today i encountered the giant blood bee, sphecodes albilabris, it lived up to the name as it was almost as large as a honey bee worker
Low Fat Sweaty Cat 🐝/acc
@silica-alien.bsky.social
I bomme as a bombylbee dothe
this stinkbug reached its legs and antennae out for me, i let it climb on my finger. it started probing me with the proboscis which scared me so much i put it back down. it reached out again and i offered my finger a second time and it seemed to lose interest
the cutest bees are polyester bees. they look like honey bee plushies, often with more saturated colors and they are very animated
bumble drills hole into flower it is otherwise too fat to enter
bumble drills hole into flower it is otherwise too fat to enter
understanding if 2 images are the same image or different images is surprisingly complicated
encountered some jewelry bees. very beautiful but also brood parasitic. your stance towards them will ultimately be determined by your stance towards macropis oil-collecting bees
1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.
Generalization as the great leap in evolvability: insights from machine learning
Abstract. Natural selection encodes learned information in the genome. Learned solutions may be tuned specifically to past challenges, failing in altered e
academic.oup.com
most evolutionary novelty is regulatory. you can see this nicely in arthropodes, mostly shared genomes achieve high morphological diversity by tuning the activity of genes. the same gene expressed throughout all of development achieves different results than the same gene expressed only briefly
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · last mo.9. Steve conjectures that at least part of the answer lies in regulatory complexity. (NB: While nematodes, flies, and humans have a similar number of genes, regulatory complexity increases enormously; humans have four times as many transcription factors nematodes and three times as many as flies.)
whenever i see a crabspider the kill bill music plays in my head and i wonder if i should let nature take its course or smite the spider for the sake of the bees with which i have a covenant
bumblebee emerges from flower, butt first, then gracefully takes off
i saw some bumblebees engage in nectar robbing. they chew holes into the sides of flowers for which they are too fat to fit in. smaller bees which can not chew holes themselves may stick their tongues into the existing ones made by carpenter or bumblebees
This book, like christianity the first 3000 years, has a gigantic scope and i wanted to collect things i found interesting: sodomy should probably be an insult for people who are rude to their guests, not for anal sex
everything about bees seems optimized to amuse me, which begs the question, how where these traits selected before i was born?
bluesky does not let me upload videos anymore for some reason, so unfortunatly you are all being starved of cute bee flower interactions
so i think fable might be completely useless to me. my memory file is full of deep learning and bio, but just small CNNs and fruit fly development. with memory deleted i can at least start a convo with fable, but it switches to opus if i just ask something like how many bee species exist in my area
i think these safety filters might be bugged, if only they had a really competent coding agent to do something about it :/
A cute beetle vomited on me in self defense
i dont think you co-evolved with this plant you little idiots
claude correctly predicted how long it would take for my potato peeled thumbnail to grow back. gemini overestimated by 3 weeks
recently a source from deep within bee cognition revealed to me that urban bees perform worse on cognitive tests than non-urban bees, unpublished though. i came across this earlier paper which maybe suggests the opposite? urban bees have larger brains royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...
Brain size predicts bees' tolerance to urban environments
Abstract. The rapid conversion of natural habitats to anthropogenic landscapes is threatening insect pollinators worldwide, raising concern regarding the n
royalsocietypublishing.org
why is biology difficult? do we have all the types but are missing the laws of their behavior? are we missing some types? do we have all the types but do not know all possible instances? do we know types, laws and instances but can not know their states? why cant we know their states?
i am curious how continuous learning will be solved. it is often said humans are more efficient learners since they need fewer training examples than DNNs. but this is only true if you do not consider evolution to be part of the learning process
