realChem

realChem, 7 months ago

The strong law of small numbers strikes again!

realChem, 7 months ago

Wild timing! I literally just (like 30mins ago) was in a graduate seminar that was being presented by the science advisor from Breaking Bad. I wonder if she’ll work with him on this? Probably not unless there’s going to be chemistry I guess? Apparently she’s working with another producer at the moment on an upcoming show about fentanyl.

In any case I’ll be interested to check out this new show when it comes out. “Mild” science fiction could mean a lot of different things!

realChem, 8 months ago

why would I want to use it?

You wouldn’t, but that’s fine with Match Group: JP Morgan[^1] are loving this new monetization strategy. If they think they can get more money out of their users they will, the experience and usefulness of their app be damned. Very similar to aggressively monetized mobile games, but extra icky since they’re monetizing human relationships.

[^1]: I’m sure other investment firms are pleased as well, but JP Morgan was the firm mentioned in the article

realChem, 8 months ago

I’ve enjoyed the last few Scalzi books I’ve read (Kaiju Preservation Society in particular was quite fun), so I’ll probably be giving this one a look! Thanks for sharing

realChem, 8 months ago

Did the fix end up working in the end, or did restoring everything from backups mean that the fix didn’t work out either? (I don’t use Jerboa or any other lemmy apps, so mainly just curious.)

realChem, 8 months ago

(I’m going to write with confidence, but I’m not an expert, just grew up around chefs. Please feel free and welcome to fact check me.)

Yeah, EVOO is made by cold-pressing the olives, and regular olive oil by hot pressing. Cold pressing releases less oil and also several tasty compounds that come along for the ride. Hot pressing releases more oil but also other compounds that don’t taste as nice, so generally regular olive oil will then be refined, removing most of the compounds that give it flavor. If you compare, you’ll find that real EVOO[^1] tastes distinctly olive-y, and regular olive oil has very little flavor at all.

When it comes to cooking, traditional advice is not to cook with EVOO because it’s got a low-ish smoke point[^2], whereas regular olive oil (which has been refined) will have a higher smoke point. EVOO’s smoke point isn’t actually that low, but I generally avoid high temp cooking with it anyway in favor of things like avocado oil (my personal go-to), peanut oil, or vegetable oil which are very tolerant of high temperatures. You absolutely can cook with EVOO though if you only want to keep one kind of oil around the house or something.

To clarify: heating up EVOO and cooking with it is fine as long as you don’t smoke it. It won’t make it any less extra-virgin or anything: to get those less good-tasting things into your oil, you need to heat up the olives themselves.

So are you wasting money if you do cook with it? Maybe.

Do you want what you’re cooking to taste like olive oil? If you do, cook with it! Real[^1] EVOO has a distinct taste that won’t go away when heated (unless you smoke it). It’s great for making stuff like olive oil cake! If you don’t care or don’t want that flavor in whatever you’re cooking, then yeah it’s probably a waste of money. There are many less expensive oils that will work well and have neutral flavors or different flavors that you might prefer, including regular olive oil.

[^1]: All of this is avoiding the issue of regular olive oil being passed off as EVOO when it actually isn’t. If you want something interesting to read about this evening, try researching olive oil fraud.

[^2]: In case you don’t know, smoke point is the temperature where an oil starts to burn, which tastes bad, isn’t very healthy, and will probably set off your smoke alarm.

realChem, 8 months ago

Glad you found it useful! When I started writing it nobody else had answered and by the time I posted it a bunch of other people had replied (that’s what I get for walking away while writing it).

realChem, 8 months ago

Always nice to see studies of these things! I feel like there’s a lot of olive oil lore out there, it’s cool to see that some of that lore checks out scientifically.

realChem, 8 months ago

That was a fun watch, thanks! Now what about TotK… 🤔

realChem, 8 months ago

I heard about it before release… albeit I heard from a friend that I play XIV with, so that’s certainly a selection bias.

realChem, 8 months ago

Yesterday was very productive and then I got to spend the evening gaming with friends, so that was nice! Today I have jury duty, and potentially for most of the rest of the week… It’s fine, but my fingers are still crossed that I end up getting dismissed and can go back to my sorely neglected research tasks!

realChem, 8 months ago

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood! It’s a really good visual-novel-style game, but with the added element that you craft your own tarot-style divination deck and then draw cards from it during some conversations, and which cards you draw influence what kinds of readings you can give for people. It is established early on that since you were a kid your readings have never been wrong, and fittingly the game warns you early and repeatedly that your answers will affect your fate, dramatically. Well, no kidding! When I was playing yesterday I had a choice that I’d made hours earlier come back and bite me in the ass, hard. Almost made me want to quit and start over, but I’ve decided to see this play-through through and if by the end I still feel like I need to fix my mistakes I’ll maybe play it a second time.

tl;dr if you like beautiful pixel art, enigmatic beings from outside of space and time, witches, tarot, and/or choices that actually matter in your games, do give this one a go! I’m not done with it yet but I’d already love to chat with someone else who’s played it!

realChem, 8 months ago

I’ve put a few hours in and I agree, it’s just a fun little game that slowly pushes you bit by bit into slightly more challenging stuff. I really like how well the game meshes the diving and sushi restaurant aspects, too. (Plus, I’m a scuba diver – still pretty new to it – and I’m a bit on the larger side, so it’s a nice bit of representation.)

realChem, 8 months ago

In FFXIV, I’m in the post-Shadowbringers DLC content. I’ve taken a bit of a break from the MSQ to get the Nier-themed alliance raids

Are you me? I’m just a bit into the post-ShB patches, and I just finished unlocking all three Nier raids. They’re really fun (although I agree: challenging). If you happen to be on Crystal DC and want to party up for some raids or something, lmk!

Think I might try a healer class next, just not sure which one

As someone who is very much a non-healer main, I quite like Sage. My first healer to 90 was actually Scholar, but a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was really into Summoner for a while: when I’m going to heal I usually hop on Sage.

realChem, 8 months ago

Sentient, spacefaring bees, according to the article! Not what I was expecting but still, sounds pretty intriguing!

realChem, 8 months ago

Agreed. Strong (and effectively enforced) worker protections are just as important as tech-specific safety regulations. Nobody should feel like they need to put themselves into a risky situation to make work happen faster, regardless of whether their employer explicitly asks them to take that risk or (more likely) uses other means like unrealistic quotas to pressure them indirectly.

There are certainly ways to make working around robots safer, e.g. soft robots, machine vision to avoid unexpected obstacles in the path of travel, inherently limiting the force a robot can exert, etc… And I’m all for moving in the direction of better inherent safety, but we also need to make sure that safer systems don’t become an excuse for employers to expose their workers to more risky situations (i.e. the paradox of safety).

realChem, 9 months ago

This is really cool, thanks for sharing!

realChem, 9 months ago

Some pretty interesting ideas. I was unaware that anything was living in the Atacama salt deposits, which certainly lends some credence to the idea that something could be pulling moisture out of the air on Mars, thin as it is.

realChem, 9 months ago

Yeah, cryptobiotic crust! I’ve seen it in the Sonoran desert. It doesn’t look like much, I think if I hadn’t been warned ahead of time not to step on it I might have just done it without thinking. Given that just footprints can take on the order of decades to heal I think a dune buggy ban makes sense in areas where it grows.

I’m still surprised to learn about the microbes in the Atacama: it’s the driest place on earth, and I would have expected the salt deposits to make it even harder for anything to live there. Yknow what they say I guess: “Life, uh, finds a way.”

realChem, 9 months ago

That’s a real mood, yeah.

I just recently decided to stick with mine. I was having a lot of doubts: feeling like I wasn’t making and progress, like I wouldn’t actually be able to finish the projects I started, impostor syndrome shit, etc. I’m happy I decided to stick with it. I just cleared some big milestones and I’m in the middle of a nice long vacation now, and I’m feeling excited again about my work.

On the other side of things, I’ve got a friend who decided to leave his PhD program with a masters a few years ago. He’s now heading up product development for a robotics startup, doing quite well for himself.

I don’t think there’re any wrong answers here. Do what will make you happiest. Maybe you just need a vacation, maybe you’re ready to move on. And remember that education is never wasted: even if you decide not to finish out the PhD, you’ve still learned a lot and that’s valuable with or without the piece of paper and title.

Best wishes, friend, whichever way you decide to go ♥

realChem, 9 months ago

That’s great news, and fantastic timing! Good luck on the interview, though I’m sure you’ve got this.

realChem, 9 months ago

For sure. They tend to do a good job communicating tricky science and math concepts as well. They interview experts in a coherent way, tend to take the time to properly set up the background for topics, and the writers there seem to really care about getting things right rather than being sensational. They’re one of my favorite sites for stories about math and science honestly.

I haven’t had a chance to read the article linked in this post yet, but I’ll be sitting in an airport in a few hours (I really need to go to sleep now) and I’ll look forward to reading it then!

realChem, 9 months ago

It seems like you’re working under the core assumption that the trained model itself, rather than just the products thereof, cannot be infringing?

Generally if someone else wants to do something with your copyrighted work – for example your newspaper article – they need a license to do so. This isn’t only the case for direct distribution, it includes things like the creation of electronic copies (which must have been made during training), adaptations, and derivative works. NYT did not grant OpenAI a license to adapt their articles into a training dataset for their models. To use a copyrighted work without a license, you need to be using it under fair use. That’s why it’s relevant: is it fair use to make electronic copies of a copyrighted work and adapt them into a training dataset for a LLM?

You also seem to be assuming that a generative AI model training on a dataset is legally the same as a human learning from those same works. If that’s the case then the answer to my question in the last paragraph is definitely, “yes,” since a human reading the newspaper and learning from it is something that, as you say, “any intelligent rational human being” would agree is fine. However, as far as I know there’s not been any kind of ruling to support the idea that those things are legally equivalent at this point.

Now, if you’d like to start citing code or case law go ahead, I’m happy to be wrong. Who knows, this is the internet, maybe you’re actually a lawyer specializing in copyright law and you’ll point out some fundamental detail of one of these laws that makes my whole comment seem silly (and if so I’d honestly love to read it). I’m not trying to claim that NYT is definitely going to win or anything. My argument is just that this is not especially cut-and-dried, at least from the perspective of a non-expert.

realChem, 9 months ago

Ooh, good suggestion, I’ll give it a try!