[-] Sal@mander.xyz 2 points 9 hours ago

This work using high-throughput combinatorial chemistry to find molecules to stop/revert aging is amazing. I have been looking it in the past few days. The authors screened 653,000 different compounds, I am very curious about how expensive this screening was.

I was not aware of DePinho but I am familiar with Schultz's work. I thought that would get a Nobel prize for his work on non-canonical amino acids, but he hasn't yet. I am now placing my bets, Ronald DePinho and Peter G. Schultz will win a Nobel prize.

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submitted 2 days ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/spectroscopy@mander.xyz
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submitted 2 days ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/photonics@mander.xyz
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submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Sal@mander.xyz to c/herpetology@mander.xyz
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submitted 2 days ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/biophysics@mander.xyz
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submitted 2 days ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/ntai@mander.xyz

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.

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submitted 3 days ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/nudibranchs@mander.xyz
[-] Sal@mander.xyz 3 points 3 days ago

Checking back in. Still not working :(

[-] Sal@mander.xyz 12 points 3 days ago

Publishing in a more prestigious journal usually means that your work will be read by a greater number of people. The journal that a paper is published on carries weight on the CV, and it is a relevant parameter for committees reviewing a grant applicant or when evaluating an academic job applicant.

Someone who is able to fund their own research can get away with publishing to a forum, or to some of the Arxivs without submitting to a journal. But an academic that relies on grants and benefits from collaborations is much more likely to succeed in academia if they publish in academic journals. It is not necessarily that academics want to rely on publishers, but it is often a case of either you accept and adapt to the system or you don't thrive in it.

It would be great to find an alternative that cuts the middle man altogether. It is not a simple matter to get researchers to contribute their high-quality work to a zero-prestige experimental system, nor is it be easy to establish a robust community-driven peer-review system that provides a filtering capacity similar to that of prestigious journals. I do hope some alternative system manages to get traction in the coming years.

[-] Sal@mander.xyz 2 points 3 days ago

The structure is shown in the full text:

[-] Sal@mander.xyz 6 points 6 days ago

Thank you for the feedback!

[-] Sal@mander.xyz 2 points 6 days ago

Great to hear! Thanks!

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submitted 1 week ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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

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submitted 1 week ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/houseplants@mander.xyz

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!

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submitted 1 week ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/entomology@mander.xyz

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.

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submitted 1 week ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/archaeology@mander.xyz
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submitted 1 week ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/scicomm@mander.xyz
[-] Sal@mander.xyz 34 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] Sal@mander.xyz 50 points 3 months ago* (last edited 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 😁

[-] Sal@mander.xyz 51 points 5 months ago

Expatriate/expat

Maybe it is not a popular opinion. And perhaps calling it "bigotry" is too far. But I work in a different country from where I was born, and I consider myself an immigrant. I have however seen this trend of referring to educated professionals as "expats" to distinguish us from people who immigrate to escape conflicts and/or poverty. I don't agree that this distinction is necessary or valuable, and I feel uncomfortable when I am described with that term. If I am called that, I usually chuckle and let people know that I'm an immigrant!!

[-] Sal@mander.xyz 43 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)
  • Password hashing occurs server-side. Even without removing the hashing step an admin can intercept the plaintext password during login. Use unique safe passwords.

  • An admin can intercept the jwt authentication cookie and use any account that lives in the instance.

  • Private messages are stored as plaintext in the database

  • Admins can see who upvotes/downvotes what

  • These are not things that are unique to Lemmy. This is common.

  • To avoid having to trust your admin, run an instance.

[-] Sal@mander.xyz 31 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Full genome sequencing.

The price of sequencing continues to decrease as the technology evolves. I have already seen claims of under $1,000 for a full human genome. I haven't looked carefully into those claims, but I think we are around there. In some years full genomes will be so cheap to sequence that it will be routine. I want to buy one of those small Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencers in the future. I'll use it like a pokedex.

[-] Sal@mander.xyz 54 points 11 months ago

Really cool! I'm excited to learn more about you and the project!

What's the format? Should we submit questions beforehand, or will you process questions that arrive at the start time? I've never participated in an AMA 😅

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Sal

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