Only a matter of time before megacorps put ads and a subscription service on bird calls, now. 😫
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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Inb4 Doom can now run on birds.
Latency tho....
How useful would this have been back at the dawn of computation, I wonder?
They didn’t have ultrasonic microphones at the dawn of computation
Pigeon guided missile but instead of pigeon it's a parrot and sings relevant source code in hex and an interpeter assembles it.
(I hate the last 4 words that sentence I made.)
In before EU genocides all starlings because you can't put backdoors in them to scan for CSAM.
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Not to be a wet blanket, but every time this comes up I get annoyed by some factual inaccuracies in the articles about this. It is not digital! He drew an image on a computer, but converted it to an analogue spectrogram to store on the bird. That's neat as hell, but it's not digital. The image that he got back was slightly corrupted.
Now I would be fascinated to see a follow-up seeing if you can actually modulate a digital signal and have is survive a round trip through the bird bit-for-bit accurate. I suspect in reality it would be much lower data rate, but definitely not nothing!
By your definition nothing can be digital since the world is analog. Even the bits in your CPU are voltages in transistors. As such, every real life signal can be distorted.
The point with digital transfers is that you round it back to either 0 or 1, hoping that no bits are distorted enough to have any loss at all.
Exactly. Digital logic, when implemented in analogue, generally have to have forbidden zones where a signal in that range is considerer invalid. Regardless of implementation, digital is about the discretized logic of the system. That is explicitly the whole point of digital: Minor analogue distortion does not change the information content of the signal unless it is so bad as to flip a bit.
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That’s not really how it works in the real world. Usually you have both bandwidth and noise constraints.
Sure you can send something like a square wave but this isn’t practical for real communication channels. Typically you’re sending many sine waves in parallel with multiple amplitudes and phase offsets to represent a sequence of bits (QAM). Then on top of that you’d encode the original data with both a randomizer (to prevent long runs from looking like nothing) and error correction. So usually the system can handle some level of distortion.
What you’re hoping is that by the time the data reaches the user (really, Layer 3), all the errors have already been handled and you never see any issues.
The bird is just another type of noisy channel with its own distortion characteristics.
The point is that at the physical layer you still have a well defined log likelihood test to produce digital information. That's why QAM lasted so long even though it is not power efficient - because it has an analytical likelihood function.
This is the boundary between digital and analog communications. Since he did not use a digital modulation scheme, this would be a form of analog comms
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You are not addressing my critique of your statement, just piling on a bunch of useless extra knowledge just so that you can feel superior.
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Hmm, not so sure. He produced a digital signal, who's spectrogram happened to be an image, and then played that digital signal to a bird. Dunno if a analogue spectrogram really even makes sense as a concept. The only analogue part of the chain would be the birds vocalisations, right?
The whole sequence is:
- Digitally synthesized spectrogram (lossless)
- Played through a DAC and speaker to produce an analogue signal (lossy)
- Heard by the bird (analogue, lossy)
- Reproduced by the bird (analogue, lossy)
- Captured by an ADC as a digital audio signal (lossy)
- Spectrum-analysed to observe a similar (but corrupted) reproduction of the shape in the original spectrogram
To be transferring digital information, we would instead need to modulate and demodulate the digital signal (exactly like an old modem) so that the analogue corruption does not affect the digital signal:
- Image file (lossless)
- Bit stream (lossless)
- Analogue modulation of bit stream played through DAC (lossy)
- Heard by the bird (lossy)
- Reproduced by the bird (lossy)
- Demodulated to recover exact bit stream despite distortion (lossless again)
- Decode bit stream to recover original image file, bit-for-bit perfect
I extremely doubt that this bird is capable of 2MB/s. For reference that would make it 280+ times fast than dialup, and barely slower than ADSL. This setup is basically just using the bird instead of a telephone line.
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Imagine the possibilities for piracy and secure messaging (provided that the birds don't snitch on you).
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Birds are totally organic organisms. Rightttttt. BIRDS ARENT REAL!!!!
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2MB/s / 16Mbps is enough for 4K HEVC video and audio. In theory you could encode a full movie with enough starlings.
A million monkeys on typewriters is old news. Now we're gonna teach a million starlings to play back the entire bee movie.
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We're finally getting tweets back
I want this to be the next reveal in a movie or TV series, in the same fashion as the one of the Navajo "backing up" the Smoking Man's magnetic tape in The X-Files.
Hear me out! Bird factor authentication!
Please honk your seagull to unlock your ed25519-sk ssh key
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Well of course NSA's spy device can store information. We've known this for decades
This is a whole new twist over RFC 1149: IP over Avian Carriers
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