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mycowerk

25 karma · joined November 2, 2021

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mycowerk··on Artificial photosynthesis can produce food without sunshine
Cultivation of caloric crops are one of the largest contributors to agricultural land use. Disruption here would have a huge environmental impact. Once carbon dioxide has been fixed you can use carbohydrates as an energy feedstock for many downstream organisms. Where's our lab grown starch startups at?
mycowerk··on BirdNET-Pi: Automated, locally run bird sound identification and tracking
Yeh this was my initial concern with optical silhouette classification. The altitude and targets are quite small (and rapidly moving). I've thought about using optical flow analysis to track wingbeat frequency etc as I feel this might be a little simpler to acquire.

On wingbeat frequency I'm very curious to play around with mmWave doppler radar (there's some RF on chip stuff around), emitting a relatively isotropic signal might allow for a pretty wide field of view and I imagine you'd get a pretty reasonable wingbeat signal.

mycowerk··on BirdNET-Pi: Automated, locally run bird sound identification and tracking
Very cool, thanks for the resources. Awesome rabbit hole to go down!
mycowerk··on BirdNET-Pi: Automated, locally run bird sound identification and tracking
Very cool! I wonder how unique the signatures are and whether this can scale to smaller flocks.
mycowerk··on BirdNET-Pi: Automated, locally run bird sound identification and tracking
BirdNET and Pl@ntNet have to be my favorite uses of AI to date. A true use of technology for the greater good.

I've actually been thinking about automated bird recognition for a while now, I live underneath a flight corridor for migrating common cranes (near Berlin). I'd love to be able to one day track their migration across the continent in real time using data from crowdsourced base stations.

I wonder if migrating birds could be identified in flight using optical/radar/audio. If anybody else has had similar ideas I'd really love to chat on this topic.

mycowerk··on Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
I think bright room lighting is a very promising avenue for SAD and circadian rhythm issues.

Last year, for my house plants, I suspended a pair of 100w full spectrum grow lights in my living room. Throughout the winter I've been using my kitchen table as a workspace and I swear this is the first time in my life that I've completely avoided SAD and my circadian rhythm has been sufficiently advanced that I'm now a morning person. In my configuration the lights are suspended behind me, the glare from having them in direct eyesight is problematic.

Has been absolutely wonderful and can definitely recommend giving it a try, the "quantum board" full spectrum lamps are getting really affordable.

mycowerk··on Opt Out of Cynicism
I'd argue the optimum strategy requires you be at least a little optimistic.

Humans are biased to outweigh the importance of losses vs gains when considering expected value. At a minimum a some optimism is required to offset this bias.

mycowerk··on Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)
Over the years I've had a lot of inconsistent experiences with commercial lactase enzyme supplements for dairy intolerance. I've decided to embark on a hobby project (OpenLactase) to produce my own digestive enzyme supplements from scratch using Aspergillus oryzae fungi.

I'm currently working on designing an open source stirred tank bioreactor (Open Scale-up) for fungi cultivation. Bench-top at first but the design is intended to be suitable for scale-up.

Very different from the day job as cloud infrastructure engineer.

https://github.com/mycowerk