Salamander

  • 23 Posts
  • 157 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2021

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  • I did not know of the term “open washing” before reading this article. Unfortunately it does seem like the pending EU legislation on AI has created a strong incentive for companies to do their best to dilute the term and benefit from the regulations.

    There are some paragraphs in the article that illustrate the point nicely:

    In 2024, the AI landscape will be shaken up by the EU’s AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI law, with a projected impact on science and society comparable to GDPR. Fostering open source driven innovation is one of the aims of this legislation. This means it will be putting legal weight on the term “open source”, creating only stronger incentives for lobbying operations driven by corporate interests to water down its definition.

    […] Under the latest version of the Act, providers of AI models “under a free and open licence” are exempted from the requirement to “draw up and keep up-to-date the technical documentation of the model, including its training and testing process and the results of its evaluation, which shall contain, at a minimum, the elements set out in Annex IXa” (Article 52c:1a). Instead, they would face a much vaguer requirement to “draw up and make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary about the content used for training of the general-purpose AI model according to a template provided by the AI Office” (Article 52c:1d).

    If this exemption or one like it stays in place, it will have two important effects: (i) attaining open source status becomes highly attractive to any generative AI provider, as it provides a way to escape some of the most onerous requirements of technical documentation and the attendant scientific and legal scrutiny; (ii) an as-yet unspecified template (and the AI Office managing it) will become the focus of intense lobbying efforts from multiple stakeholders (e.g., [12]). Figuring out what constitutes a “sufficiently detailed summary” will literally become a million dollar question.

    Thank you for pointing out Grayjay, I had not heard of it. I will look into it.


  • Salamander@mander.xyzMtoScience Memes@mander.xyzElsevier
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    2 days ago

    Some time last year I learned of an example of such a project (peerreview on GitHub):

    The goal of this project was to create an open access “Peer Review” platform:


    Peer Review is an open access, reputation based scientific publishing system that has the potential to replace the journal system with a single, community run website. It is free to publish, free to access, and the plan is to support it with donations and (eventually, hopefully) institutional support.

    It allows academic authors to submit a draft of a paper for review by peers in their field, and then to publish it for public consumption once they are ready. It allows their peers to exercise post-publish quality control of papers by voting them up or down and posting public responses.


    I just looked it up now to see how it is going… And I am a bit saddened to find out that the developer decided to stop. The author has a blog in which he wrote about the project and about why he is not so optimistic about the prospects of crowd sourced peer review anymore: https://www.theroadgoeson.com/crowdsourcing-peer-review-probably-wont-work , and related posts referenced therein.

    It is only one opinion, but at least it is the opinion of someone who has thought about this some time and made a real effort towards the goal, so maybe you find some value from his perspective.

    Personally, I am still optimistic about this being possible. But that’s easy for me to say as I have not invested the effort!











  • Awesome! The one with the sustained source loop is my favorite:

    Also, the one that shoots out flames paints a picture similar to how a synchrotron behaves, shooting out X-rays into the beamlines as the electron bunches move around.

    Upon looking into it closer, the synchrotron is a bit of a mixture of those two concepts - the source loop (booster ring) that is fed by the linear accelerator, and then the larger loop (storage room) that feeds X-rays the beamlines. Of course, many details differ, but still it is interesting to notice the similarities !


  • If the timing is right, I would bring a mushroom grow bag with mushrooms sprouting.

    If not… probably my radiacode gamma spectrometer and some of my radioactive items. Maybe a clock with radium painted dials and a piece of trinitite. I think that there are many different points of discussion that can be of interest to a broad audience (radioactivity, spectroscopy, electronics, US labor law story of the radium girls, nuclear explosions, background radiation… etc). As a bonus I can bring a UV flash light and show the radium fluorescence. Adults love UV flash lights.


  • Salamander@mander.xyzMtoScience Memes@mander.xyzmycology
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    3 months ago

    I think that they are referring to Paxillus involotus

    It is quite an interesting mushroom. It was considered “safe to eat” for a long time, but it contains an antigen that a human’s immune system can learn to attack.

    The antigen is still of unknown structure but it stimulates the formation of IgG antibodies in the blood serum.

    I once looked into whether this immune response builds up over many exposures, or if it is a random event that has a probability of happening for each exposure. I don’t remember finding a convincing answer… If it is a random event, then mushroom could be considered a “Russian roulette” mushroom that will usually provide a nice meal, but, if unlucky, you may experience the following:

    Poisoning symptoms are rapid in onset, consisting initially of vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and associated decreased blood volume. Shortly after these initial symptoms appear, hemolysis develops, resulting in reduced urine output, hemoglobin in the urine or outright absence of urine formation, and anemia. Hemolysis may lead to numerous complications including acute kidney injury, shock, acute respiratory failure, and disseminated intravascular coagulation. These complications can cause significant morbidity with fatalities having been reported.

    I agree with you that this is probably unrelated to the “generally similar to humans” comment. I feel like this fantasy is a combination of the above fact mixed in with the fact that the Fungi belong to the Opisthokonts, which places them closer to animals than plants, and so they share some interesting cellular characteristics with us. This places them closer to animals than plants, but “generally similar to humans” is perhaps a bit of a stretch _

    But, it is just a meme about a guy being hyped about mushrooms. Hopefully people don’t expect memes to be super accurate 😁




  • I have heard of scams like this one happening to people I know for many years now in Mexico, but without AI. In its most basic form the scammer does not need to know who they are calling, because the scam relies largely in volume and the psychology of fear.

    The victim picks up, someome screams something along the lines of ‘mom/dad please help’, and then the “kidnapper” takes the phone away and says that they have taken their daughter/son hostage and that they must not hang up the phone. They do this to several numbers until someone takes the bait and freaks out, often revealing additional information (like their kid’s name) in the process.

    With AI the scammer could spend the time and collect information to make the scam more believable. But I don’t think that the voice is the bottleneck for these scams. Those who have experienced this (including my mom, uncle, grandma, and acquaintances) say that in the moment of shock they really do believe they hear the voice of their family member.

    The AI method makes a more sophisticated class of these attacks easier to perform, but it is still a sophisticated attack that requires gathering data, and the execution will still require some form of a performance. Or… At least that’s what I think






  • Thank you for the positivity 💚 I wholeheartedly agree!

    Drama and negativity drives engagement, and this form of engagement can easily trigger a feedback loop in which negativity keeps piling on and voices of support are practically muted.

    We are participating in an open source project that has some very ambitious goals. Things can be messy, mistakes happen, there are risks, and people have many different opinions and moods. Heated discussions can be a healthy part of the process. But, once the dust is allowed to settle for a bit, it is good to remember that we are humans and that we are here because we have some shared goals.

    I think the majority of people around here are kind and have a positive outlook, but perhaps it is more motivating to speak out when we have negative comments than positive ones. So, thank you for taking the time to write this positive message!