Mushroom ID

Looking over the wikipedia page on this mushroom and all the similar, very edible ones...Yeah I'm never foraging mushrooms.
- Yeah, I carefully read the description of its distinguishing features, studied the photo, and concluded I have no idea what I'm looking at and how to tell them apart.
  
  I'm really good at spotting differences or inconsistencies, I'm totally lost with mushrooms though, and I go multiple times every Autumn with a woman in her 70's. She is very clear about what we are looking for. She throws out at least half of what I gather.
  
  Simple, just eat it and see.
  If you're dead, it's poisonous.
  If you are alive, you haven't eaten enough.
  
  This.
  I'll just trust the dealer.
  
  Mushroom lesson I did says that looking under the cap, spore color, what tree root system it’s growing in, can give you a really solid ID
- chanterelles are pretty safe to forage if they grow near you.
  they are very distinct looking.
  
  egg mushrooms 😋
- And this is why I grow my own. I'm very fond of Albino Texas PE6. Easy to grow, consistent, and you can clone and agar spawn over and over again. Such an aggressive little strain. And looks very distinct. Unmistakable.
  
  There's nice little kits you can buy online for your kitchen. :)
- Mushroom foraging can be safe, but the rules are:
  Always learn from a local guide first. It's not transferable to other regions. Which makes books a bad way to do it, and the internet a horrible way.
  You don't rule out dangerous mushrooms, you identify a specific edible mushroom.
  Never trust a little white mushroom.
- Is the main visual difference just the stem or whatever it's called being much longer?
  
  IIRC, the only definitive way to ID mushrooms is by making a spore print - and even then you need to know what you're doing.
  Just doesn't seem worth the risk to me.
  
  Lots of differences but the simplest one would be that button mushrooms would typically have color to their gills—depending on the species they usually start out pinkish or pale brown and move to dark brown as they get older. Destroying angel has pure white gills.
  But button mushrooms are actually not very beginner friendly despite their familiarity since there are other poisonous lookalikes in many areas.
- My wife wanted to take a foraging class and I pointed out all the similarities and said to her, if you don't want to buy mushrooms from the store, we can just grow them.
- The two mentioned species are pretty easy to distinguish once you get familiar with them (based on gills, spores and the stem base). But I would never rely on an app to make the decision for me! If you exclusively go for easier groups where there are no life threatening species in your area (boletes where I life), you should be pretty safe.

There are old mushroom foragers and then there are bold ones. There are no bold, old mushroom foragers.
- There are no bold, old mushroom foragers
  Sure there are, they just have to not eat what they picked up.
  Source: friend's mom once gave food poisoning to the whole family by serving them an omelet made with mushrooms she found, but didn't eat it herself. Fortunately it was merely mushrooms of the "fucks up your stomach" variety.
  
  "Once" has no effect on my statement. There are no Bold, Old mushroom foragers.
- Okay, Brown Ben Plumm.

Looks like a destroying angel (e.g. Amanita virosa) to me. This and the death cap together account for the vast majority of mushroom poisonings in the world. Cooking it will not destroy the toxins, nor will acid. Symptoms tend to appear 5-24 hours after eating, too late to pump the stomach. Half a mushroom can be enough to kill you.
I don't recommend going out to pick mushrooms unless you know what you're doing. If you do, stay away from the white ones. You can still get terrible stomach cramps and diarrhea from other colors of mushrooms, but the white ones have the most dangerous species.
- Easiest way to avoid problems I've heard is to never pick any mushroom with ribbed underside. If the underside looks like a sponge, it's usually safe to eat. At least where I'm from.
  
  Might be valid advice for some regions, I don't know. But mushrooms tend to vary quite a bit in appearance. Sometimes ribbed species don't have very visible ribs, or younger mushrooms don't quite have all the characteristics of their mature form. If you really want to get into picking mushrooms, there's often local groups you can join with a resident expert who can tell you which ones are safe.
  
  Easiest way to not die from bad mushrooms is to not eat them because they're fucking disgusting anyways
  
  Yeah, the sponge underside mushrooms are boletes, and I am not aware of any that are poisonous.
- What about a base?
  
  Not sure about this one, but acid resistance is pretty relevant because of the typical stomach environment. In general, amatoxins are just very stable and it's difficult to deactivate them.
  
  i don't think you want to eat it after that anyways.

Neural networks are magical anywhere that near misses are good enough.
Companies keep using them as if they're infallible, when lives and fortunes are at stake.
Tech is not the problem.
- Tech is ravenously trying to convince the world they need AI for every aspect of their business. Tech wants you to think LLMs are infallible and they strongly imply that they are even if the fine print says otherwise. So personally I would say tech is very much part of the problem. One could say they are the root of the problem in fact.
  
  I think he’s referring to literal technology itself as “Tech” and you’re referring to the people trying to sell it as “Tech”—aka “Big-Tech” as some would say
  
  I don't think the tech is the problem, it's the business drones trying to sell you it
  
  The tech is not the problem.
- If you give out hammers to everyone, some people will end up with smashed balls.
- Yeah, I have to agree with you. For example, I would have no problem using a decently tested LLMs for engineering simply because Engineering usually accounts for errors and uses appropriate factors to accommodate them. Sure LLMs could be get more accurate in future, but I believe the error will reduce asymptotically. Essentially, more accurate LLMs get, it will get that much harder to increase the accuracy. There is always a price to pay, IMO.
  
  "There's always a price to pay" is basically what engineering is.
  Anybody could build a bridge to last 100 years, or to survive a barge ship crashing into it, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that will barely last 100 years, or barely survive a bridge crashing into it (which you could kind of say the F.S.Key bridge did, since only really the middle section was taken out).
  Put another way, in the real world, there are budgets and sacrifices.

Amanita bisporigera, or the aptly named eastern North American destroying angel, if anyone's wondering.
From Wikipedia:
The principal amatoxin, α-amanitin, is readily absorbed across the intestine, and 60% of the absorbed toxin is excreted into bile and undergoes enterohepatic circulation; the kidneys clear the remaining 40%. The toxin inhibits the enzyme RNA polymerase II, thereby interfering with DNA transcription, which suppresses RNA production and protein synthesis. This causes cellular necrosis, especially in cells which are initially exposed and have rapid rates of protein synthesis. This process results in severe acute liver dysfunction and, ultimately, liver failure.
I could not confirm that it causes liquefactive necrosis of the liver specifically, however. I wouldn't doubt it, but I couldn't confirm it.
Edit: I should clarify, I got this from the original thread on Bluesky, not my own identification.

I love fungi facts.
- This guy sees the most terrifying description of a toxin killing someone and goes "Yep, that's a fun mushroom facto"
  
  To be fair, that is basically what's to be expected from myshrooms
- Fungi are fascinating. Did you know that, if I'm recalling correctly, the largest living organism is a massive fungus?
  
  And reindeer are trained to follow the smell of human piss because they like tripping on amanita muscaria, which transfers its psychoactive compounds through urine.
  Wacky!
  
  It's not the shared root system tree in North America? I could totally see it being a mushroom.

i didnt even consider that this AI shit was going to claim to be able to ID mushrooms
ok ive been a little skeptical of the idea so far but now im fully convinced. this dumb ai shit is going to get people killed. like straight up more than one person is going to die because of these upjumped autocorrects masquerading as intelligence. and no one is going to be held responsible.

Deleted
- Once.
  
  They said you die one or two days after eating. You could definitely eat more than once in that time.
  
  If you eat fast enough, maybe twice!
- You'd have to use a very strange definition of edible. For something to be edible it does not only need to be able to fit down your throat, it has to be capable of nourishing you without harming you. You can swallow paper and it won't harm you, but it also can't nourish you and is thus inedible. You can eat this mushroom and it'll probably provide some kind of nourishment, but then it will swiftly kill you and thus it is inedible.
  I would accept a definition of edible which includes things you can't digest. For example, gold can also be a food additive referred to by the code E175. Can't digest it, but it doesn't hurt you. So I could accept someone referring to gold as edible. But I think the barest, most universal element of something being edible is that it doesn't kill you. If literal deadly poison is considered edible one must wonder what the word "edible" is even supposed to mean.
  
  Jimmy Neutron "sodium chloride" ass reply, "everything is edible at least once" is a common joke that works precisely because words' definitions are not rigid
  Edit: I think it's best to leave this comment up as I originally wrote it, but I'm also going to go on the record to say that I could've and should've phrased this a lot more cordially.
- Only once. ;)
  
  You can do anything once.

Which mushroom is it then? 😱
- Destroying Angel
  
  No joking around when it came to naming it.
  
  Sounds safe and yummy!
- Eastern North American Destroying Angel. Half a mushroom is enough to completely destroy your liver and symptoms show up too late to do anything about them
  
  The symptoms can even disappear after some time, so you think you'll be fine and then you experience a second onset that kills you.

My fucked up brain goes like, "woah, I wonder what death tastes like."
- Probably bitter and followed by a slow agonizing death by liver failure.
  
  As somebody who has been through liver failure and transplant, it really sucks. I do not recommend it.
  
  Wikipedia says the death cap tastes quite pleasing, reportedly.
- Saute in a pan with butter and garlic. Death will taste fabulous.
  
  That's cheating. Anything will taste great with butter and garlic.
  
  Little salt, little pepper. /~~chef's~~death's kiss
  
  And a tiny bit of white wine, and some salt. Freaking delicious.

2 mushrooms hard to fuck up in America.
Chicken of the Forest.
Morels.
I remember selling like 5 lbs of morels when I was a kid and getting like $200. That was without even driving to the city to make the real money.
- note that chicken of the woods may give about 50% of people horrible nausea for several hours
  
  Sure, if you're weak. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laetiporus
  It's not near 50% of people though.
- Chicken of the Woods is the shit!!!
- What, a wood pilz that is edible?
- There are also mushrooms that look like morels that you shouldn't eat. Somewhat easy to filter out if you know what you're looking for but maybe wouldn't say hard to fuck up.
  
  Can you show me some that would grow in the same areas next to dead elms? I'm unfamiliar with any and I've foraged for them a lot.
  E: Looks like this has some info on False Morels further below. I'd have a difficult time mistaking one for the other myself but eh?
  https://www.bhg.com/news/how-to-find-morel-mushrooms/
  https://www.thegreatmorel.com/false-morels/

I remember being on a wilderness weekend many years ago and being told that when you cut the stem on some poisonous shrooms they discolour a sort of blue tint. I'm lucky, I hate the taste and texture of mushrooms.
- I remember years ago reading you can tell if a mushroom is "magic" by blotting it on paper towel and seeing if it stains blue or purple. Unfortunately, that is also how many things say you can tell it's toxic. Maybe you'll trip balls. Maybe you'll die. 🤷🏻‍♂️
  
  Maybe you’ll trip balls and THEN die!
  
  I wouldn't be surprised if the poison and the psychoactive part are the same thing in different doses, or just function similarly.
- Mushroom haters unite!
  
  Those things scare me.
- Funny you say this, there is actually a mushroom that does this color change but is edible. Allegedly doesn’t taste very good, though.
  Best not to eat any wild mushrooms at all unless a verified mycologist can look at them first.
  
  Scarletina bolete apparently tastes relatively decent. I haven't tried it myself though.
- I hate every mushroom I have ever tried- except shiitake mushrooms, which don't taste like mushrooms and are amazing.
  
  I'm literally 100% the opposite. Give me some morels, porcini, lions mane... anything but shiitake.
  
  Does it grow in shiit? 😅

Adds this to the big list of horrible ways to die
- I wonder if it fits above or bellow the Demon Core.
  At least looks like this is quicker.
  
  I'll take deadly mushroom over radiation poisoning any day. Melted liver is better than melted skin.

Thank fuck I don't eat mushrooms

Darwin machine

Is blue sky "instance" just sub-domains of bsky.social ?!
- Usernames are subdomains on bsky
  
  I was confused as these two person are on different sub-domains of bsky.social (url after the @ symbol). Does this mean they are on different instance? AFAIK most mastodon server I see have different domain (specifically, different combination of top level domain and second level domian).
  EDIT: I see, theur user name is the subdomain, and things before @ is their display name. Not the most conventional system, but it makes sense.
- Washington Post is @washingtonpost.com, so evidently not.
  Edit: Bluesky has this about page which is relevant.

ooh, amanita

Amanita phalloides, if I'm not mistaken?

Fun guy

Is Gemini using the same model as Lens?