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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I followed the work of some A.M. groups for a bit and they have basically proven it can be eaten without dying. The question is, what benefits do the different A.M. compounds have? Unfortunately, everything I heard or read from those groups was anecdotal and not formalized. Admittedly, I am a year or so behind on my fungi studies so there may be new info out there.

    Speaking of anecdotal, my experience with psilocybin has been phenomenal. Granted, I don’t eat much anymore, but I don’t really need to. Studies do support its use for PTSD treatment for vets (me) and for recovering addicts and alcoholics (also me). I only mention this as there are likely thousands of undiscovered compounds in mushrooms that may be phenomenal for mental health The evidence (anecdotal or not) is looking good for A.M.

    Alas, there are risks.


  • The better advice is if you don’t know what something is, don’t put it in your mouth at all. If someone was to try this when they are desperate for food, usually if alone and lost, they could make a bad situation even worse.

    There are quite a few stories or people eating death caps (Amanita phalloides), especially after cooking and not being able to detect anything off until they need to go to the hospital.

    Aminita muscaria has been used medicinally for years and has some really good potential. If you really want to trip though, just stick with psilocybin. Ibotenic acid is a neurotoxin and there is not a reliable way to test dosages at home. The last dosage advice I read was just eat a half mouthfull and you should be good if your stomach doesn’t cramp up to all hell. (The companies that have been pumping out muscimol gummies recently are shady as fuck if you were wondering.)

    The aminita family is still super interesting though and deserves a ton more research.




  • remotelove@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzBoss Mode
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    15 days ago

    Photons are the smallest unit of energy that can be transferred between a light wave and a different particle.

    That is a much better description than what I have heard for the last 30 years: “A photon is a packet of energy”. That made no sense to me back then, and makes no sense to me now and, IMHO, doesn’t quite give a good visualization. It’s a placeholder, and I suppose it is slightly accurate depending on how “packet” is defined.


  • Enjoyment of art is subjective and not generally related to education level or even awareness of art being generated by AI or not. Is someone likes something, they like it.

    If you like green circles and I like blue squares and we are both self-aware and confident enough to understand our own feelings, there is not much education that could change our feelings. Education may change our respect and appreciation for other forms of art, but it should rarely change our preferences unless there is something extremely relatable I lean about your green circles. (There are thousands more conditions that might shift my opinions. Education is just a single variable, is my point )

    Edit: My use of caveats was intended to be extremely liberal in this particular case. Opinion and preference can be extremely dynamic.


  • remotelove@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzBoss Mode
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    16 days ago

    That’ll break a few brains. To elaborate with an example: From the perspective of a photon, it’s “life” is over as soon as it begins. Even though it takes about 8 mins for a photon to travel from the sun to the earth from our perspective, no time at all has passed for it.

    (Correct me if I misspoke.)




  • Not really surprising as we had recently evolved to stand on two legs and probably lacked the brain power to hunt effectively. We only started using fire sometime during the following two million years as a we transitioned into “modern” humans. Fire was likely a huge motivator to begin consuming meat once the maillard reaction was “discovered”. The last ice age probably kicked out hunting skills into high gear due to sparse vegetation and the need to consume more fats and proteins.



  • Maybe. People with more technical knowledge should understand that LLMs aren’t magic or sentient and have some severe limitations. Hell, I have been tinkering with ML and ANNs for a better part of 15 years or so and they can be extremely useful. (I am no expert and never indend to be.)

    It’s the marketing wank, scams, art theft and all the bullshit that pisses me off now. In that regard, I am squarely in the “Fuck AI” category. There is absolutely nothing phenomenal that has come of this recent bubble in the commercial space. AI generated images are mostly trash, articles are riddled with gross factual errors, phishing and other scams are more realistic (and maybe even more dynamic) now and public forums contain even more annoying bots. And the worst bit is that AI generated media, like music, is just a collection of averaged values with no originality.

    That bell curve represents something but it isn’t IQ.