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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • (Swiss)Germans are completely mad about food.

    It’s their culture to complain about everything, except food. All they care about is that it’s as bland as possible and has big portions. If you manage that, they’ll give you five stars every time.

    I spent 3 years living in Germany, and not only can you not get anything spicy for love nor money, they also don’t use herbs. It just blows my mind. They’re physically so close to France and Italy, but the food is so far away.


  • One of the important things in many kinds of meditation is it’s not about stopping the bees, but noticing them.

    I remember hearing about some Buddhist monk who was famed for his meditation. Someone asked him how long he could sit before his mind wandered “oh about seven seconds normally”. He just got very good at noticing when his mind wandered and trying again.



  • Honestly, if you’re sharing office files you’re probably using office 365. This means everything is a web app first and therefore Linux compatible.

    I tried using the desktop version of word on a Mac last week, and the latency was so bad on a shared document that I had to switch to the web app anyway.

    Basically, if you just want to use Linux you’ll be fine. If instead you don’t want to use Microsoft, you’ll probably have lots of problems.

    Microsoft have been brutally effective in getting their tentacles into academic institutes, and you’ll find that everything from email to logging into internal sites relies on an office 365 account.



  • Nah, you’re forgetting how fucked the US is.

    Citizen’s United mean it’s absolutely fine for billionaires to spend as much money as they like supporting geriatric fascists, providing they don’t ask the fascists how they’d like the money spent.

    Providing Elon keeps going off half-cocked and making decisions on his own and isn’t following instructions from the trump campaign this is all perfectly legal.

    And even if he is acting on orders, how could you ever prove it?








  • OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzSardonic Grin
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    2 months ago

    I’m not describing binary classification, I’m describing multiclass. “Group classification” isn’t really a thing. Yes, your ml system probably guesses what kind of plant it is and then looks up the ediblity of components.

    The problem with this is how they will handle rare plants that aren’t in the dataset, or that are in the dataset but with insufficient data to be recognised.

    Because multiclass assumes that it’s seen representative data on all possible outputs (e.g. plant types) it will tend to be dangerously confident on plant types it hasn’t seen before.

    This is because it can rule out other classes. E.g. if you’re trying to classify as rose, tulip, or daisy and you get a bramble, your classifier is likely to be very certain it’s a rose because tulips and daisies don’t have thorns. So your softmax score is likely to show heavy confidence in rose even though it’s actually none of them.

    This is exactly what can go wrong when you try to use the softmax/standard multiclass approach and come across an interesting rare mushroom or wild carrot. You don’t want it to guess which type of plant in the database it’s most like, even if this guess comes with scores, you want it to say that it genuinely doesn’t know and you shouldn’t eat it.


  • OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzSardonic Grin
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    2 months ago

    The key issue here is that ‘level of certainty’ doesn’t really mean what you would like it to.

    You get back a number yes, but it can change according to what’s visible in the background, the angle that the plants at, how close is it to the camera, and how nice the camera is you’re using (professional photographers use expensive cameras and take shots of different things to everyone else).

    Interpreting this score as “how safe is it to eat the plant” is a really bad idea. You will still eat the wrong plant. These scores can lead to very confident random guessing when you show it a plant it’s never seen before.

    And no, softmax is a trick for making the scores all sum to one, so you get back a confidence for every possible thing the image could be of.