Related to this, I had been dreaming up an idea for a start-up for a while that uses computer imaging techniques to do non-invasive in-ovo sexing of bird eggs for the poultry industry. It seems criminal that we gas or drop into a macerator over half of the chickens hatched. It's just so cruel and seems like it could be done at an embryonic stage where they don't yet have the capacity for pain or sentience.<p>Turns out that since the last time I started doing some initial testing with my university MRI machine, someone has already run with the idea in Germany and it looks like they have a viable product that customers are already using: <a href="https://orbem.ai/solutions-poultry-egg-scanning-classification-sorting/" rel="nofollow">https://orbem.ai/solutions-poultry-egg-scanning-classificati...</a><p>This is awesome, exciting, and I hope it becomes the norm for the industry.
I'm surprised that this article left out how the training of the chick sexers actually happened.<p>Apparently it was:<p>- trainee picks up a chick and looks at the rear end<p>- they say "male" or "female"<p>- the instructor is standing behind them but offset so they can look over the should of trainee and still see the chick<p>- the instructor says either "correct" or "incorrect"<p>- this goes on until the trainee hits some level of accuracy<p>The thought here is that this is building a subconscious (some might say "zen like") ability to determine the sex. This is also why the successful trainees can't explain how it works: they weren't give explicit instructions to build a mental framework.<p>Some other examples of this:<p>People who learn a language organically at home vs in school. E.g. it's easy for me to translate Spanish to English b/c I learned it in high school. It's harder for me to translate Italian to English b/c I learned Italian organically and not via vocabulary mapping and class instruction.<p>Another example is the egg sushi scene from Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The junior chef just makes egg sushi every day until Jiro one day says "good".
The pg quote is interesting, I strongly disagree with this part<p>> But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job.<p>That would be only true if as a designer your job is to make things as beautiful as possible, or aligned with your own taste. But to me large part of professional design is not personal taste but knowing and understanding your target audience and design intent, and design appropriately.<p>> If taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that's it.<p>Which then goes to the other large part of professional design; its one thing to have some "taste" or be able to evaluate a design, and another thing to actually create/implement/change a design. Indeed that is the big thing of professionalism in general, not just being able to imagine some ideal solution, but to understand what is implementable with the real-world constraints which include your own skills and/or time-budget.<p>There is this common division of hobbyists vs professionals and its often implied that professionals can do things better. But to me the big distinction between the two is that professionals can do things on a budget and on the spot, while hobbyists can pour endless hours for their passion projects. With that perspective its not surprising that hobbyists can accomplish better results in many cases.
There are a few comments here related to how unethical the chicken industry is. Other animal production is just as bad, cows are treated terribly whether they're being raised for meat is dairy. If you are one who believes plants may have feelings or that the fungal network is actually used as communication between plants, the concerns would spread to them as industrial farming treats plants just as badly.<p>I wish more people would go out of their way to buy from local farmers, and that the government would get out of the way with regulations so that it could be a more viable business.<p>Its nearly impossible to start and run a profitable small farm today, and when production goes to an industrial scale all concern for the animals' (and plants') well being is lost. Everything is boiled down to numbers in a spreadsheet and producers rarely even interact with the animals at all, of course they won't care for an individual animal's well being.
The TL;DR insight is a good one: if NNs are trained on the concensus status quo, they will generate the OK results, not the effective or outstanding ones. The author is I guess in product marketing and says that this result should be encouraging. They point out that simply benchmarking your efforts against the competition also gets you just to the consensus status quo.<p>There’s also an amusing subtle shout-out in the opening chick sexing hook: people (correctly) complain that we can’t look into NNs to explain their inner working; the author points out that many skilled people can’t explain their decision making either.
I have seen this fact referenced many times at this point. You should look up what happens to the male chicks, it’s some of the most fucked up shit you can imagine. Search for “male chicks” on YouTube.
There are certain “sex linked” breeds of chickens that it is obvious whether a new born chick is male or female as they will be either color a or color b. We raise chickens for eggs and got stuck with a couple roosters before we decided to only purchase sex linked chicks going forward.
This is an article about subjective artistic taste and how its not subjective at all<p>all can be quantified and everything else is a convenient lie. our inability to quantify something is a deficiency we have in our data processing abilities.
Can someone provide/find the Japanese name of "Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School"? I'm curious about it and want to find some primary sources, but I can't even find the name.<p>I'm not saying it's bullshit by the way; I'm fairly familiar with Japanese, after reading <a href="https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%8B%E3%83%AF%E3%83%88%E3%83%AA%E3%81%AE%E3%83%92%E3%83%8A%E3%81%AE%E9%9B%8C%E9%9B%84%E9%91%91%E5%88%A5" rel="nofollow">https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%8B%E3%83%AF%E3%83%88%E3...</a> it looks to me that indeed so-called "Vent sexing" was discovered by Japanese in 1920s (the exact year isn't very consistent, Wikipedia says it was 1924 for Japanese version and 1933 for English version; while this article says 1927).<p>But I can't find any mention about a school. I tried to search "全日本 初生雛鑑別" with various words of "School" in Japanese but find nothing.
Also see culling: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling</a><p>How do practices like that not make everyone infuriated at the meat industry