i’m aware, last year i’ve been tasked to use a certain process but refused and instead modified it in such a way as to get rid of mercury salt used; it was dissolved in DMF, so (regular nitrile) gloves won’t even help. worse than that, it took me only 2-3 weeks start to finish to figure it out, meaning that anyone else could do that earlier and handful of people were put at risk for no reason. aggression as a result of lead toxicity is probably a bit more complex story and looks like it might have a developmental part, judging by delay and how kids are more susceptible to lead toxicity in general; meaning that presumably mostly adults won’t be affected to the same degree. another big nope on my list would be thallium and cadmium compounds, and while i’d only use sub-g amount at most, there are places where all of these metals are mined, and at one point are in form of fine dust fortunately these are so obscure that i’ve never came across these

long term lead exposure will also do that, and neurotoxic part at least appears to be irreversible. can’t remember how much of it is more of neurodevelopmental thing tho

wasn’t there a case of some supplements that were contaminated with lead? you know, a sneaky neurotoxin with no antidote whose results only show up months later

but then you’re living with red-button-pushers only

they’re all cosplaying medieval alchemy so at least it fits a theme

11GW is on par with energy use of entire Begium or Finland

I’m Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death

thiel jumpscare

damn i wish i had confidence of a mediocre techbro. twitter thread suggests that there’s four copyright infringements just in these two images

e: still can’t get fingers right, lol

okay so they want to use layer of soil as a sort of seasonal storage. fine; this part works. 1. who’s paying for all these residential heat pumps? 2. this kind of arrangement means a lot of digging and drilling. it takes one (1) nimby to stop it in its tracks and all these earthworks also cost money 3. at this point it’s way simpler and cheaper to just use solar collectors to top up heat reservoir in the summer, as long as heat pumps are paid for. also these same solar collectors would just provide hot water in summer directly

were they advised by rube goldberg?

also, your local university probably has a kind of stability that makes years-decades long commitment worthwhile, unlike some sketchy bloated startup that probably dealt in crypto seven years ago

i heard that a couple of german dcs (owned by universities or other research institutions and therefore indirectly by state) do this, but this kinda depends on district heating grid existing and also puts some limits on thermal side, in simplest variant chips just have to run hotter. not to mention that it’s kinda easier to do when you own the entire thing, long term, and can offload some of the engineering and design effort to some intern student writing masters or doctoral thesis. this works in part because when you switch from coal to gas and have district heating using that waste heat, there’s less waste heat from CCGT of equal power, and it’s all gone when you switch to renewables, so there’s a grid that still needs some heat and dc boiler can fill that gap to a small degree. at the same time dc can’t be the only source of heat because demand is seasonal and dc ideally should run 24/7 and while you can get enough storage for daily variation this won’t be enough and some other source of heat is needed. this is why it makes more sense as a long term government backed project

(he’s in the business of dropping anvils from biplanes)

Yeah there are only so many ways to get it going, you don’t hear about these that don’t figure it out because cops bust them making them look like clowns and nobody wants to get associated with them afterwards

there is also a barrier between step 2 and 3, because sometimes news like that are suppressed. american school shootings get that treatment sometimes, not to mention all the info filtering at facebook and friends. this is why sympathetic media is an important bit to have in advance. there’s also this bit where any serious insurgency needs money and it looks like what they got didn’t work out

that southern police chief was per blogpost Laurie Pritchett and this kind of thinking is also what makes COIN tick. worry not, Hegseth declared it all woke nonsense

eliezer misses that (as used in decolonization/civil rights era) nonviolence is effectively a sophisticated propaganda strategy that takes existing injustices and violence and uses it to bait opponent into attacking you, all while your own people take photos and show to entire world carefully crafted messaging that appeals to general public conscience. the messaging part is extremely important in this. there’s no fucking way this could work for him because his cause is comprehensible only to those who already buy his cult messaging as ground truth. he’s in just for the moral superiority of being nonviolent. he’s never gonna get it because comprehending it requires touching grass

extreme billionaires want you to know they could have done physics vibe

there’s been a claim of 200ish GW of new datacenters announced but it’s only something like 5GW being built and only a fraction of that is actually finished or powered on. this mostly goes for american ai dcs, which are 3/4 of them all. not sure if it holds for emirates, but it would completely not surprise me if it’s the case there also https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/#how-much-actual-data-center-capacity-came-online-in-2025-my-estimate-3gw-of-it-load

Except it is a problem, man! As I covered in this week’s free newsletter [link above], I estimate that only around 3GW of actual IT load (so around 3.9GW of power) came online last year, and as Sightline reported, only 5GW of data center construction is actually in progress globally at this time, despite somewhere between 190GW and 240GW supposedly being in progress. In reality, data centers take forever to build (and obtaining the power even longer than that), but nobody needs to harsh their flow by looking into what’s actually happening.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-much-of-the-ai-bubble-is-real/ (paywalled) linked claim for 190GW https://www.sightlineclimate.com/research/data-center-outlook linked claim for 240GW https://paulkedrosky.com/chart-of-the-day-data-center-buildout-slowed-sharply/

aside from everything else, as posted by ed zitron previously i doubt that anything is really getting built there

- hey chaotic systems are a thing, you can’t predict every single last detail

gwern: as a proof that you’re wrong, what if we placed everywhere very fast robots that avoid getting into chaotic systems in the first place

spare a thought and a prayer for all these careers of ambitious propagandists and engagement farmers, dislocated without warning

fresh hellish nonsense brought to you by ai-gen podcasts enabled by techbros interpretation of consent and privacy:

https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/

WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to say their call was turned into a podcast in an attempt to promote WebinarTV’s services.

“WebinarTV is believed to leverage a range of browser extensions that provide functionalities such as AI powered transcription and note-taking tools, or tools to automate the joining of online meetings. The platform mostly relies on the widespread use of these tools by end users, rather than operating them directly. However, at least one of the known extensions is listed on the Chrome Web Store as developed by WebinarTV.”

i see elsewhere that wikipedia after all restricted a bit more use of chatbots, and i’m very interested how much kicking and screaming did it involve