as a pdf I think)
That language is the missing link. In Real Life there is a language for collaboration. Perhaps the task is to understand the elements of IRL collaboration and then transpose it.
One could make some guesses about fundamentals. As we have all discovered, one fundamental is trust. IRL Trust is identity and reputation based. With many caveats. Perhaps we could start by considering
A New Kind of Identity. ?
I never knew we had this many fish swimming by until this camera perplexed me.
My boat was moored 30 meters away.
My ISP offices where a little further upstream.
2000 Years ago the city of Utrecht grew around this river branch, now called the Kromme Rijn/Vecht but originally it was the main river Rhine. It started out as a Roman frontier fort at the river crossing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kromme_Rijn
The Oude Gracht is the second most famous canal monument in the Netherlands after the Amsterdam canal system.