[HN Gopher] Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphib...
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       Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to
       science
        
       Author : raybb
       Score  : 150 points
       Date   : 2023-05-03 17:41 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.science.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
        
       | jdthedisciple wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | slmjkdbtl wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
           | jdthedisciple wrote:
           | Thanks ChatGPT
        
             | slmjkdbtl wrote:
             | You're welcome! We hope you enjoyed your experience using
             | our model and we look forward to seeing more of what you
             | can create in the future :) #ChatbotGeneration
        
               | rashkov wrote:
               | Your personal site (in your profile) is quite the work of
               | art, brought me joy
        
               | slmjkdbtl wrote:
               | Thank you so much! And sorry for the trolling.
        
         | kranke155 wrote:
         | Could be someone testing it out seeing if he can get away with
         | it.
        
         | tysam_and wrote:
         | They sorta read like those ride reviews from the theme park
         | denizens of SimCoaster tbh.
        
         | skullone wrote:
         | Do you have any examples before they were deleted? I wonder if
         | I'd even recognize a fancy bot comment
        
           | InitialLastName wrote:
           | At the moment it's a few brand new accounts posting
           | essentially the same content-less statement that covers the
           | big points in the headline {novelty, pollination, frog}.
           | 
           | Example: That's amazing! It's incredible that we are still
           | discovering new species, and that some of them can even have
           | special abilities like pollinating. I'm looking forward to
           | reading more about this frog.
        
             | throwawayadvsec wrote:
             | I don't see the point of making bots on HN to post about
             | some damn frogs
             | 
             | those are probably just boring people
        
               | detaro wrote:
               | the point of the bots isn't posting about frogs, they are
               | posting about frogs to (badly) look like users that have
               | normal activity when they do start spamming or mass-
               | upvoting.
        
             | CobrastanJorji wrote:
             | Kind of concerning that "hey that's pretty neat" comments
             | are immediately suspected (probably accurately) of being
             | bots. A comment like that example isn't useful to the other
             | comment readers, but it's probably pretty motivating to the
             | author, and it makes forums more positive places. Removing
             | the organic versions of those will make forums a more
             | negative place, and that's a shame.
        
               | InitialLastName wrote:
               | I'd be more accepting of a "hey that's pretty neat"
               | comment if it didn't read like the equivalent of a middle
               | schooler's attempt to restate the headline as if they
               | read the article (with some hallucinations, such as this
               | being a newly-discovered species).
               | 
               | Edit to add: Sibling comment has me questioning whether
               | _I 'm_ a robot
        
               | berlinmarzahn wrote:
               | [dead]
        
           | csallen wrote:
           | Turn on "showdead" in your HN account settings, and you can
           | see deleted content.
        
         | LegitShady wrote:
         | unfortunately this is the future of the entire internet - and
         | not just the comments the submissions as well. the search for
         | authenticity and actual human material will become the most
         | valuable thing.
         | 
         | This isn't that different from what we have now as people have
         | abandoned corporate messaging for communities and
         | podcasts/youtube/etc to try to find authentic human voices. The
         | difference will be how much harder it will become to catch the
         | bots.
        
           | Blikkentrekker wrote:
           | If it ever become impossible to spot a human from a bit, then
           | bots become valuable contributors to online discussion with
           | interesting insights so I don't see the problem.
        
             | cubefox wrote:
             | > We can thus imagine a technologically highly advanced
             | society, containing many sorts of complex structures, some
             | of which are much smarter and more intricate than anything
             | that exists today, in which there would nevertheless be a
             | complete absence of any type of being whose welfare has
             | moral significance. In a sense, this would be an
             | uninhabited society. All the kinds of being that we care
             | even remotely about would have vanished.
             | 
             | https://nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution
        
             | dangling42 wrote:
             | [dead]
        
             | pizzeriaricardo wrote:
             | [dead]
        
             | bigdictinstance wrote:
             | [flagged]
        
             | NoZebra120vClip wrote:
             | https://xkcd.com/810/
        
             | LegitShady wrote:
             | that depends on what your purpose is for going online and
             | engaging in social networks/forums
        
           | hackbert wrote:
           | And the tough part is new users being kicked out when someone
           | thinks they're a bot. How do we protect people from the bot
           | witch-hunt?
        
             | noizejoy wrote:
             | On the other hand if your human comment is
             | indistinguishable from a bot comment, maybe it's ok to be
             | kicked out?
             | 
             | Related: Reverse Turing Test:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Turing_test
        
               | LegitShady wrote:
               | It depends on the community. I think its ok for humans to
               | not be perfect, sometimes. Meanwhile I have no interest
               | in what ChatGPT thinks about anything.
        
             | ghoogl wrote:
             | [dead]
        
             | InitialLastName wrote:
             | You've hit a pet peeve of mine:
             | 
             | The key feature of witch hunts as a concept is the non-
             | existence of witches. If you have a hunt for something that
             | certainly exists (Soviet spies infiltrating US institutions
             | come to mind) it definitively isn't a witch-hunt.
             | 
             | For my part, I'm going to keep downvoting comments that say
             | nothing in the most bland way imaginable, and flagging
             | anyone who posts "I put your question into ChatGPT; here's
             | what it says" (in contexts other than discussions of chat
             | bots).
        
           | cubefox wrote:
           | I actually think some major commercial use cases of the
           | OpenAI API are a) fake reviews on Amazon etc and b) SEO spam.
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | Without naming names - the other day, I sat on a
             | presentation related to a commercial offering of some SOTA
             | LLM APIs; there was a slide listing a dozen use cases
             | claimed to have been piloted or already tested. I
             | distinctly remember being a bit disgusted by how all,
             | excepting one or two, were highly morally questionable, as
             | they boiled down to improving or scaling all the usual ugly
             | kinds of marketing and marketing-related surveillance
             | schemes.
             | 
             | The last time I felt this kind of disappointment was when
             | those Bluetooth Low Energy beacons ("iBeacon") became a hot
             | topic - a lot of startups popped up, and quite quickly,
             | they've mostly settled on the same primary use case:
             | retail. That is, tracking and spamming unsuspecting users
             | as they move about shopping malls.
        
             | Baeocystin wrote:
             | https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aamazon.com+%22as+an+
             | a...
             | 
             | It's already starting, humorously at least for now.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | mmanfrin wrote:
         | Very strange indeed, first I've seen it, but they're all the
         | same format and all new accounts.
        
         | hombre_fatal wrote:
         | Bots seem to be seasonal creatures. Some months you won't see
         | any. And then some months you'll see four per submission. I'd
         | just downvote and reconvene when it seems to be a substantial
         | issue.
         | 
         | As for GPT, the bots you usually see on HN are just as easily
         | written by humans. GPT makes sense for scale, but it's not very
         | interesting when bots are posting at such low volume, so it
         | doesn't necessarily have to be the case nor does it really
         | change anything.
        
           | TeMPOraL wrote:
           | Yeah, bots - sure. GPT? No way. My rapid-classification
           | pattern matcher, honed on two decades of running blogs and
           | web bulletin boards, recognizes the shape, cadence and sound
           | of these comments as indicative of the usual kind of spam
           | comment, common in the last 15+ years.
           | 
           | I.e. they came out of some boring, old-school script.
           | 
           | (Though I do wonder, how much of the spam comments on random,
           | long-forgotten wordpress blogs, ended up in the GPT-{3,4}
           | training data.)
        
           | doctoboggan wrote:
           | I see 4 dead comments, but I suspect one of them is from a
           | real human (derjanni)
        
             | hackbert wrote:
             | I've seen a lot of new users today that were rage silenced,
             | including obviously human ones.
        
       | samstave wrote:
       | just curious, how do underwater plants pollinate in general,
       | while Ive never thought about it - I guess it would be currents?
        
         | tomrod wrote:
         | PBS Eons has a few related videos iirc
        
           | samstave wrote:
           | But do they pollinate through their roots? because - then a
           | whole realm of hydroponic polination for anything that can be
           | pollinated through a root, would be really interesting.
           | 
           | Think of real Wasabi - which thrives in very shallow,
           | consistently flowing steams...
           | 
           | -- Nevermind, I find the answers...
           | 
           | Wasabi, still uses flowering insect polination in the wild,
           | but is farmed via vegatative cloning.
           | 
           | Seaweed is really interesting, male and female plants release
           | cells that fuse to create the zygote
           | 
           | ---
           | 
           | Thanks for the min rabbit hole by posting this to HN
           | 
           | ----
           | 
           | Sexual reproduction in seaweed typically involves the
           | production of male and female gametes, which are released
           | into the water column. The gametes then fuse to form zygotes,
           | which develop into a new seaweed plant.
           | 
           | Asexual reproduction in seaweed involves the fragmentation of
           | the plant, where pieces of the seaweed break off and develop
           | into new individuals.
           | 
           | In commercial seaweed farming, propagation is typically done
           | through vegetative propagation or by seeding. Vegetative
           | propagation involves taking cuttings from mature seaweed
           | plants and growing them in a suitable environment until they
           | form new plants. Seeding involves the placement of young
           | spores or young plants onto lines or ropes, which are then
           | suspended in the water and allowed to grow.
        
         | pvaldes wrote:
         | Most underwater "plants" are algae, too primitive to produce
         | flowers. Their life cycles are complicated and the fecundation
         | happens in special short lived individuals called gametophytes
         | that are generated from spores and produce gametes that fuse
         | into other spores. They don't produce pollen, so can't be
         | pollinated.
         | 
         | To speak crudely, pollen is like a vase that hosts inside a
         | crew of "spermatozoan like" gametes and then injects them
         | directly in the right place. Algae just release the gametes
         | without the "mothership". Some have "smart" gametes that act
         | basically like tiny animals. This was a headache for a lot of
         | time until a new kingdom was created for "neither exactly a
         | plant nor an animal".
         | 
         | The upper aquatic plants normally just raise the flowers over
         | the surface to use the old reliable insects (Lotus). Only a few
         | remain totally submerged at all times (Posidonia) and those
         | probably use crustaceans and sea currents as pollinators.
        
       | zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
       | This is super cute
        
       | antalyagrill wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | doenertier wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | derjanni wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | sarahbecker wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | hackernj wrote:
       | That's the bee's knees!
        
       | darth_avocado wrote:
       | This is strange but I swear growing up, I read in science
       | textbooks that pollinators included insects, birds, mammals,
       | reptiles AND AMPHIBIANS. Maybe I'm misremembering or it is one of
       | those Mandela effect things?
        
       | raybb wrote:
       | The frog the article talks about:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenohyla_truncata
        
       | dvt wrote:
       | Awesome discovery, and I absolutely love this alliteration:
       | 
       | > planet's pantheon of pollinators
        
         | gweinberg wrote:
         | Yeah, except it really isn't a pantheon. "Pandemonium" might
         | work better.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-03 23:00 UTC)