"Reason" is an "in the eye of the beholder" type human thing. They're taking it in the most tortured sense, because under sufficient pressure that's "exactly" what happens anyways. It sounds silly until everything you touch is 20 indirections away.

Hey there, thanks for checking in.

Regarding the custom normalization step, that makes sense, and I don't really have much more to add either. Looked into it a bit further since, it seems that specifically with programming languages the topic gets pretty gnarly pretty quick for various language theory reasons. So the solution you settled on is understandable. I might spend some time comparing how various semantic toolings compare, I'd imagine they probably aim for something similar.

> The YAML/JSON ordering point is interesting, we handle JSON keys as entities so reordering doesn't conflict during merges.

Just to clarify, I specifically meant the ordering of elements within arrays, not the ordering of keys within an object. The order of keys in an object is relaxed as per the spec, so normalizing across that is correct behavior. What I'm doing with these other tools is technically a spec violation, but since I know that downstream tooling is explicitly order invariant, it all still works out and helps a ton. It's pretty ironic too, I usually hammer on about not liking there being options, but in this case an option is exactly the right way to go about this; you would not want this as a default.

Yes *, and in the real world. The question then is if you rate that to be an equivalent existential horror to being a varyingly maldeveloped, malnutritioned, disembodied version of those mice, forced to live out life in a low fidelity version of the Matrix [0], potentially in constant or recurring agony. You get a potential match or approximate match in cognitive ability and operation, but with a lot different set of circumstances.

* They kinda do have a problem with that too, that's why ethics committees exist, and why the term "animal testing" pops up in the news cycle every so often.

[0] https://xcancel.com/alexwg/status/2030217301929132323

> yeah definitely not

I don't know about ants, but after a refresher on the people favorite fruit fly, I'd be hard pressed to be so dismissive - 200K seems to be plenty: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302051

I inspire you to look up what is known about fruit flies' behavior.

The reason it's probably nevertheless not as messed up as people might assume it to be is specifically because it's an organoid, not an actual brain. Which is to say, it has the numbers but not the performance, not by a long shot.

> Surely it makes no difference

It absolutely should, though specifically with organoids, I guess it might not. Ironically, I would expect the ethics angle to be actually worse with small animals. The size of the organoid will be closer to the real thing comparatively, after all, so more chances of it gaining whatever level of sentience the actual organism has.

But then this will be heavily muddled by what people believe consciousness is and whether or how humans are special, I suppose.