Sal

joined 3 years ago
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[–] Sal@mander.xyz 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

The CO2 has not proven too valuable because the humidity controller refreshes the air before CO2 builds up. But the humidity sensor is quite handy. I made a simple humidifier and it gets triggered by a raspberry pi over Zigbee when the humidity drops below 85%.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 9 points 3 months ago

That is perfectly understandable! The Internet Archive is a worthy project to donate to!

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 3 points 3 months ago

No problem! Happy to share

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 4 points 3 months ago

I'm happy to share and glad someone else finds it interesting too :D

I also use SHT41 for other projects. It is a very nice sensor. I made an incubator with PID control and tested multiple different sensors, and the SHT41 was my final choice. Responds very fast and its accuracy is excellent.

In my mushroom chamber I have found out that CO2 is not actually an important control variable because the humidity is what changes the fastest and blowing humid air through the chamber brings the CO2 down anyway. So I would probably be able to get away with the SHT41, but measuring CO2 is just fun.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 6 points 3 months ago

That would be awesome! But, of course, always be mindful of your own needs first and it is OK to pick. The fact that you are supporting something through donations is already cool of you. Wikipedia is also a great project to donate to.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 14 points 3 months ago (2 children)

That's fair. I have a generally positive opinion of the devs even if I disagree with some of their views. Moderating is not easy, and especially not when you get into heated political territory - that's why personally I "cheat" a bit by dissuading politics within this instance ;) A small select list of mod actions is not something that sways my opinion. It is tricky to process some reports and sometimes we can make bad calls.

But it is true that this context will affect someone else's opinion differently, so it is good for others to be aware of some of this context before deciding to donate.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Wow, the acoustic spectrum feature is amazing! I have been coming back to it a few times over the last couple days to try to understand what I am seeing and listening to here. In the log plot I can see these lines of power increase that happen usually between 10:00 - 15:00 and often peak around 12:00. May 1 around 5 pm the bees appear to have been buzzing louder than usual. Is this the swarming sound?

It is really really cool, and I love that you have been able to apply ancient magic on this!

I myself have been playing recently with a CO2, temperature, and humidity sensor from Sensirion (SCD41, costs about $13 from China on a breakout board and talks I2C). I use this one for controlling a mushroom chamber, and I can see the CO2 released by the mushroom (or human activity nearby). It may be interesting for you as well, as I can imagine swarming might be associated with a CO2 spike.

The radiation levels are also very cool! I have a few gamma spectrometers and have tracked radiation for a bit, but I got a bit bored of measuring background radiation in my apartment in Amsterdam. But I do want to set up one again, just in case it catches some interesting spike.

It is difficult to keep track of the year because the year is not listed along the X-axis. On page 7 and 8 of Припять I see spikes of up to ~2300 MR/hr, are these true, or measurement glitches? If true, do you know what happened?

Very cool stuff, thanks for sharing!

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 6 points 3 months ago

Very cool! Nice work :D

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 5 points 3 months ago

I think the belief is more grounded in them wanting it to be true. A faith-based belief. In the video he refers to ancient Egyptians and lost hidden knowledge. I would categorize it as a form of pseudo-scientific spirituality.

I don't think the belief starts from a rational basis. The guy likes snakes, has a rational basis for developing immunity through self-envenomation. At some point he might want the project to bring even more value than that. "Ageing" is a nice target because it is an aliment that affects us all and for which we have no solution. The rationalization would then come after hoping that this is true.

As how to rationalize. I am not sure but I have a guess. I often I see rationalizations for this kind of claim to hinge on the idea of adapting the body to survive some form of stress. The stress-adaptation arguments draw an analogy to the concept of working out and vaccines. You stress and break your muscle cells, your muscles recover and become stronger. You inject venom or small quantities of a virus and your body becomes better able to fight it.

Many pseudoscientific ideas generalize the concept of stress adaptation and apply it to other situations even if the data is not available (or, worse, contradicts it). For example: some people will actively expose themselves to low doses of radiation in the hope that this will train their cells to repair DNA damage by up-regulating DNA repair genes. The idea is that they increase their resistance to ageing. For snake venom: my guess is that they imagine that snake venoms will stress some ageing-relevant pathway that will somehow train adapt the body to resist such stress, and this way the body is more resistant to ageing.

What makes bodybuilding and vaccines scientific but radiation dosing and snake-venom-for-ageing pseudoscientific is that... the first two are supported by a lot of data! The others are hypotheses that might be worth testing, but skipping all steps and going right to self-medicating due to holding a strong belief without data is pseudoscientific.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 1 points 3 months ago

Nice! Just yesterday I was finally able to write a simple driver to drive my Core1262-868M. I was search for 'SX1262' to find some discussions and found your attempt. Have you continued playing with it? At the moment I have made a very basic Rx/Tx system to transmit packets for sending sensor data to a raspberry pi. Not sure yet if I will integrate it with Meshtastic yet as sending and capturing LoRa packets will probably be enough for me, but I'm curious.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Hi! I am sorry, I know it is not entirely obvious from the community's description (the community itself has been abandoned it seems), but the community is hosted in a non-political science/nature instance.

I think it is better if I remove the community altogether because it is not moderated and it will inevitably invite this kind of politicized questions.

I will do so in a bit. Perhaps this other community is better for this: https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 1 points 3 months ago

Sometimes it is also just good or bad luck. This time I got lucky. Last month this instance had about a month of problems because the image hosting provider's services came down unexpectedly and they took over 3 weeks to fix the issue. I think it is a good idea to have accounts on different instances - and even better - one can create a single-person instance and use that to interact.

Thanks a lot! I appreciate the gesture of donating but it is not necessary, it is not expensive and I have not gone through the process of setting up a donation system. My recommendation in general is to donate to the development directly if you would like to support the lemmy ecosystem: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

 

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) systems, such as ChatGPT1 or Gemini2, can show impressive reasoning and question-answering capabilities but often ‘hallucinate’ false outputs and unsubstantiated answers3,4. Answering unreliably or without the necessary information prevents adoption in diverse fields, with problems including fabrication of legal precedents5 or untrue facts in news articles6 and even posing a risk to human life in medical domains such as radiology7. Encouraging truthfulness through supervision or reinforcement has been only partially successful8. Researchers need a general method for detecting hallucinations in LLMs that works even with new and unseen questions to which humans might not know the answer. Here we develop new methods grounded in statistics, proposing entropy-based uncertainty estimators for LLMs to detect a subset of hallucinations—confabulations—which are arbitrary and incorrect generations. Our method addresses the fact that one idea can be expressed in many ways by computing uncertainty at the level of meaning rather than specific sequences of words. Our method works across datasets and tasks without a priori knowledge of the task, requires no task-specific data and robustly generalizes to new tasks not seen before. By detecting when a prompt is likely to produce a confabulation, our method helps users understand when they must take extra care with LLMs and opens up new possibilities for using LLMs that are otherwise prevented by their unreliability.

I am not entirely sure if this research article falls within the community's scope, so feel free to remove it if you consider it does not.

 

Cross-posting to the OpenSource community as I think this topic will also be of interest here.

This is an analysis of how "open" different open source AI systems are. I am also posting the two figures from the paper that summarize this information below.

ABSTRACT

The past year has seen a steep rise in generative AI systems that claim to be open. But how open are they really? The question of what counts as open source in generative AI is poised to take on particular importance in light of the upcoming EU AI Act that regulates open source systems differently, creating an urgent need for practical openness assessment. Here we use an evidence-based framework that distinguishes 14 dimensions of openness, from training datasets to scientific and technical documentation and from licensing to access methods. Surveying over 45 generative AI systems (both text and text-to-image), we find that while the term open source is widely used, many models are ‘open weight’ at best and many providers seek to evade scientific, legal and regulatory scrutiny by withholding information on training and fine-tuning data. We argue that openness in generative AI is necessarily composite (consisting of multiple elements) and gradient (coming in degrees), and point out the risk of relying on single features like access or licensing to declare models open or not. Evidence-based openness assessment can help foster a generative AI landscape in which models can be effectively regulated, model providers can be held accountable, scientists can scrutinise generative AI, and end users can make informed decisions.

Figure 2 (click to enlarge): Openness of 40 text generators described as open, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT (bottom) as closed reference point. Every cell records a three-level openness judgement (✓ open, ∼ partial or ✗ closed). The table is sorted by cumulative openness, where ✓ is 1, ∼ is 0.5 and ✗ is 0 points. RL may refer to RLHF or other forms of fine-tuning aimed at fostering instruction-following behaviour. For the latest updates see: https://opening-up-chatgpt.github.io

Figure 3 (click to enlarge): Overview of 6 text-to-image systems described as open, with OpenAI's DALL-E as a reference point. Every cell records a three-level openness judgement (✓ open, ∼ partial or ✗ closed). The table is sorted by cumulative openness, where ✓ is 1, ∼ is 0.5 and ✗ is 0 points.

There is also a related Nature news article: Not all ‘open source’ AI models are actually open: here’s a ranking

PDF Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3630106.3659005

 

ABSTRACT

The past year has seen a steep rise in generative AI systems that claim to be open. But how open are they really? The question of what counts as open source in generative AI is poised to take on particular importance in light of the upcoming EU AI Act that regulates open source systems differently, creating an urgent need for practical openness assessment. Here we use an evidence-based framework that distinguishes 14 dimensions of openness, from training datasets to scientific and technical documentation and from licensing to access methods. Surveying over 45 generative AI systems (both text and text-to-image), we find that while the term open source is widely used, many models are ‘open weight’ at best and many providers seek to evade scientific, legal and regulatory scrutiny by withholding information on training and fine-tuning data. We argue that openness in generative AI is necessarily composite (consisting of multiple elements) and gradient (coming in degrees), and point out the risk of relying on single features like access or licensing to declare models open or not. Evidence-based openness assessment can help foster a generative AI landscape in which models can be effectively regulated, model providers can be held accountable, scientists can scrutinise generative AI, and end users can make informed decisions.

Figure 2 (click to enlarge): Openness of 40 text generators described as open, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT (bottom) as closed reference point. Every cell records a three-level openness judgement (✓ open, ∼ partial or ✗ closed). The table is sorted by cumulative openness, where ✓ is 1, ∼ is 0.5 and ✗ is 0 points. RL may refer to RLHF or other forms of fine-tuning aimed at fostering instruction-following behaviour. For the latest updates see: https://opening-up-chatgpt.github.io/

Figure 3 (click to enlarge): Overview of 6 text-to-image systems described as open, with OpenAI's DALL-E as a reference point. Every cell records a three-level openness judgement (✓ open, ∼ partial or ✗ closed). The table is sorted by cumulative openness, where ✓ is 1, ∼ is 0.5 and ✗ is 0 points.

There is also a related Nature news article: Not all ‘open source’ AI models are actually open: here’s a ranking

PDF Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3630106.3659005

 

We are having a pumpking growing competition at work and I live in an apartment, so I'm working with what I have 😆

The plant already produced many male flowers. From what I have read, the male flowers usually come out 10 - 14 days before the female flowers. They open up for a single day and then they close and fall off.

I found out that tey are edible, so I stuffed a few of them with some left overs as a culinary experiment.

And the first female flower has arrived!

 

TL;DR: This paper describes the finding that there is a specific type of bacterium (Symbiodolus clandestinus) that lives inside of the tissues of several different insects. This bacterium appears to cause no disease, and it is hypothesized that it provides some useful metabolites that the insects are unable to produce themselves. The bacteria can be passed from the mother directly to her offspring. So, this appears to be a widespread symbiotic relation between a bacterium and insects.

The article goes into a lot more depth and describes some other examples of bacteria <-> insect interactions.

 

Here are some images of the sargassum-looking nudibranch in case you don't want to load the PDF file!

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