highly corrosive and combustible chemical or go without their key ingredient.

Sulphuric acid is not combustible. I can go into details if anyone wants, but it’s mostly a fire hazard near most metals and burnable substances. This matters because, as long as properly stored, it offers no risk of fire, and proper storage isn’t hard to achieve. (e.g. carbon steel tanks if concentrated past 93%).

And this shit goes every fucking where, from copper ore treatment to organic synthesis to fertiliser production. You can get a pretty good guess of the industrial capabilities of a place based on their sulphuric acid production. As such it’s no surprise China is banning exports.

Relevant to note sulphuric acid is typically made from sulphur, and sulphur is typically obtained from petroleum and/or natural gas. That’s why the supply has become problematic.

If you don’t have corn beer, then any little thing… (reference to a certain song)

By the way they still drink that same corn beer in the region. It’s called chicha de jora. It’s barely alcoholic,

I wonder if there wasn’t some decoration around that “plug”, like a tail or some feathers.

The jaguar spots becoming holes in the statue are a nice detail. I guess they’re there to avoid the ceramic from exploding once cooked? (I once made a clay centaur in arts class. It got me a 100. Then it exploded in the oven. Teacher was sadder than me.)

Haec amissio? (is this loss?)

What a banger. I’m not into musicals, mind you, but I’ve enjoyed every single second of this episode, it was bloody perfect. All that build-up from the other six episodes, the tease with the Misfits “fighting” over Elizabetta, the way they introduced Lilith’s lovers, letting the Misfit’s personalities “leak” into the characters they’re representing, all that anxiety waiting for Purson (mind you I did read the manga, but I was still “Purson when?”)…

And they made the Misfits look physically tired at the end of the episode. Specially Elizabetta. Like you’d expect from someone who has been dancing/singing/acting for minutes in a row, it’s something so subtle but you notice it in real actors.

Plus I love how this arc basically introduced a new character (Purson) without feeling weird or off. Perhaps due to his bloodline ability, sure, but still.

People will still talk about this episode for the years to come, because it is that good.

That a relationship needs to grow into maturity, and this takes time.

I think people are a bit too eager to swallow bullshit in general, as long as spoken/written/gestured in a confident tone. And they often deal with uncertainly poorly; when others show doubt, they often either disregard the info or the doubt itself.

This likely predates Big Tech. I do agree with you though, Big Tech is actively encouraging this behaviour — it’s easier to sell goods, services and ideas to a gullible person than to a sensible one.

And, when it comes to LLMs, Big Tech is always playing some sort of double game: at the same time it claims “the info might be inaccurate, be careful!”, but it tunes its models to use that confident tone that fools people into believing bullshit. Because the people in Big Tech know that, if the general population becomes sceptic towards LLM output, most of its appeal as a new technology is gone; you can’t use it for any task that needs any sort of reliability.

[Sorry for the double reply]

*slow clap*

I’m not completely opposed to people using large models as a writing aid, specially for technical stuff. However: if you’re publishing a scientific paper, it’s your job to check it twice, thrice, tenice ten times, to ensure all info there is accurate, factual, and well grounded. If you can’t do it, you shouldn’t be littering the commons with your rubbish.

That applies even to references. In fact, references are part of the process: knowledge isn’t born ex bloody nihilo dammit, people should be able to check the references of your paper and find earlier literature about the subject.

[Justin Angel] My guess is that this policy will be applied selectively depending on institutional privilege and personal notoriety. It’ll end up as a tool of silencing unconnected individuals vs. promoting better scientific discourse. // I aspire to be wrong.

Doesn’t it sound weird that someone immediately assumes (i.e. makes up) the policy will be implemented unfairly, as soon it is announced? Well, if you check their profile, it doesn’t:

Justin Angel // @JustinAngel // AI, iOS & Android dev. Worked at Meta, Uber, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft building apps, developer platforms, and hardware. Tweeting about LLM psychotherapy.

Plus almost all of their tweets are about LLMs. This stinks “competing interests” from a distance.

It’s actually harsher than it looks like: “followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue.”

This means that, for all intents and purposes, if you get caught by this policy, you’re permanently banned from submitting preprints to arXiv, even if those are the main appeal of the repository.

Good to know, since I have both peppermint and red peppers in my garden. And I actually use both together often, with either ground meat or aubergines. (Plus cumin. Lots of. It goes great with both.)

Abo-meow-nya-tion.

Funny (but not surprising) that Gilbert immediately caught what Stanley was up to: Stanley is trying to give Pride the freedom to marry whoever she wants.

Also, Pride, come on… you know you ain’t your game counterpart. You’re just some Earthling baka. Chill, no need to blame yourself for what you didn’t.

I’m not a biologist either, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

But it still points the no life / life transition being extremely easy? Doesn’t it?

Perhaps so, provided the conditions are suitable for that.

In special, going from free-floating to contained self-replicating junk seems to be a damn big leap, since the containment (aka membrane) needs to be selective: it needs to let some material to go in/out to allow replication and get rid of leftovers, but not enough to threat the integrity of the structure.

It was still most likely a hellscape for our standards, though. Just not a barren one.

300 million years is still a lot of time, even evolutionarily speaking. For reference, it’s ~twice the time between us and our last common ancestor with platypuses (160mya). Plus I kind of expect this sort of barely celular… being? structure? that gave origin to the LUCA to evolve way faster.

And more importantly, it means the LUCA wasn’t the only one around those times. It was part of some sort of ecosystem already. Alongside a bunch of less lucky siblings.

To be clear: the LUCA is the last universal common ancestor. There was earlier life, before the LUCA; it’s just that all its surviving descendants are also LUCA descendants.

This is important to know while reading the text, because it explains why the LUCA was so surprisingly complex.

With 32 GB system RAM, Microsoft believes that the games can have more “breathing room”.

There’s no such thing as “breathing room”, dammit. Once you set up 32 GB as standard, shitty / assumptive developers are going to say “well, we assooooome users have 32 GB. It would be a waste to design the game to use less than that lol lmao”. Specially devs doing the same as Microslop, and using AI shitty code to pump out code faster than humans can desloppify.

System monitor says I’m running 12GB, but there’s a lot of unnecessary stuff open, and last time I restarted this machine is 4 days ago. Plus at this rate my computer is basically a server, and since I already have 32 GB I don’t care too much about memory management any more.

I found the recipe! Might try my hand at it, it’s Autumn here and the recipe looks good. (I might end using butternut squash instead though.)