wgrover
Re:Identifying fake cosmetics using AI
on Saturday August 29, 2026 @01:24AM (#49487117)
I think my "cautious optimism" mostly came from the fact that Gemini found subtle problems with the counterfeit packages that I (someone who looks at fakes as part of my job) didn't notice - like mismatched info between the tube and box, and a malformed Irish postal code. If I didn't notice those, then I seriously doubt that a consumer glancing at a package would notice them. In that case, Gemini's insights would be valuable info for a consumer.
Gemini wrongly called an authentic product a fake, but that was mainly because there really were typographical errors in the authentic product's ingredient list. That's more of an indictment of the manufacturer than it is Gemini.
Finally, a lot of the things that Gemini got wrong seemed to me like they could reasonably be attributed to things like optical artifacts in the photos (glare, shadows, stuff like that). Better/more photos might improve that.
All that being said, this is obviously a tiny study of a single AI tool with a single brand of cosmetic product, so it's probably premature for me to optimistic, even cautiously. I've edited the last section of the writeup accordingly.
Re:Identifying fake cosmetics using AI
on Friday August 28, 2026 @09:01PM (#49485943)
That's fascinating! If any of your work using AI to identify reproductions is publicly sharable, I'd love to learn more about it (amateur antique collector here). But if not I understand.
Re:Identifying fake cosmetics using AI
on Friday August 28, 2026 @08:59PM (#49485922)
Regarding scaling - I think you're right if the AI mostly detects typos, like it did in this work.
I'm hopeful that future AI models (perhaps trained for this purpose, not a general-purpose model like I used here) might be able to identify more subtle variations in e.g. injection molding patterns, the surface finish of a pill, things that would be hopefully a lot harder for counterfeiters to fix than a typo.
Re:Identifying fake cosmetics using AI
on Friday August 28, 2026 @07:37PM (#49485482)
Thanks! I'm putting "doing cool stuff with really basic ideas" in my bio... :)
Identifying fake cosmetics using artificial intelligence
Your comment makes me think of LabVIEW - if you're not familiar with it, it uses a visual programming language ("G") in which data flows down wires. The color of the wire indicates the wire's data type (blue for ints, orange for floats, green for bools, pink for strings) and the width of the wire indicates the dimensionality of the data (thin line = scalar, thick line = 1D array, double-thick = 2D array). The color is more than decorative or even assistive - it's essential to understanding the program.
Re:A Mysterious Numbers Station Is Broadcasting Through the Iran War
on Wednesday April 01, 2026 @08:22PM (#47608481)
Fans of the band Wilco will recognize one of the Conet Project's recordings as the source of the woman repeating "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" in the song "Poor Places" from the eponymous album. Wilco failed to license the sample and the resulting lawsuit gave the Conet Project a portion of Wilco's royalties on that track.
Re:A ternary plot of citrus geneology
on Friday March 06, 2026 @12:02AM (#47271091)
Yes! And every day the California Citrus State Historic Park is open for tours and tasting of various citrus varieties:
Re:The Old Robots Website
on Friday September 05, 2025 @07:43PM (#45145035)
And I remember going to Radio Shack at the mall as a kid and wanting that Armatron robot so badly! Being able to get these things now for pretty cheap and fixing them and playing with them with my kids has been such a treat.
Re:The Old Robots Website
on Friday September 05, 2025 @09:53AM (#45138608)
A parenting tip for those with geeky kids:
You can get some of these (like the smaller TOMY robots) for pretty cheap on eBay. They're usually broken, but the innards of these robots are so interesting, just taking them apart is a learning experience. TOMY was brilliant at making seemingly sophisticated toys that were actually run by a single DC motor; all the movements, sounds, sensing etc. were implemented using gears and cam shafts and other mechanisms. A great way to learn about simple machines, and a bonus if you (or your kid) can repair them and bring a 40-year-old robot back to life.
Re:Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004
on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @12:29AM (#44506361)
In the site's defense, it is emulating like ten different operating systems as you scroll.
Re:The Barbican
on Monday May 12, 2025 @01:17PM (#43965347)
Here's a cross-section through the theatre portion of the Barbican showing the complexity of the engineering:
https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/5w9ep7/cross_...
Re:The Smallest Thing in Go
on Sunday December 08, 2024 @11:15PM (#42363040)
I'm guessing the title was meant to be a nod toward the meaning of the English word iota,
"an extremely small amount".
Re:Can You Get Root with Only a Cigarette Lighter?
on Monday October 07, 2024 @10:41AM (#41766477)
Yup - the first few minutes of one of Technology Connections' videos on electromechanical pinball machines shows this mechanism in action:
Re:So thieves broke into your storage unit – again
on Sunday October 06, 2024 @03:17PM (#41759443)
Your post reminded me of Mark Twain’s very funny short story “The McWilliamses And The Burglar Alarm”:
https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...
Re:Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
on Friday October 04, 2024 @03:40PM (#41744895)
Here's a Python script I wrote that generates storage bin labels and prints them using a cheap 2" by 3" label printer:
https://github.com/wgrover/jamie
The name 'jamie' is in honor of Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman's meticulously labeled storage bins at M5 Industries.
The code uses a brute-force search to fit the specified text on the label using the largest possible font size.
Re:Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email
on Thursday August 22, 2024 @03:19PM (#41323567)
I miss Pine too. I could read/file/delete scores of plaintext emails in seconds using single keystrokes.
Every email client I've used since Pine has been better at dealing with all the stuff we've bolted on to email (HTML, attachments, calendar invites...) but none of them have been as efficient at the core tasks of email as Pine was.
Re:Make Your Electronics Tamper-Evident
on Saturday August 03, 2024 @09:40PM (#41150580)
Thanks for the suggestion - I looked into music recognition algorithms early on but struggled to adapt them for image use. But I'll revisit them.
Re:Make Your Electronics Tamper-Evident
on Saturday August 03, 2024 @05:16PM (#41149317)
Thanks! There are related structures in electronic circuits called physical unclonable functions (PUFs) that find uses in cryptography - you might find them interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function
Re:Make Your Electronics Tamper-Evident
on Saturday August 03, 2024 @04:33PM (#41149051)
Here's some work I did a couple years ago using some of these principles to fight counterfeit medicines: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11234-4
A side note: I think there's an unmet need for algorithms that can convert photos of these random patterns into text (or something similar) that can be stored in a database and searched quickly for matching patterns. I've tried image similarity algorithms like the ones used by e.g. Google Reverse Image Search, but they seem poorly suited for this task. I ended up writing my own crude algorithm in the paper above that converts a pattern into a set of strings, and it works OK, but surely there are better ways to do this.
Re:Light Characteristic
on Friday February 09, 2024 @03:10PM (#39319896)
You might also find moiré-effect navigation beacons interesting, like the one that Tom Scott visits here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d99_h30swtM
Re:Bitten by the black box of iCloud
on Monday October 09, 2023 @08:29PM (#37827170)
Can anyone recommend a backup strategy for iCloud? Specifically, my Macs' hard drives aren't big enough for any one computer to store everything locally, so some documents end up living only in iCloud which is clearly asking for trouble. My ideal solution would be to regularly mirror iCloud's contents on my NAS (which is big enough to store everything locally) but I've never seen anyone implement something like that.
Re:John McCarthy’s collection of numerical facts for use in elisp prog...
on Thursday September 07, 2023 @01:00PM (#37421985)
Re:Charles Darwin Ate One of Everything He Discovered
on Monday August 28, 2023 @03:25PM (#37299194)
I had the same thought. BTW, the movie is titled "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!" in the UK (same as the book it's based on). The studio changed the title for Americans [1], perhaps assuming we'd be less interested in a movie with scientists, shudder...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_In_an_Adventure_w...
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @03:45PM (#36606050)
https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr
Random musings of a professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside. A few highlights:
- https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2017-12-10-csu.html - My investigation into a fictitious California university and its link to predatory academic journals.
- https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-19-gene-roddenberry-ucr... - Looking into filming locations for Gene Roddenberry's TV show pilot "Genesis II" that was filmed at UC Riverside in 1972.
- https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-06-stereo-records.html - How stereo phonograph records work.
https://www.simplify3d.com/3d-printing-the-curta-calculator-...
And a fun video of Adam Savage playing with Marcus Wu's 3D-printed Curta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9uRckJLqLk
40 years later, officials reflect on “The Play” (Cal vs. Stanford)
CandyCodes: Simple universally unique edible IDs for fighting fake drugs
Re:Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colo...
on Monday June 27, 2022 @10:55PM (#31903582)
Lovely work. Here's a similar project where I showed that randomly-placed multicolored candy particles (nonpareils) can be used to confirm the authenticity of pharmaceuticals: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11234-4