I highly recommend you watch the video - you can here.

This is, full stop, regardless of who is performing the behavior, not an appropriate way to handle birds. Toucans do not enjoy being ‘hugged’ because they are prey animals, and a full body squeeze sensation is not pleasant to them. Jade’s reaction clearly displays she does not enjoy the contact - so much so that the owner has to place his hands around her neck to try to wrench her off. He leaves the interaction with bloody bites to the face.

like, you look at

and it’s a completely normal sentence! which feels very natural to write or read! but, well, there’s no way to convert those diagrams to… words. there’s no order in which they’re supposed to be read, no convention for how it’s supposed to turn into sounds in your brain, and in fact it… just doesn’t, yknow? you switch between “read words” mode and “decrypt diagram” mode without even thinking about it and the whole thing somehow parses as a sentence in your brain anyways.

you also get incredibly cool stuff like

i mean just look! he put a semicolon after the diagram! a semicolon actually needs to be there or the thing won’t be grammatical! here after something that is not written to be expressable in words! it’s so! ugh! i love it!!!

in fact there’s like, multiple conventions as to where the punctuation is supposed to go after diagrams. johnstone above has been kind of old fashioned w/ putting the punctuation after the first line, these days people tend to write stuff like

where the punctuation goes after the rightmost symbol of the bottommost line of the diagram.

Everyone seems to think you can just... Google stuff? And it comes up? bruh the moment you get anywhere near the frontier of knowledge, accessibility craters. Hard.

A real life example: during my PhD, my whole (subsubsub-)field existed basically entirely because a certain sensible conjecture turns out to be false, so we need a weird subtle painful approach rather than just using the obviously true fact.

How do we know it's not true? A counterexample was given in 1913 in a paper written in french, which no one actually cites, has no existing english translation, is nigh impossible to find a pdf of (no one could tell me its name - only its author's name), and is over 100 pages long, seems to be (I think) concerned largely with only tangentially related stuff, and is impenetrably dense due to lacking many modern concepts and notations. No one I'd ever met had ever read it, let alone understood it. And no other published proof exists - that I know of. It is not a simple proof. I wouldn't be able to prove it myself.

One day, my supervisor and I were emailing a colleague, and I offhandedly mentioned that it was the "only known counterexample". The colleague responded - oh! That's not true. Here's a handful more.

He did not supply any proofs. My supervisor went and figured out and wrote down a proof for one, and satisfied himself. He did not publish it, and it is basically illegible. He tried to explain it to me, but it was unintelligible. I could not make heads or tails of it. I still don't know, myself, for absolute certain, that a counter-example even exists. I had all the access in the world to journals and leading researchers in the area and I still couldn't get access to a remotely legible explanation of the foundational fact that spawned my field.

Research is THICK with folklore, and often the only way to learn something vital is to be wrong in the right way in front of the right person at the right time.

Y'know what tool is capable of cutting through a huge proportion of that reliance on luck and the hundreds of hours that go into just trying to figure out what's known and where to find it (even for established researchers familiar with their field)? yuh. LLMs. and nowadays they're basically reliable. They check online. They check themselves. And they've read the entire literature and picked up on much of the unwritten folklore whose presence in the literature is only the shadow it casts.

You'd have to be insane not to be using them at this point. Even just to ask "is it known whether or not blah?". Genuinely an invaluable tool. You don't have to offload your cognitive. You don't have to sell your soul or publish slop. You can just... benefit. And people are coming thick and fast at Hank Green - who has contributed so, so much to humanity - for using LLMs. For research. For his videos.

Mom vs Bro Strife