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Sal

@Sal@mander.xyz

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

Sal OP ,
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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.

Sal OP ,
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The bottle is a carbon dioxide tank. It is connected to a regulator that can open/close the valve to let CO2 out. During the day it brings the CO2 level under the leaves to around 800 - 1000 parts per million (ppm). Usually the level in the air is closer to 400 - 500 ppm, and fast growing plants can grow faster with some extra CO2 in the air to build into sugars during photosynthesis. At least in theory... For me it is an experiment in CO2 regulation as I have measured and decreased CO2 levels in the past (when growing mushrooms and tempeh) but I had never actively delivered it, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn.

It turns out pumpkin flowers are very fragrant, and the odor is very pleasant, but I am not good at describing smells with words, sorry... To me it smells like a mixture of a rhododendron flower and a pumpkin. I recently went to a wedding in which they served ricotta stuffed zuccini flowers (very similar flowers) and the cook clearly knew what she was doing, in that case the zuccini flowers still had some of the fragrance and this made the dish taste very special. In my attempt I filled the flowers with some curry rice and then pan-seared them in butter, and all the fragrance went away in the process. So the flower was just a vessel with the soft texture of a petal and the taste of browned butter. I did not succeed in keeping any flower flavor. It was a quick-and-dirty experiment... I would like to learn more about cooking with flowers while keeping some flavor.

Sal OP ,
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My plan is to remove the petals from the freshest male flower available and rub that directly.

I store the previous set of male flowers in a cup with a bit of water in the fridge :

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/e171c77e-4b7d-4f2d-a30e-04ad14b74101.jpeg

If I don't pick a male flower, the next day it looks like this:

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/c7779ce0-9eda-4d2a-8935-53884883d699.jpeg

I did this in case that the male flowers would stop coming out when the females came. But I think my worry was not warranted... because the plant is swarming with male flowers. That's why I have begun cooking them.

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/c98ec2cc-ef2f-4ad3-83fd-1ecea817ed43.jpeg

I am still not sure of whether I will pollinate a single flower to try to grow a large pumpkin, or if I will go for multiple pumpkins.

Sal OP ,
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Hahahaha, woops, I had worse photos but none better 😂

Sal OP ,
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Yeah, I have three moisture-in-soil sensors inserted around the plant. The idea was to use to them to control the irrigation, but they did not work out.

Sal OP ,
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In the case of tempeh keeping the right ambient temperature (~30) and adding a bit of vinegar to the beans is the best way I have experienced to make it grow fast and healthy. The CO2 I only measure to check for stale air. The tempeh fungus breathes in oxygen and exhales CO2, and if you have a lot of tempeh in a small incubator the CO2 can get too high.

In some techniques for mushroom growing, the mycelium is grown inside of a tub. The fungus exhales CO2 into the closed tub and inhibits this high CO2 condition inhibits fruiting. The fruiting stage can be stimulated by using a fan to push out the CO2. In the case of tempeh one can surround the tempeh with fresh air to stimulate the tempeh to produce spores, which can then be ground with white rice to create a powder to inoculate a lot more tempeh.

Sal OP ,
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The sensors are from AZDelivery, these ones. They are connected to an arduino nano which reads the capacitance values and sends them over to a raspberry pi 5. The raspberry pi 5 is connected to a few other sensors (CO2, particle counter, air humidity and temperature all from Sensirion), and there is a 7-inch raspberry pi display that the pi writes images to. I was making a home air quality station but I decided to place everything around the pumpkin instead for now, to see if I could get something interesting out of that. But, so far most of them have not been practically useful.

Sal OP ,
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There is a bit of humor and a bit of truth. I don't have a garden and so when I was looking into whether it was possible to grow a pumpkin in a pot, most of what I found stated that the pumpkins need a lot of ground to have a strong and healthy root system, and a lot of sun, and so it is not recommended to grow them indoors. I thought that the plant would begin to grow but at some point the pot would not be able to sustain the root system and the plant would die. This has happened to me with many trees that I try to grow indoors - most recently my tamarind trees. They look perfectly healthy and then drop dead. Well, I am not certain of why the trees die but I suspect their roots rot.

But the humor is that I still don't think it is a good idea to grow this plant indoors. It has taken over a lot of space! My original plan was to prune it and keep it small, but I noticed that even the farthest leaves are able to pull moisture from the pot with no problem, and so I am letting the plant grow to see what happens.

Sal OP ,
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I have been very succesful with indoor peppers. With tomatoes I had too much plant and a few cherry tomatoes (from a supermarket cherry tomato's seed)

Sal ,
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Thank you being around, bringing this nice community here, and helping with the federation!! 😁

Sal Mod ,
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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!

Sal Mod ,
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That's really cool, I will use it

Intracellular symbiont Symbiodolus is vertically transmitted and widespread across insect orders ( academic.oup.com )

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...

Sal ,
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🥳 Muchas gracias!

Sal ,
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Jajaja, sí, soy Mexicano 😁

Sal Mod ,
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You can start learning about plants by making use of local field guides. In the EU we have Collin's guides (Tree Guide, Wild Flower). I can also recommend "Identification of Trees and Shrubs in Winter Using Buds and Twigs" by Bernd Schulz which has beautiful illustrations of the details of the twigs and buds of plants during winter, and so it is great for learning to identify trees when they lack leaves. This book is also EU-centered. If you would like a technical book to get really into evolution and taxonomy of plants, I can recommend Plant Systematics by Michael G. Simpson, which is quite good! This one covers plants from around the entire world, but it is not light reading.

For plant nutrition, I read "Soil Science for Gardeners" by Robert Pavlis before I bought the more technical plant nutrition one. Robert Pavlis is the author of a website about gardening myths (https://www.gardenmyths.com/) and he has some books about compost and plant science. I have only read the Soil Science one and it is good. It covers the structure of different types of soil, how nutrients stick to and are release from soil grains as a function of factors such as acidity, the structure of roots, etc... If like this book but feel like you would like to know the details much more in-depth, you can then get Mineral Nutrition of Higher Plants by Horst Marschner, which is a technical text that goes into specifics about the types of nutritients, the concentrations that you can expect under different conditions, their transport into roots and through the plant, metabolism, etc... This book requires a good understanding of chemistry and it is dense, with lots of tables, figures, and data.

Sal OP Mod ,
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Good to hear!

Sal OP Mod ,
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Thanks!

Since the upgrade, I can see (here) that activities from lemmy.world are being fetched significantly faster. I will let it run for some time and hopefully this speed-up is enough to catch up.

Sal OP Mod ,
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Ah, thanks!

Hmm, I am not sure about how the queue gets filled. It might be that the instance needs to process all of the older content first.

I will give it some hours and if it does not look like it will catch up, I will look into other methods.

Sal OP Mod ,
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The instance is catching up at a rate of ~15 activities/s, and we are 2.5M activities behind. So it should take about 2 days to catch up.

I have tried fiddling with some parameters to see if this could be improved, but I did not find the right knob to tune. Best is probably to just let it run 😄

Sal OP Mod ,
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(@Shdwdrgn ) I think it is related with the processing of so many activities per second while syncing with Lemmy.World.

I have tried changing some rate limits and the number of maximum database connections, but I get similar errors while moving around the site. The server is running well below 100% on all metrics, and the logs don't produce an obvious error. I will wait until we catch up with Lemmy.World and see if that fixes the issue. If it doesn't, then I will trouble shoot more in-depth.

Sal OP Mod ,
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As soon as it comes!

Sal OP Mod ,
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Aaaah, thanks! 😆 It is done now.

Sal OP Mod ,
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Thanks! The database is currently fetching lemmy world data as fast as possible, so this might be saturating the database. Once the syncronization is tested, I will try to tune postgres if it still happens.

Sal OP Mod ,
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This was a small update so it only required me to get to my computer. I just had to change 0.19.4 to 0.19.5 and restart the docker containers :)

The 0.19.3 -> 0.19.4 was lot more involved because of the database upgrade and all of the extra server stuff that I needed to catch up on.

Sal OP Mod ,
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Well it is here now! Almost caught up :-)

Sal OP Mod ,
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Hey @RobotToaster , @lvxferre , and @Shdwdrgn - we are now in sync with lemmy.world and the database under much less stress. This seems to have fixed the problems that I observed on my end. Are your problems also resolved?

Sal OP Mod ,
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It should have been fixed about 13 minutes ago! Thanks for checking! If problems persist I will try to fine-tune the database settings as suggested above.

Sal OP Mod ,
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It works now :)

Sal OP Mod ,
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Thanks! All seems to be in order now 😌

Sal OP Mod ,
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Ah, thanks. I think that was when I reboot the instance to change a setting that controls how post thumbnails are generated, as the new setting was failing to generate thumbnails for many posts.

Sal OP Mod ,
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Great, thanks for letting me know!! I did a bit of research and I think that the next time I need to upgrade the instance I will move it to a dedicated server instead of a virtual private server. But hopefully it runs smoothly for some time! :)

Sal OP Mod ,
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Great to hear! Thanks!

Sal ,
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Yes, sorry, there was some serious lagg in fetching posts from Lemmy World that persisted for several days and accumulated a 1-week delay.

But after upgrading Mander it is now fetching data from LW quite rapidly and it should be back in-sync in about a day and a half from now.

If you are curious about the ranking algorithm, there is some info here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

Sal ,
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I find it satisfying to see the graph come down :)

Sal ,
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Amazing work! Thanks a lot!! Took me a few days to get to it but I have upgraded now and it looks great 😄

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