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Comment Good luck with chemistry (Score 1) 33

I'm an older chemist. I'm seeing little to no advancement of what I do, medicinal chemistry, from AI. Translating chemistry from the literature into a real notion of how chemistry behaves isn't happening. I know, AlphaFold, right? No. AlphaFold was a beautiful application of AI, to solving a fairly bound problem using a very large, highly curated data set (the pdb). Most chemistry is a lot messier. I'll keep watching, but right now it seems that we're gonna have to keep chemists around, though we've largely decided that they will reside outside the US in the future.

Comment Nut jobs everywhere (Score 3, Interesting) 85

I'm a medicinal chemist and have been for 45 years. I also tend to vote fairly liberally, though the leftists thought police were beginning to get on my nerves. Anyhow, my feeling is that glyphosate is probably a lot safer than anything that we try to replace it with, that works as well. When anything has been used as much a glyphosate and the only people sure of it's toxicity are lawyers, then you've got a pretty safe agent. Go to Lowe's hardware and get a container of new Roundup and read the label. The new stuff in there is surely more toxic than glyphosate and is more chemically kin to Agent Orange and paraquat. Be careful what you ask for here. Oh yeah, I kind of feel the same way about methylene chloride.

Comment Duh! (Score 1) 102

Given where "cable" was heading, this was kinda "Duh!". Of course it was going to happen. We went from $240/mo with AT&T's service to $140 with Google Fiber and Youtube TV. And everything got better in the process.

Of course, now that Google Fiber is being bought by private equity, the enshitification will began anew.

Comment Bad News! (Score 1) 16

This is really bad news. TWC started it all with Road Runner and then started their enshitification. Mostly, their settop boxes and remotes just didn't work and, of course, the steady 2x inflation rise in prices. Then AT&T came in and was a breath of fresh air with clear pricing and reliable high speed. Unfortunately, their enshitificaion was even more rapid with 4x inflation rises in prices. Then, after years of promises, Google Fiber finally shows up. It's been bliss for 5 years. Then I saw this. When I saw the words "investment firm" in an announcement somewhere else this morning, I knew we were for another round of enshitification. Oh well, here we go again.

Comment Chemist here. (Score 1) 61

I keep trying to get AI to answer chemistry questions, mostly of an organic synthesis nature. I get answers that sound like they might know something but it's not very specific. Sort of like trying to bullshit your way through it. I think it will be a long time before we get good AI on organic synthesis which is kind of central to drug discovery. It's mostly because the literature isn't all that easily extractable. The other is that there's a lot of garbage to ignore. And yes, I'm aware of AlphaFold et al. I'm also aware of the limits of extending that model.

Comment Not a gun nut! (Score 4, Insightful) 123

I'm no gun nut, nor do I worship at the feet of the second amendment, but this seems downright stupid. I'm betting this Bauer-Kahan person, although well intentioned, is probably not really well informed on this. I'll go do a little research.

I'm back. Just as I thought. A very nice person with good intentions who is also a lawyer. So yeah, no clue. She does seem to have something against plastics in general.

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