self

and their name would be a lot cuter if other fucking shitheads weren’t still to this day selling thieves’ oil (aka four thieves vinegar) as a cure-all to people with terminal illnesses

I honestly feel really bad when I see fairly respected leftists and journalists celebrate Four Thieves as something that could make a big difference for folks who are paying way too much for medicine (which is all of us) and enable a mutual support network of hobby chemists saving lives.

and then I look at it and that’s not what I see at all — it’s just a fucking cosplay anarchist (complete with cheap camo pants) with the type of opsec that gets the people around them arrested and an understanding of chemistry that will get people killed. and that fucking sucks! the part of me that’s susceptible to a dream like this thinks a 3D printer for medicine (per the marketing) is a great idea!

every other part of me is horrified. 3D printers barely fucking work and that’s our reliability target for fucking organic chemistry, a branch of science where it’s so easy (and sometimes necessary for a synthesis, as you pointed out) to produce chemical byproducts that give you fucking horrifying cancer if you’re lucky? and then the fucker just forgets or doesn’t know about yield and purification? this fucker calls his output “street drugs” and expects you to fucking bareback them without an appropriate validation to make sure you haven’t synthesized fucking poison in your little tin-foil-and-tape reaction vessel? and he sure as fuck isn’t giving test catalysts out with the pills he keeps throwing into crowds

one thing I’ve noticed from this most recent article is they forked some MIT designs for their synthesis discovery software and their chemical reactor. I’m not a chemist, any chemistry knowledge above was gleaned from YouTube and probably isn’t correct (let me know if I was way off), so I wanna know — is there anything at all to that for any drug, or is the idea as a whole just fucking terrible? I’m leaning towards the latter, but like I mentioned, I’m susceptible to this kind of dream.

the only worthwhile use of LLMs: endlessly prompting the L Ron Hubbard chatbot with Battlefield Earth reviews as a form of acausal torture

the people who originated this bullshit have a 177-page ebook full of exactly the kinds of essays you’d expect from TESCREAL propaganda

it’s like a software fidget toy. also I found out how to make the mistake that makes a backup take 5 hours instead of 1.5 minutes (fortunately locally, not on our deployment)

the ability of Mozilla’s executives and PMs to ignore public outcry is incredible, but not exactly unexpected from a thoroughly corrupt non-profit

so mozilla decided to take the piss while begging for $10 donations:

We know $10 USD may not seem like enough to reclaim the internet and take on irresponsible tech companies. But the truth is that as you read this email, hundreds of Mozilla supporters worldwide are making donations. And when each one of us contributes what we can, all those donations add up fast.

With the rise of AI and continued threats to online privacy, the stakes of our movement have never been higher. And supporters like you are the reason why Mozilla is in a strong position to take on these challenges and transform the future of the internet.

the rise of AI you say! wow that sounds awful, it’s so good Mozilla isn’t very recently notorious for pushing that exact thing on their users without their consent alongside other privacy-violating changes. what a responsible tech company!

I still need to listen to this (I got way too into making backups of various systems, as one does) but severed heads has been such a big part of my FLAC rotation ever since you first mentioned them

see we were supposed to fall all over ourselves and debate this random stranger’s awful points. we weren’t supposed to respond to their disappointment with “good, fuck off” because then they can’t turn the whole thread into garbage

Awful.systems may contain malware or other harmful content.

oof, this one stings

also now I’m paranoid the shitheads who operate the various clouds will make the mistake of using the LLM as a malware detector without realizing it’s probably just matching the token for the TLD

a lot of their liquor is surprisingly very good! that’s why it’s also surprising how bad their scotch is

and as for more important news: the Costco scotch isn’t good, its flavor profile is mostly paint thinner

but their tequila’s still excellent