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CapeWearingAeroplane

@ CapeWearingAeroplane @sopuli.xyz

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90
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • What is the most advanced chemistry you've done on your own at home or work?

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  • Hehe, exactly :) the thing with gases is that the line between completely fine (campfire outside) to potentially lethal (liquid nitrogen evaporating in a small, poorly ventilated garage) can be harder to see and judge for an amateur than a lot of other things. Anyone would understand that they should avoid getting acids or toxic chemicals on their skin, and the protective measures are quite simple to carry out. The same is true for most flammable or explosive liquids or solids. So the idea behind my advice was really "If there's something that's likely to hurt you because you aren't properly aware of the danger involved and how to mitigate it, it's likely to be a gas, so be extra, extra careful around gases, gas producing reactions, and volatile compounds."

  • What is the most advanced chemistry you've done on your own at home or work?

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  • If you have a fume hood that's good of course, but since the question was about advising amateurs on safety, my advice is restrictive, because gases can be very dangerous in subtle ways.

    As an amateur: Do you know how to properly work in a fume hood so that it protects you? Do you know its capacity, and what to do if something unexpected leads to gas development over that capacity? Have you had training in using this stuff, so that you can react properly and quickly if something goes wrong, rather than freezing up?

    In short: Because the potential dangers when working with a lot of gases are harder to detect, and harder to mitigate, than when working with other stuff, I'm taking a restrictive approach in my advice.

    For you question on pyrophoric gases: They can remain in contact with air for a while (several minutes, depending on concentration) before igniting. Worst case, the room around you can fill with gas from a leak before causing a gas explosion. In principle you can also inhale gas from this leak, such the the explosion also takes place inside you :)

  • What is the most advanced chemistry you've done on your own at home or work?

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  • Anther chemist stepping in here: Anything that produces an off-gas of any kind that does anything other than smell bad should be considered potentially lethal. People have died from working with liquid nitrogen or dry ice without proper ventilation. In addition, a gas explosion can be far worse than any other explosion you are likely to pull off by accident, and if you have a leak somewhere you may have no clue how much explosive gas is in the room with you. Some gases will react and form acid when it gets into your airways, essentially acting as an invisible acid that can jump from the table into your face.

    In short: Stay away from dangerous gases and stuff that makes them, and consider pretty much all gases as dangerous unless you know for a fact that they aren't. Other than that, the potential dangers of backyard chemistry can largely be mitigated by using common sense and working with small amounts of chemicals, good luck :)

  • Court Bans Use of 'AI-Enhanced' Video Evidence Because That's Not How AI Works

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  • Looking at a half circle and guessing that the "missing part" is a full circle is as much of a blind guess as you can get. You have exactly zero evidence that there is another half circle present. The missing part could be anything, from nothing to any shape that incorporates a half circle. And you would be guessing without any evidence whatsoever as to which of those things it is. That's blind guessing.

    Extrapolating into regions without prior data with a non-predictive model is blind guessing. If it wasn't, the model would be predictive, which generative AI is not, is not intended to be, and has not been claimed to be.

  • Court Bans Use of 'AI-Enhanced' Video Evidence Because That's Not How AI Works

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  • I 100 % agree on your primary point. I still want to point out that a detail in a 4k picture that takes up a few pixels will likely be invisible to the naked eye unless you zoom. "Digital zoom" without interpolation is literally just that: Enlarging the picture so that you can see details that take up too few pixels for you to discern them clearly at normal scaling.

  • Court Bans Use of 'AI-Enhanced' Video Evidence Because That's Not How AI Works

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  • No computer algorithm can accurately reconstruct data that was never there in the first place.

    What you are showing is (presumably) a modified visualisation of existing data. That is: given a photo which known lighting and lens distortion, we can use math to display the data (lighting, lens distortion, and input registered by the camera) in a plethora of different ways. You can invert all the colours if you like. It's still the same underlying data. Modifying how strongly certain hues are shown, or correcting for known distortion are just techniques to visualise the data in a clearer way.

    "Generative AI" is essentially just non-predictive extrapolation based on some data set, which is a completely different ball game, as you're essentially making a blind guess at what could be there, based on an existing data set.

  • You will certainly not regret

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  • I may be wrong, but I've been told by a German that beer is by German law considered a staple food. I choose to believe this is true.

  • USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

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  • Hehe, I absolutely agree.. for reference, High Sierra is v10.13, released in 2017. I'm now running v13, released 2022. They moved from v10.15 to v11 in 2020, when the arm chips were released.

    My old MacBook could probably run 10.15 just fine, but I don't have any good reason to update it, as it's only purpose now is to compile distributables for other old machines.

    Also: I really dislike that they've been pushing non-backwards compatible major releases so hard since 2020. I'm not updating my OS because I can't be bothered to break shit, it shouldn't be like that..

  • USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

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  • I believe brew dropped support for a high Sierra just a couple years back (2022 I think) but as of now my 2012 MacBook Pro is still chugging along whenever I need to compile or test something for x86 and can't be bothered to cross-compile from my new MacBook :)

  • Putin ‘wins’ rigged Russian election with 88% of the vote, early results show

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  • Exactly this: I remember meeting some Russians that had moved to Belgium a few years ago, and we got to talking about this topic. These were well educated young people, yet they told me the thing that surprised them the most when moving to Belgium was that people actually cared about elections, and that elections actually mattered. They had been completely convinced that elections in the west were just like the "elections" they were used to from Russia.

  • Denmark to conscript women into armed forces for first time

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  • I don't see Russia, or other authoritarian countries mentioned in the thread I'm responding to. This is about conscription in a democratic country where only adults are conscripted.

  • Solutions? Where we're going, we don't need solutions.

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  • I was joking, and definitely agree with you. I don't think I've used eval since my first programming course in uni.

    Edit: Except for monkey hacks for laughs of course.

  • Denmark to conscript women into armed forces for first time

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  • The step from "Denmark" to "Corrupted rulers" went a bit fast there.

    You are aware that Denmark allows political parties and movements to oppose conscription, and that anyone strongly opposed can emigrate and denounce their Danish citizenship? Nobody is preventing anyone from doing those things. If you don't do them, you are implicitly accepting the social contract in the country.

  • Denmark to conscript women into armed forces for first time

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  • Ever heard of "solidarity"? You can't just live safe while your countrymen risk their lives to defend you. If you don't like it, you have plenty of time to emigrate in peacetime.

    If shit hits the fan, it's too late. YOU made the choice to stay in a country where you were obligated to defend you neighbour if called upon. You can't reap the benefits of collective protection and responsibility and then run off when it's time to step up and do the dirty work.

  • Denmark to conscript women into armed forces for first time

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  • I strongly disagree. This isn't about "depriving people of their freedom" this is about the fact that everyone who lives in a free country, which will support them and give them benefits for life, has a responsibility and a duty to answer when called upon.

    Nobody can expect others to defend them if they won't do the same. An integral part of the social contract in countries with conscription is that everyone accepts that duty to answer when called upon, and to defend their countrymen when necessary.

    Anyone who doesn't like it is free to start a political movement to abolish it. I have yet to see such a movement in any of the Nordic countries.

  • Solutions? Where we're going, we don't need solutions.

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  • For Python I think there's an actual point though: A lot of Python projects are user friendly wrappers for pre-compiled high-performance code. It makes sense to call something "py

    <SomeKnownLibrary>

    " to signal what the library is.

  • Solutions? Where we're going, we don't need solutions.

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  • That will give you an extremely clear error when you run the code. Also, any IDE worth its salt should be able to fix that for you.

    Even the error message you get from C++ for missing a semicolon is harder to understand and fix than this.

  • Solutions? Where we're going, we don't need solutions.

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  • I have to be honest: I dont see the problem of including the entire signature at the top of the doc, and the listing the params below. If I know the class/function, a quick look at the signature is often all I need, so I find it convenient that it's at the top of the doc. If it's a class/function I'm not familiar with, I just scroll to the bullet points.

    I agree on the bit about whitespace in signatures though. Luckily Python allows me to use as many lines as I want within a parentheses.

  • Solutions? Where we're going, we don't need solutions.

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  • I believe eval would like a word with you...