Salamander

  • 394 Posts
  • 872 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2021

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  • Thanks!

    The way submitters didn’t played by the rules

    It is not that the submitters did not play by the rules. The ‘rules’ of the instance set the scope of the kind of communities that belong here, but I would not expect users from other instances to be aware of these rules. So, it was a mistake on my end not on any poster’s. It would have been better to react sooner, but better now than later.

    There are ways this community could have been both science

    From the name my impression was that the community was about more aligned with futuristic sci-fi, which would be a bit on the edge of the scope but acceptable.




  • The instance has had this policy for over 4 years. The sidebar reads:

    The main focus of this instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields.

    Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instance’s local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.

    The goal when creating this instance was to a place to discuss about scientific discoveries, post pictures of nature, and have a set of communities for this while avoiding polarizing content. If someone wants to discuss politics they can click on ‘All’ and go right to it. The scope is explicitly anti-politics because I do not want to moderate a politically charged or polarizing environment, and I know that many people with interests like mine will also appreciate such a space existing because they see enough pictures of Donald Trump and polarizing discussions elsewhere.

    y’all are a science community and science is being hunted down and destroyed systematically and your response is to try to become less political?

    I do not disagree with you broadly, and that is to an extent why I use common sense and do not enforce the “no politics” rule religiously. There is quite a bit politics that gets through. Although I do prefer to offer users of this instance a politics free experience, if no one complains I usually let it go.

    In this case: I have noticed posts in the front page that have nothing to do with science lately, and they came from this specific community. I then saw some US politics characters attached to articles that had nothing to do with science. I looked through the community and most of it is off-topic, so it makes more sense to lock the community.

    I’m sorry this upsets you, I should have removed the community as soon as it was created, but I did not realize what it was.









  • Sport watches.

    Combination of two tings: I used to think that wearing a watch was irrelevant because I could always see the time in my phone. And I did not want to have an app knowing how many steps I take.

    What changed a few years ago: I stopped having a phone on me most of the time, so a watch became extremely handy for knowing what time it is, and I found out that Garmin watches work perfectly well without an app. So, now, I really like my watch. I am considering getting a fancier one with solar charging, and I even got a chest strap to improve measurement accuracy while running.






  • Yes, this is a problem that happens with a lot of detector types as one tries to push them to detect lower energies.

    In this specific case, light is captured by a retinal molecule that is held within an opsin protei and this excess energy allows it to twist. The opsin protein envelope tunes the environment around the retinal molecule such that it absorbs photons of specific colors. To tune these to lower energies means altering the energy landscape in a way that makes the twisting of the retinal molecule require less energy. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of molecules, and some molecules at room temperature can move with kinetic energies that match the energy of infra-red and sometimes near-infra red photons. So, from time to time, molecules with enough kinetic energy may collide against the protein with enough force to induce the twist without light. Absorbing near-IR light would lead to an increase in thermal noise, because the opsin becomes activated by a collisions more often as opposed to light.

    Here is an image showing the retinal twisting and the energy landscape. The ‘hv’ arrows indicate light absorption, and the opsin’s structure alters the energy curves.

    The core-shell upconversion nanoparticles are special in that the photoactive region in the core is protected from the environment by an inert transparent shell. Light can pass through the shell and create localized electronic excitations within the core, while it is much more difficult to transfer the energy from a molecular collision against the outer layer into a localized excitation in the core. This shell is a strong dampener that protects the core from external influence.

    Here is an example image of the core-shell structure, for reference:



  • Definitely, disclosing (either private or publicly) a vulnerability that has been verified is significantly better than passing on the LLM output without verifying it.

    It isn’t my intention to argue one specific case. What I think is that normalizing public disclosure of LLM-inspired vulnerabilities would lead to a wide distribution of cases. We would have some successful cases like yours, and also some cases of the type that I have mentioned. Increase in disclosures will raise the noise floor, and the fact that it is done publicly adds the additional pressure that I mentioned.

    I see your point, but I don’t agree that the benefit of public awareness offsets the increase in noise. This disagreement isn’t rooted in aspects that we can objectively quantify though - we just have a difference of opinion here.


  • And in that world, doing a private disclosure made a lot of sense because you did a lot of hard work to find it, and it wasn’t easy for somebody to replicate. This was valuable and dangerous knowledge that had to be communicated in a responsible fashion.

    Private disclosure still makes sense to me when you add LLMs into the mix. It is possible that an LLM outputs some plausible-sounding story that over-estimates the actual risk and impact of the exploit. If this story is publicly announced to people who use the software but are not capable of assessing these risks themselves, this can easily have a negative unnecessary consequence - for example, people may bring their server down until an expert or developer provides an assessment or fix.

    This is a source of noise, and I don’t agree that this is better than private disclosure. Via public disclosure one is applying a lot of pressure to the developer(s) to prioritize whatever is being disclosed, which may not always be the nicest thing to do, especially if the impact is not as significant as the LLM suggests. This may not have been what happened in your case (I don’t know the details), but I am thinking about the idea of the average person disclosing publicly LLM-discovered vulnerabilities.












  • Don’t worry, I wouldn’t ban you for this.

    Yes, the physical modulation implemented by LoRa transceivers is proprietary.

    It is not entirely correct to say that the “mesh” itself is proprietary. Meshtastic is open source, even if it relies on proprietary radio hardware. In principle, one could take the Meshtastic codebase and adapt it to a different physical layer.

    It is perfectly reasonable to reject a technology because the full stack is not open. That said, once you look closely at most modern digital and RF hardware, you are extremely likely to encounter proprietary ICs, firmware, or physical layer implementations somewhere in the stack.