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realChem

he/him

Materials Science PhD candidate in Pittsburgh, PA, USA

My profile picture is the cover art from Not A Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough, and was drawn by Casper Pham (recolor by me).

Posts
14
Comments
91
Joined
2 yr. 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

  • 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.)

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • (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.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.)

  • 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!

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

  • 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).

  • Science @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    The Oldest Living Shark

  • This is really cool, thanks for sharing!

  • Report 'em too, if you're not already! It helps the mods and the admin team find them so that site-wide bans can be issued.

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • Well I hear what you're saying, although I don't much appreciate being told what I should want the outcome to be.

    My own wants notwithstanding, I know copyright law is notoriously thorny – fair use doubly so – and I'm no lawyer. I'd be a little bit surprised if NYT decides to raise this suit without consulting their own lawyers though, so it stands to reason that if they do indeed decide to sue then there are at least some copyright lawyers who think it'll have a chance. As I said, we'll see.

  • Yeah I've heard a lot of people talking about the copyright stuff with respect to image generation AIs, but as far as I can see there's no fundamental reason that text generating AIs wouldn't be subject to the same laws. We'll see how the lawsuit goes though I suppose.

  • I'm personally not so much worried about it being buggy or broken, that stuff gets patched. I'm more worried that it'll be fundamentally disappointing in some way, which is something that I probably wouldn't discover until long past the refund window. To be clear, I'm cautiously optimistic, but that caution leads me to wait until a week or so after release to hear what folks are saying about it.

  • I agree completely, especially about the negative knock-on effects on the quality of science overall. Making replications worthwhile for researchers to spend time and money on is certainly going to be a challenge that the institution of academia will need to figure out sooner or later (fingers crossed for sooner, but realistically probably later).

    Good luck with your PhD too! I hope it's going well so far!

  • Science @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    How Quantum Physics Describes Earth’s Weather Patterns | Quanta Magazine

    Not what I initially expected this article to be about, but I do love this kind of cross-cutting research that takes ideas from one field and applies them to a seemingly entirely different field. (Also makes me wish I'd been able to take a topology class at some point.)

    Science @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    Science Q&A

    Hey folks! Here's a pinned post where you can ask science questions!

    Here's a quick rundown of what this post is and isn't:

    • This is a place where you can ask science-related questions!
    • This is a place to provide science-based answers to others' questions!
    • This isn't reddit's askscience community. By this I mean we don't have the resources (or, really, desire) to vet users' credentials, and you shouldn't expect that whoever is answering your question is necessarily an expert. That said, this community does have a large share of professional scientists and engineers, and I'm hoping that those folks will be interested in sharing their expertise when they can.
    • This isn't a place to ask for medical advice – since we can't vet qualifications these kinds of questions won't be allowed here in the interest of preventing harm, and I'll remove any comments that ask personal medical questions. If you have a question about medicine that's not asking for advice, that is fine and al
    Science @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    I am once again asking for your feedback: Weekly /c/science Q&A post?

    So it turns out if you set a language on your post, anyone who hasn't explicitly picked any languages in their profile can't see it. So I'm gonna repost this with no language selected and see if we get a little more feedback this time.

    There were a couple of Q&A posts here yesterday the other day that got some pretty good engagement, and I was wondering if folks would be interested in a weekly/biweekly pinned Q&A post?

    I don't think it makes sense at this point to do anything like reddit's /r/AskScience does in terms of organizing themed panels or vetting people's credentials, nor is that something that's really supported by lemmy as a platform at the moment. It seems, though, that we do have a fair number of users around who are working scientists and engineers in a pretty wide variety of fields.

    So: if a pinned Q&A post existed, would you ask questions? Likewise, would you contribute answers? If you wouldn't use it, I'd love to know that too! Do you think it wou

    Technology @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org
    Science @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    What are your favorite science publications (that aren't primary literature)?

    A lot of science communication in the media can be, to say it gently, not the best. Important things get left out, conclusions are often misrepresented or extrapolated to things that they really don't say, and methods are often left out completely.

    I want to find some more sources for good science communication that people have generally found to be both accurate and well written for folks outside the field (since if all we wanted was accuracy, we'd just read the primary literature).

    I've always personally been a fan of Quanta. They occasionally write about topics I'm well versed in (materials / crystallography) and I find that on those topics they're very accurate, so I assume that's also true about the articles they write in other fields. I also think that the folks writing for them do a good job at the communication aspect, e.g. being willing to cover the basics a bit before jumping into the new science.

    What about you all? **Do you have a fa

    Science @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    Here's the relevant paper (which does not appear to be open access, unfortunately): Polygonal tessellations as predictive models of molecular monolayers

    Science @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    Interested in a weekly pinned Q/A post?

    There were a couple of Q/A posts here yesterday that got some pretty good engagement, and I was wondering if folks would be interested in a weekly pinned Q/A post?

    I don't think it makes sense at this point to do anything like reddit's /r/AskScience does in terms of organizing themed panels or vetting people's credentials, nor is that something that's really supported by lemmy as a platform at the moment. It seems, though, that we do have a fair number of users around who are working scientists and engineers in a pretty wide variety of fields.

    So: if a pinned Q/A post existed, would you ask questions? Likewise, would you contribute answers? Do you think it would be better to leave things as they are and just ask questions in post form? Let me know here in the comments, and also of course feel free to raise any additional thoughts or concerns you might have. If it seems like enough folks are interested I can set up a thread this week to try the idea out.

    Edit: Okay, base

    Science @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    Gell-Mann Amnesia and Michio Kaku

    A very thought-provoking video about Gell-Mann amnesia, its compliment (which she calls Mann-Gell amnesia, which I think is a fun name), and science communication

    Also the beginning of the video is framed around reddit, which I think is interesting to bring up in the context of lemmy/beehaw, building a new community, and the choices we make about how we communicate with each other online

    Science @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    On the Works of Pierre Curie on Symmetry -- one of my favorite papers

    This paper describes an amazingly deep principle underlying a lot of physics. The paper might be a little tricky if you're not familiar with group theory, but it's got some pretty good illustrations that help a lot.

    The one-line takeaway is:

    It is only the absence of some symmetry elements, which is obligatory. It is this property – dissymmetry – which makes phenomena

    Essentially, if you can find a broken symmetry in some effect, you know that you'll also find that broken symmetry in (the superposition of) it's causes. You can't necessarily say anything about the set of symmetries of the causes, but you can about their dissymmetries.

    The reason I love this paper so much is because it's part of a line of mathematical thinking about science that eventually lead to Emmy Noether's famous theorem, where she was able to prove that wherever we find a conserved quantity (e.g. energy, momentum, etc) it is due to an underlying

    Science @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    What field do you work in?

    I've been curious how many working researchers we've got in this community, and what you all do!

    If you're working in science (physical or social), engineering, etc in a research capacity, give a shout in the comments and let us know what you work on! Same goes for students and amateur scientists at any level. (And by amateur I mean those of you who are working on your own experiments but just not being paid for it / not working on a degree; I'm upset that "amateur" has a negative connotation, it shouldn't.)

    I'm currently a PhD candidate, working on transmission electron microscopy and electronic materials (mainly ferroelectrics). In the past I've been involved in research / product development in a few different industries, including medical devices, aerogels, and materials for RF devices.

    Sports @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    I've done it - open water certified!

    It's not sports news or anything, but I'm pretty excited! Finished my open water yesterday, got my card today! Really looking forward to getting some more dives in (I can tell I'll need a bunch more practice).

    Anyone else here scuba dive?

    Food and Cooking @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    Simple Strawberry Mochi Cake

    EDIT: Now with image!

    The mochi cake I used is from a mix (I like the one that Trader Joe's sells), but it you wanted to make your own I don't think it's too complicated. I like a thinner cake, so I usually only use half a box of the mix. Doing that also means it cooks very quickly!

    What takes it to the next level, in my opinion, is to get some freeze-dried strawberries or other freeze-dried fruit (Trader Joe's also sells this, and freeze dried fruits of all kinds are common in most supermarkets, usually in a snack aisle), grind them up, and dust them over top like you would with powdered sugar, but in a thicker layer. I like to grind mine with a mortar and pestle, but a (blade-style) coffer grinder or anything like that works too.

    It's honestly the simplest desert recipe I know, and one of my favorites!

    Music @beehaw.org
    realChem @beehaw.org

    What makes a concert great for you?

    Back in 2014 I got to see Rise Against play at the House of Blues in Boston, which was amazing, and just recently I went to see grandson and K. Flay perform together.

    I think these are my two favorite concerts I've been to, and the key factor seems to be the energy between the crowd and the band. It's a thing that's kinda hard to express in words, but for me that's definitely what makes a concert go from good to great. It doesn't need to be a high-energy thing necessarily, either: one of the best moments from grandson's set was actually a really somber, lower energy song that he came down onto the floor to perform, and you could just tell that everyone was really invested in that moment.

    What about you all? What takes a concert to the next level for you?