>At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.
I see this sentiment often, repeated a couple times in here, but I don't understand why on earth that would be the case. Gas Town was released a little over three months ago. It's an ongoing open-source experiment at the bleeding edge of vendor-agnostic multi-agent orchestration.
I was using gastown for fire-and-forget prototyping of larger projects. It was flaky and scorches tokens but it was able to get larger prototypes done than I could with a single instance of my daily river (claude) alone.
I've had an AI assistant send me email digests with local news, and another watching a cron job, analyzing the logs and sending me reports if there's any problem.
I'd say that counts as yes.
(For clarity: neither are powered by Claude Code Routines. Rather, Claude Code coded them and they're simple cron jobs themselves.)
Seems like you could put a few of these on a contact lens and minimally get a small private HUD. Seems like with a few of them (or fast enough scanning speed) you could build effectively a light field to give it depth)
Bought and rigged up a 'hand sanitizer plant' about five months into COVID. Populated the thing with thermocouples, load cells and automation with nodered on raspberry pi and a bunch of esp32s flashed with tasmota doing sensing and control. Everything talked over mqtt. Great little architecture and having it highly automated allowed me to focus on the parts that were less easily controlled for.
I had a load cell under the collection jar that would adjust heat input (via PWM to SCR) to achieve a steady output rate (dW/dt) via outer PID loop, then lower the heat to just below boiling when it got to 700mL to keep it hot but pause output. It'd play a tone, I'd swap in a new jar then resume ignoring the whole thing. (I'm lying, I'd sit glued to that thin little stream of sanitization precursor teeter on breaking up the entire time.)
I stopped messing with it right before starting to measure/vary water supply through the condenser coils so I could more directly manage reflux ratio. Also had planned a float/load cell to calculate specific gravity.
All sorts of little side quests and fun mix of art/science to get into.
You know, if any of those other hobbies start to lose their lustre. :)
(for real though, the nodered on pi controlling a squadron of esp32 workers over wifi/mqtt was really nice, in case you would have any use for such a thing in any domain)
Haha I actually have a bag of chips but never bought a bath large enough to be worthwhile. Started going down the juniper/citrus/rosemary/coriander/etc route instead.
It's probably not the 'only' difference, because clearly the models are advancing in capability, but it's likely way more important than generally given credit for.
>Blood donations are also somewhat effective, saunas less so. Also, to be clear, PFAS are very different from microplastics. PFAS are the Teflon chemical.
I wonder if there's a safe way to equip people to just do simple bloodletting if they have high exposure to PFAS. I mean obviously it's better to donate, even in that case, given the steady state of most blood banks. But it's still a bit of a pain in the ass.
Put it down over winter but just picking it back up.
Bat detection/identification with ultrasonic recordings. It's been fun building the data pipeline to manage the ~30GB+ of WAV files generated every night, run through some identification processes (currently using https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer) and build a UI (mostly vibe coded lol) to help with replay, cataloging, etc.
I'm using an AudioMoth currently (https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth), am thinking about extending it to do some of the preprocessing in the field to scale things up a bit.
Sorry if this is not the place to do it. I live in a city that has bat at nights, so if you live above 6th floor and you leave your windows open, there are chances some confused bats go into your apartment.
Even worse, they can go into the blind box of your rollover. After two traumatic events where I had bats going into my apartment (and it took me 5 days/nights where I didnt sleep at all to take them out alive), I put something in the opening of the blind box to avoid them getting into it.
However, I don't feel safe. I wake up in the middle of the night with any sound thinking they are trying to get into.
All this introduction is to ask if there is something that detracts bats going near my window. Maybe some kind of ultrasound (that I could play with some kind of speaker), or odor? I don't know, but I'd like to try something that could make me sleep more relaxed.
I asked about this to people who put meshes but they said the mesh goes into the window (it's mostly for mosquitoes), and the open would be outside the mesh, so it wouldn't cover it. I would be OK but I can't find anyone who would be willing to put the mesh on the outside of the window.
I’m working on a friendlier version of BirdNET-Pi with support of the latest BirdNET 3.0 model, also planning to add the BattyBirdNET later. https://github.com/Suncuss/BirdNET-PiPy
Yeah there's quite a bit of opportunity to reduce processing time along the way.
Couple cool things I've learned about bats.
- They are *extremely* loud in the ultrasound range, 130db echolocation calls from something the size of a mouse.
- On an average recording, the ultrasonic range is almost exclusively filled with sound from wildlife (bugs, birds, etc). I'd expected to see lots of harmonics and whatnot from human-generated sounds but there just aren't that many. It's quiet up there.
- You can leverage these two in combination for sampling by just strapping the recording device to the roof of your car and driving around. The wind and road noise is basically absent and the echolocation calls come through loud and clear. The AudioMoth can be fitted with a GPS receiver to correlate the calls to location (and time ofc)
- There are three primary types of echolocation calls: Search - Semiregular calls just to see what's out there. Approach - Faster rate of calls once prey has been identified. Terminal - Aka feeding buzz, very high rate (200hz) of echolocation calls in the last meter or so of approach. Most of the recordings of bat calls you see on YouTube are slowed down 10x to bring the audio into listening range, but this also slows the call tempo by just as much. They make lots of calls.
- Most bat calls use frequency sweeps rather than continuous tones to pick up both distance and relative velocity of the target (akin to FMCW radar).
- There are more bats around than I realized. I started off by looking for 'good spots', but now I just set the device out on a porch. Many times you'll hear me walking up to the recording device at the end of a recording and there will be 2-3 bats overhead that I was perfectly unaware of.
Thanks jcims for sharing this amazing info! However, I wonder how these very loud bats, all in close proximity, don't get confused by each others' calls? Is the answer their frequency sweeping? Or does each have something analogous to a unique "voice"?
Good question! Yes they definitely have unique voices and call signatures. A single string of calls from a single bat will have variation between calls as well (especially in search phase).
It'd imagine there's a lot of neurophysical adaptation involved as well, just like listening to a single conversation in a crowded room.
That said, hunting in an area filled with bats is probably not as effective as being in a quiet place.
Microphone selection is super important and can get extremely spendy very quickly. The AudioMoth device I use comes with a simple mems ultrasonic mic and it's perfectly adequate for what I'm using it for, but loud signals can cause artifacts that wouldn't be present on more expensive ones.
I see this sentiment often, repeated a couple times in here, but I don't understand why on earth that would be the case. Gas Town was released a little over three months ago. It's an ongoing open-source experiment at the bleeding edge of vendor-agnostic multi-agent orchestration.
I was using gastown for fire-and-forget prototyping of larger projects. It was flaky and scorches tokens but it was able to get larger prototypes done than I could with a single instance of my daily river (claude) alone.
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