this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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Sardonic Grin (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
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[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I know nothing about plants.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Yeah, I am not botanical enough to get this, but presumably it's something poisonous?

[–] [email protected] 137 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Apiaceae, the carrot family, is full of wild species that are incredibly poisonous. Basically if it looks like a carrot in the wild dont eat it or you might die.

[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Same goes for if it looks like a Tomato, those are nightshades and the only ones I know about that aren't deadly to eat are tomatoes and peppers, and the peppers only because the poison they developed doesn't kill you it just makes you feel like your entire digestive tract is on fire.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eggplants, potatoes, ground cherries, tomatillos, huckleberries are all edible too. That said you are right, if it is growing in the wild assume it will kill you. Don't eat it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Huckleberry varieties are all Nightshades? Does that mean blueberries are Nightshades?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Huckleberries and blueberries are not related closely at all. Huckleberries are in the nightshade family, Solanaceae. Blueberries are in the blueberry family, Ericaceae. Their morphologies, or growth forms, are very very different.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't realise blueberries were in the Heather family but it makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Totally. Once you see the flowers, you can't unsee it. Families are based on flower structures. Once you see and begin to know the flower structures, you'll know a sage is a mint, a hibiscus is a mallow, a manzanita is a blueberry, on and on. Fun free puzzles if nothing else.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Youll like this little daily game about guessing plants

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh crap. This is Wordle, but for me! Thank you!

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When I looked into this what I came away with was there was a single species of nightshade that is sometimes called "Garden Huckleberries", which are unrelated to what are commonly known as "true huckleberries". True Huckleberries are all in the genera Vaccinium and Gaylussacia, which are contained in the family Ericaceae, of which "Ericacaea" is either an alternative or misspelling.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You must be confused, or perhaps you're not talking about the same species that I am thinking about. Huckleberries, genus Gaylussacia, are definitely in the same family as blueberries, Vaccinium. They're both Ericaceae, in the subfamily Vaccinioideae. Gaylussacia is definitely not in Solanaceae.

Two species of blueberry as well as cranberry grow natively in a few bog habitats near my home, and huckleberries are also sympatric with these species.

ETA: I saw some context from other comments in this chain that somebody else already beat me to this. I, too, didn't realize that there were, if you were, "false" huckleberries in the nightshade family.

To add to both of our shared confusion, there is even a false huckleberry from within the blueberry family, but instead the Ericoideae subfamily: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/553849-Rhododendron-menziesii. I have no experience with this plant, or even really this subfamily, as it isn't exactly endemic to my neck of the woods.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

True or false, common names are confusing. Huckleberries are called huckleberries, regardless of family or genus. I wasn't confused, I was naive. Just didn't know that other plants were called huckleberries. Binomial nomenclature rocks.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Potatoes, believe it or not, are also nightshades.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Actually I'm pretty sure those can poison you if you don't grab them at the right time

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Yes, and also it can be poisonous later down the line after harvested

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The berries of potatoes are poisonous, just the tubers aren't unless exposed to sunlight.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The tubers will give you a fever if eaten raw.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

And tobacco

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Ah ok, so like Queen Anne's Lace and Poison Hemlock?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Yeah, water hemlock, cowbane, fool's parsley, wild parsnip, etc, etc.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yep. Hemlock is one of them

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Look up “Sardonic Grin”. It’s one of those things that makes you think this is interesting, and also never going to eat wild plants again.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Or hallucinogenic? Although if there were an easy-to-forage hallucinogen that looked like celery I'm pretty sure I'd know about it.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

A trip down the river Styx

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

The roots of the common reed contain dimethyltryptamine. Not sure if it's enough to make a tea, never heard of anyone doing it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Apparently it is indeed referring to hemlock (Oenanthe crocata):

Contains oenanthotoxin. The leaves may be eaten safely by livestock, but the stems and especially the carbohydrate-rich roots are much more poisonous. Animals familiar with eating the leaves may eat the roots when these are exposed during ditch clearance – one root is sufficient to kill a cow, and human fatalities are also known in these circumstances. Scientists at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Italy claimed to have identified this as the plant responsible for producing the sardonic grin, and it is the most-likely candidate for the "sardonic herb", which was a neurotoxic plant used for the ritual killing of elderly people in Phoenician Sardinia. When these people were unable to support themselves, they were intoxicated with this herb and then dropped from a high rock or beaten to death. Criminals were also executed in this way.

(From Wiki page on poisonous plants)

But the main wiki page on Oenanthe crocata doesn't even mention this.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Hemlock water-dropwort looks like celery. It causes muscle spasms, which at times results in the victim dying with a grin on their face.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Looks pretty similar to hemlock.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

Neither do the LLMs you used to identify your “wild celery” lol

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it baffles me that there are ID apps that don't follow the model of 1) very clearly SUGGESTING what it MIGHT be, and 2) only present a level of precision it's actually confident in

having it always present a specific species and just pick the most likely one is so dumb and irresponsible of the designers.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It's a fundamental problem with the tech in general. It inherently has no concept of "I don't know" and will just be confident, specific, and wrong.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (7 children)

That's blatantly untrue. My plant ID app gives multiple suggestions with certainty percentages.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

inaturalist does this, and also lets other people suggest an ID so you can get a consensus.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

My app does this too!

Feeling like half these commenters hating on this feature use one bad program and think the whole concept is bad.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is blatantly false. Classification tasks like this all have a level of certainty for each possible category - it's just up to the person writing the software to interpret those levels of certainty in a way that's useful to the user. Whether this is saying "I don't know" when the certainties are too spread out, or providing a list of options like other people in this thread have said their apps do. The problem is that "100% certainty" comes off well with the general public, so there's a financial incentive to make the system seem more certain than it is by using a layer (from memory it's called Softmax?) that will return only the category with the highest degree of certainty.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

uhhh do you have any clue how it actually works? i mean maybe there's some sort of visual AI tech that doesn't let you make it say "idk fam" but the standard stuff just gives a point value to each result, and you could just.. have a minimum limit..

and like i'm pretty certain the current chatbots available generally are capable of responding that they don't know, they're certainly capable of "recognizing" when it's a topic they're not allowed to talk about.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This actually is a symptom from the sort of "beneficial" overfit in Deep Learning. As someone whose research is in low data, long tails, and few shot learning, there's a few things that smaller networks did better in generalization, and one thing they particularly did better (without explicit training for it) is gauging uncertainty. This uncertainty is sometimes referred to as calibration. Calibrating deep networks can yield decent probabilities that can be used to show uncertainty.

There are other tricks for this. My favorite strategies prep the network for learning new things. Large margin training and the like are a good thing to look into. Having space in the output semantic space (the layer immediately before the output or earlier for encoder decoder style networks) allows for larger regions for distinct unknown values to be separated from the known ones, which helps inherently calibrate the network.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Oh so poisoning the elderly with hemlock was more common than just executing annoying philosophers eh ?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My app only says "dicot" so now that's what I call all plants.

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