4 ms·
I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
https://shell.hawzen.me/ https://shell.hawzen.me/
- charcircuit 4mo ago[flagged]
- ry-grah 4mo agobut, from my understanding what the author was really wanting was an adventure and to learn new things. he gained so much more than just learning what type of shell it is
- Azantys 4mo agoI trust a proper solution (even though I can be certain how accurate it is), which compares to a known dataset much more than just giving it an AI. For identifying current living species it is probably fine but this is something to nice for an AI to be trustable. Also this path is much more fun and you learn sonething along the way!
- cyclopeanutopia 4mo agoMaybe he's not an idiot?
- tomstuart 4mo agoAmong a strong field, this is the single most depressing comment I’ve ever read on Hacker News. Several grim components but it’s the “I don’t understand why” which seals the deal.
- orf 4mo agoWhy? Calling a reasonable thing grim without any follow-up isn’t the hallmark of a good comment either.
- bigstrat2003 4mo agoIt is not remotely reasonable to ask "but why didn't he feed it to ChatGPT?". It is pretty silly to assume that ChatGPT should always be consulted.
- charcircuit 4mo agoIt's a good starting place. As an analogy imagine someone wanted to look up the definition of a word. If someone wanted to know the definition and they went out and crawled the entire internet, built an LLM, and then asked it for the definition you would wonder why they didn't check an existing dictionary first. I wouldn't consider it silly at all to always check a dictionary or existing LLM first when you want to know the definition of a word. Wanting to know the definition of a word is not an original problem. Similarly wanting to know what's in an image is not a new problem either.
- throw310822 4mo agoI understand this is more about the process than the result, but note that: a) his result is completely wrong, he identifies a living land snail as the 100+MYa fossil; b) a conversation with Claude helps with some decent knowledge and provides a few possible candidates, that can be then double checked. c) Claude could have talked the author out of trying to identify a Jurassic fossil against a database of living species.
- paulpauper 4mo agohow is it depressing? that seems a tad strong. Maybe disappointment is the correct feeling
- s5300 4mo ago[dead]
- sam_goody 4mo agoThe AI would confidently give him the wrong answer, since it has no way to provide the correct answer, and doesn't know its own limitations. (Or however you wish to describe "hallucinations", which is about as accurate as my description ;)) And he would think he has the right answer, perhaps write up an essay about his findings, which later AI bots will read and learn from, propgating the mistake...
- CamperBob2 4mo agoThe AI would confidently give him the wrong answer There is irony here that does not sleep.
- throw310822 4mo agoWait, the author identified the shell as "Sphincterochila candidissima". Which is a living species of air-breathing land snail, a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusk. Completely off.
- saaaaaam 4mo agoWho says the whole analysis isn’t AI inspired?
- charcircuit 4mo agoNo one. I'm pointing out there are existing AI models that can do this that the author could have tried before investing all the work to build his own.
- fzeroracer 4mo ago> investing all the work to build his own. I don't think you understand why the author did this on a fundamental level. Sometimes it isn't explicitly about getting the outcome directly, it's about putting in the work to understand how you get there.
- charcircuit 4mo agoThe article says that the author wanted to have an analysis done, but ruled out the option of a human doing it. He did not rule out using a multimodal LLM. It's possible that he just is unaware that multimodal LLMs are capable of doing an analysis. Considering the approach wasn't mentioned in the article one can guess that the author just didn't know it was possible. But there is no way to know for sure.
- sublinear 4mo agoIs this example of vector search not "AI" enough?
- addandsubtract 4mo agoGenAI is the new AI, now, unfortunately. PapersWithCode died for this.
- kaka314 4mo agoBecause it’s much more fun that way
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Cockbrand 4mo agoShe sells seashells in the Sahara was my first association, but then the article clearly states that we're talking about a different desert.
- muenalan 4mo agoland snails ?
- cluckindan 4mo agoIn the middle of a desert?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- the__alchemist 4mo agoWhere does the water come from? [;)]
- emigre 4mo agoAt this time of the year? ... At this time of the day? ... In this part of the country? ... Localized entirely within your kitchen?
- croisillon 4mo agocouldn't it be a snail?
- markdown 4mo ago[flagged]
- mik3y 4mo agoBecause the repo includes the tool authored for, and discussed in, the "blog"?
- tokai 4mo agoNot saying its a good idea, but blogging on github has been a thing for much over a decade by now.
- analogpixel 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- hendry 4mo agoI found a sea shell in a visit to Latamber in Pakistan (NWFP): https://www.flickr.com/photos/hendry/73369720/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/hendry/73369720/ Gemini says "As the crow flies (Straight-line distance): Approximately 900 to 920 kilometers (roughly 560 to 570 miles) directly north of the coast at Karachi"
- tokai 4mo agoMaybe some geology buffs can correct me, but as I understand it there has been three periods with ocean on top of the crust we call Pakistan today. The Proto-Tethys, Paleo-Tethys, and Tethys Ocean. Many hundreds of millions of years of being ocean.
- colechristensen 4mo agoBecause of the Indian subcontinent colliding with the Eurasian plate there's a wide variety of origins for the surface geology in that region. An incredibly detailed and descriptive map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/1964_Pakistan_Geology_Map.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/1964_Pak...
- seszett 4mo agoMaybe a nitpick but Latamber is not directly north of Karachi and it's about 1000 kilometers away (the closest coast is 950 km but not in Karachi). It's easy to see and to measure on a map.
- paradoxyl 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- regenschutz 4mo agoNon-tech-related stories frequently make the front page here too. It just so happens that this site has a lot of coders because, err, it's literally Hacker News.
- saaaaaam 4mo ago[flagged]
- colechristensen 4mo agoHuh? Plenty of places have geology where the rocks were formed under ancient oceans and are full of sea fossils.
- saaaaaam 4mo agoMaybe. But I don’t see anything in this piece that says that it’s a fossil, rather than something that resembles this person’s idea of a fossil. It doesn’t look like a fossil to me. It looks like a piece of rock that’s been bashed about a bit. And given the whole premise of the piece is “this should not be here!” I don’t really understand the point you’re making. The author says it’s a strange find in that area - so either they have a valid point or they don’t. I don’t know if it’s a fossil. It doesn’t look like a fossil to me. I’m not a fossil expert. The only way to tell if it is a fossil is to do some analysis on the actual specimen before writing screeds about what it might or might not be based on visual similarity.
- colechristensen 4mo agoIf we're going to rate annoying takes on the internet, "some guy who knows nothing about a topic being snarky because AI was involved" is far worse than somebody doing something with AI.
- throw310822 4mo agoLooks like ampullospira, documented in Saudi Arabia. Age (middle-upper Jurassic) and actual location also match.
- pvaldes 4mo agoGood candidate
- d--b 4mo agoSnails have shells too. Just saying
- bouncycastle 4mo agofreshwater lakes have shellfish too, so it doesn't automatically mean that place was a sea.
- purplehat_ 4mo agoCool find and a very interesting analysis! There's a lot more to morphology than just the shape of the shell, and indeed the shape can sometimes be misleading, in that very different species can have somewhat similar shells, and different individuals of the same species can have quite different shell shapes. You've got a gasteropod, so it would be good to pay special attention to the peristome and siphonal canal (based on the bio classes I took in the area, I'm no expert) but of course there's lots of features that could be helpful in an identification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastropod_shell#Parts_of_the_shell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastropod_shell#Parts_of_the_s... is a good list, and maybe you've already done this but you would want to find a dichotomous key of gasteropod families native to the area to narrow it down. Good luck in figuring out your shell!
- altcognito 4mo agoI'm a little confused about how significant of information can be derived from a 2d projection of the shell. This sort of mathematical modeling looks like phrenology.
- drzaiusx11 4mo agoUsing PCA on 3d shapes is a proven method for identification. It's nothing like phrenology aside from both involving morphology. Former actually works, latter does not.
- altcognito 4mo ago(I upvoted, seems a little weird that you were downvoted) So, I spent a little time looking up "Principal Component Analysis" and yeah, this method works well with these forms, and my comment comparing it to phrenology was definitely more out of ignorance! I was most surprised that you could flatten a 3d structure down to 2d and not lose so much information that it would cause a very high rate of error. Someone else was skeptical enough to do a study as a critique on it, only to have it retracted. (funny in light of this post) https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/94685v1/pdf https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/94685v1/pdf
- paulpauper 4mo agoEven with AI, to try to replicate this on my own would take me a really long time, maybe impossible. Despite the use of AI,it would be a huge undertaking , such as having to come up with the blueprint and procedure for classifying the shells, setting up all of the environments, setting up repository, understanding the math, writing it up, coding the tool, etc. This should allay fears that AI will render people jobless or automate everything.
- helterskelter 4mo agoHerodotus did it first, and even speculated that that region must have been covered by water at some point.
- LeonB 4mo agoHerodotus wouldn’t have written it quite the same — no Jupyter notebook for example, Jupiter being a Roman term; the nearest equivalent for the Ancient Greeks was Zeus.
- VileSquirrel 4mo agoSafe to assume Herodotus would have used a Zeus notebook.
- HiPhish 4mo agoAre you sure that's a fossil and not just a rook that happens to look kinda like a snail's shell?
- Evidlo 4mo agoFinding a chess piece out there would be very interesting
- TheMagicHorsey 4mo agoIt's interesting that saying the Earth is more than 10,000 years old is not haram in Saudi Arabia. I thought it would be, since they are so religious, but it turns out the Koran doesn't make any claims about the age of the Earth, so you are free to say that the Earth is billions of years old and not be accused of blasphemy.
- regenschutz 4mo agoI mean, even in countries with extremely high levels of Christianity, such as Romania, you won't be accused of blasphemy for just... agreeing with science. Both Christianity and Islam are pretty similar after all, so hopefully that is not too surprising. I can't think of a country where you even might be accused of blasphemy, though I'll admit I am not very familiar with the topic.
- gerdesj 4mo agoThank you for a great write up. Concise, to the point and really interesting. It would be nice if your local detractors noticed your steely insistence on remarking where you are coming from. I think it would be superb if some ... experts ... in most spaces learned about the beauty of brevity.
- andix 4mo agoSt. Stephens cathedral in Vienna was built with sandstone that contains seashells. It's hundreds of kilometers away from the shore, but ~15 million years ago the area where it stands now was a seabed. The stones are not from the exact location where it was built, but from close by. The quarry where the stones came from hundreds of years ago is still active, and you can find tons of fossils there. It's practically impossible to get a piece of rock from there without visible seashells.
- thrownthatway 4mo agoWas the land lower, the seas higher, or some combination, way back when?
- andix 4mo agoI'm not sure, I would guess both.
- Crunchified 4mo agoI would wager that the land was lower than the sea back then.
- thrownthatway 4mo agoHa! Indeed. If all the ice melted it would raise the oceans by something like 230 feet, so modern Vienna would still be above water at 495 – 1778 ft elevation. Although some estimates suggest Earth loses 20 - 30 cubic kilometres of water to space annually. Plus whatever water is bound up in mineralisation annually. 450 million cubic kilometres of water lost over a 15 million year period would lower ocean by something like … a bit? The total volume of water on Earth is presently estimated to be around the 1.386 billion cubic kilometre mark. The volume of a sphere increases to the cube of its radius … carry the 1 … nup, that’s to hard for me. Beach front property in Vienna, at a guess? https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-glaciers-melted https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-... https://www.ewash.org/how-much-water-disappears-from-earth-each-year/ https://www.ewash.org/how-much-water-disappears-from-earth-e... https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/the-water-cycle/ https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/the-water-c...
- Suppafly 4mo agoCool write up, a little weird that you were surprised to find it in the first place though.
- socalgal2 4mo agoyea, finding shells all over was one of those things I was taught in elementry school. We even had a field trip to some place to find them along with geography lessons on the various layers of the area
- brennanpeterson 4mo ago"If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone." John McPhee from the wonderful Annals of the former world
- eggsandbeer 4mo ago[dead]
- roenxi 4mo agoI also recommend a quick search for "whale skeleton mountaintop". The mythology of dragons probably came from a find like that.
- ughitsaaron 4mo agoI really love that book and also couldn’t help but think about it while reading this.
- canyp 4mo agoVery interesting story and also hands-on walkthrough of PCA.
- motyar 4mo agoI found may under 12feet in desert of Thar, India. It was River or flood deposited according to my research.
- danieldrehmer 4mo agoAwesome, someone finally found one of the seashells I drop for entertainment when I go for a ride across the desert
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- HawtAds 4mo agoHe is losing a lot of information in that normalization pipeline (whole shell reduced/feature engineered into nothing but an outline). A CNN or something similar would be better and he can maybe get a better depth map of the mouth shape.
- ta9ta9008da 4mo agoThis loading screen looks great!
- Quarrel 4mo agoI have quite an early memory of being on the somewhat remote property in Australia that my mother grew up on (Central NSW, near Condobolin). My Uncle, who then ran the property, walked over to a rock, whacks it with a hammer or similar, shows me a bit of a trilobite (which are totally different to our sort of bytes). He did this a bunch of times. I still have the rocks. No amazing full horizontal cross-sections, but it certainly got my very young mind excited. There were fossils RIGHT THERE from before there were dinosaurs! Oh, and that central Australia used to be an Ocean! These clear demos to young kids, or adults, are great, and the many other examples here in the comments are a testament to that (Vienna? wtf!).
- My_Name 4mo agoOne thing that will have thrown the author off the trail is that he is holding a fossil of the organic parts of the snail and that is essentially a cast of the animal, not the shell. They are known as Steinkerns (stonecore). The insides get replaced by minerals, which harden, the shell dissolves, then the only fossil remaining is a mould of the inside of what used to be the shell. So on a fundamental level, the headline is wrong. He did not find any sort of shell...
- rf15 4mo agoSplitting hairs in bad faith is not constructive to the points being made here.
- TheTaytay 4mo agoTrue, but I actually had no idea that it was the soft parts rather than the hard parts that had been fossilized. (I haven’t verified it yet.) Either way, it didn’t read like a bad faith interpretation/comment.
- My_Name 4mo agoIt wasn't written to be one. If the author went to the trouble of making a 3D space filled with many shells, knowing the actual shell was most likely a different shape would be something they would probably want to know, so the position of their fossil could be placed more accurately in the graphed space.
- kaonwarb 4mo agoReads to me like a fascinating and relevant distinction.
- Ericson2314 4mo agoNo, a layperson doing a bunch of math but barking up the wrong tree theory-wise is actually super instructive for this forum of autodidacts. And I say that as one of the autodidacts.
- 4mo ago
- pvaldes 4mo agoThe analysis is nice, flashy, and wrong. Several weak assumptions here leading to hallucinate an obviously wrong result. Taxonomy IS a science. Just use the wide corpse of knowledge that has been built for the last 229 years, where the class Gastropoda was created. First wrong assumption. This is a seashell. This probably is a seashell, yes. But fresh water snails have also shells; and savannas can have a lot of lagoons before eventually turning into deserts. If you train your model only using zebras, your model will happily conclude than an hippo is a sort of non stripped obese zebra.
- pvaldes 4mo agoMore points for though 1) The model use incomplete data. The data used to train the model is based in 7800 species alive. After wikipedia, Gastropoda have more than 75000 species alive, plus 15000 fossil species known. (We can assume safely that this is a snail, but remember that some cephalopods also have coiled shells). 2) The model use spurious data. All clams and Tusk shells must be removed (because we want to classify a snail). This means that the number of snails available to train the model is much lower than 7800. Including non-snails just gives us a false confidence in the strength of our model. 3) The model covers only one couple traits in this species, but this particular traits can vary within members of the same species. Taxonomy uses thousands of traits to classify a mollusc and some are particularly fastididious. Dozens of items only to describe the shell. Often the soft parts are needed (Is the penis shaped like a club? this genus, shaped like a whip? this other one; the penis in your sample is contracted because you didn't put to sleep the animal first with mint crystals, though luck, we'll never know). 4) The model is based in extant alive species, but we want to identify a fossil. Alive species have non-distorted shells. Fossils often lose their shape by the weight of sediments and compression. Only the thickest shells would keep its real height/wide proportions. 5) The model ignores important details. The species found in the desert has a very evident shell groove at the top of the spire, that the targeted species does not have. This alone, tells a newbie taxonomist that the result is wrong.
- pvaldes 4mo agoAnd to end this, 6) the model ignores all knowledge about the species and its habitat Sphincterochila candidissima is a western Mediterranean species. It lives from Spain to Libia. The fossil is from Saudi Arabia.
- userbinator 4mo agoI found an article about finding a seashell in the middle of the desert on GitHub... More seriously, I wonder if there's anything inside. Somewhat reminds me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact
- iSnow 4mo agoWhy would you write a lot of software to find the closest match (which doesn't even seem that good) if you could also ask a subject expert? I guess you could even just post a photo to some subreddit with people who could tell you what it is... Also: "it shouldn't be here; the nearest coastline is Dammam's, 500 km away." - are people really that ignorant about plate tectonics and sea fossils in mountains?
- xg15 4mo agoI think that sentence was more to show why it had to be a fossil in the first place and not just an ordinary seashell you'd pick up on the beach.
- LadyCailin 4mo agoI found a seashell in the middle of the forest in (well inland) Mississippi. That was an interesting find, and lead me to learn that much of the continental US used to be covered in a sea, I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interior_Seaway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interior_Seaway This means the shell was dozens of millions of years old, and may be the oldest thing I’ve ever held, except maybe some rocks.
- mangomanai 4mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway5765 4mo ago"He swam at my feet, Powerful arms in broad strokes Sweeping the sand. So I asked this man, What seas do you swim? And to this he answered, 'I have seen shells and the like On this desert floor, So I swim this land's memory Thus honouring its past,' Is the journey far, queried I. 'I cannot say,' he replied, 'For I shall drown long before I am done.'" ― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates
- gaiagraphia 4mo agoI've got some 'shells' from the deserts near Siwa Oasis. Quite a cool feeling walking on top of what used to be the floor of the Tethys Ocean, especially when everything around you is just rock and sand without a drop of water in sight.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]