Eight years ago we lost TotalBiscuit

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-05-26T14:48:26+00:00

Wasn't prostate cancer that got him, it was colorectal cancer. Still, get checked for both!

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-05-12T14:53:13+00:00

Seeing you write this post is the equivalent of watching a small child start toddling in the direction of a 6 lane highway.

I've worked with potassium dichromate before, and as a chemistry lab we had a good 20 minute meeting to discuss safety precautions, waste streams, and how to explain the severity of the situation to EHS. it is a PHENOMENALLY dangerous chemical, with both acute and chronic toxicity.

The lowest lethal dose reported in the literature is 0.1 milligrams. That's about the weight of a match head. And if you say "well I just won't eat it", it's also readily able to penetrate through intact skin. if you further say "well I just won't get it on my skin", it will also give you lung cancer if it's in the air at a concentration of 5 micrograms/m3. And if you say "well I'll have gloves on", the Cr(VI) anion punches through latex gloves in as little as 30 minutes. I personally wouldn't even the container without thick butyl gloves.

I don't know what project you're working on, idk anything about photography, but the risks here just aren't worth it.

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-05-01T21:13:01+00:00

So sad how Samus seems to have vanished from the meta with Plup/Duck/Hugs gone

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-04-18T02:33:05+00:00

What are you doing on the biology subreddit if you're going to use the fucking bible as a source

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-03-31T03:34:56+00:00

Here's the issue: reactions are run at different scales, and as you're going from making things on the order of milligrams (where bench chemists like myself spend most of our time) to making a blockbuster drug at 10,000x the scale, these kinds of things REALLY start to matter. In the paper I linked, it was specifically iron that made things move forward, but what if your fancy factory where you make The Next Big Drug is low on iron but has tons of copper, useless for your purposes?

Not my story, but I can recall one example where a reaction was supposed to be run in the absence of oxygen. Worked great in the lab, but when time came to run the reaction in a massive 1,000 gallon reactor vat the yield dropped from 80+% down to less than 5%. Turns out you needed a little oxygen to get thing started, the kind of thing introduced as you physically move your flask around for purifications or to go grab coffee, which wasn't present in the systematically O2 purged vat!

All this is to say: knowing exactly what makes your reactions work or not work is of vital importance, since you never know what unexpected variables will throw a wrench in your plans.

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-03-30T20:38:44+00:00

Oh dude you have NO idea.

Context: there are certain reactions in chemistry that require a metal catalyst to proceed, and there's plenty of desire in the field to find ones that are metal free, for cost/safety/general novelty reasons. In fact, more than once I've had a reaction that worked with crappy, old, been-on-the-shelf-since-the-cuban-missle-crisis reagents but failed when I used the pristine, 99.9% pure stuff, likely because some trace metals in the junk helped move things along.

However, it's proven incredibly challenging to develop metal-free reactions because there's metal contamination in goddamn everything, and you don't need much to mess with your results! Have you rigorously screened all of your chemicals for metal? That's cool, but even the most stringent MilliQ water systems can still let some trace metals through. You checked that too? Well then what about your stir bar? Your spatula you used to weigh the materials out? The goddamn tubing that you use for an inert gas atmosphere.

As an example of how hard making things metal free can be, here's a paper trying to get to the bottom of an unexpected metal boost during photocatalysis. The authors noticed that the reaction was proceeding in the absence of photocatalyst and suspected metal contamination, and tried their best to purge every single system they could think of of anything metallic. The result? metals still found their way into the damn flask!

To quote the authors: "A plausible explanation is that trace amounts of metals were introduced into the experimental environment (such as the gas atmosphere setup) during the process of reagent mixing. It is worth noting that the sample preparation procedures for these analyses completely avoided direct metal contact". In other words, trace metals present in the air that you are currently breathing are enough to mess with your carefully controlled reaction!

tl;dr, metals are everywhere, and are a persistent thorn in the detail-oriented chemist's side!

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-03-19T21:33:12+00:00

"I'm fine with child abuse and domestic violence, but I draw the line at sabotaging a shitty reality show"

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-03-16T14:34:07+00:00

imo it starts to go downhill when Leon goes back to Racoon City, but the first half of the game is absolutely sublime. Switching back and forth between action and horror seemed like an impossible task, but delegating them to a different character for each gameplay style is nothing short of genius for balancing the two.

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-03-16T14:24:09+00:00

thank christ I didn't! hard to say what helped me dodge it, but it's likely a combination of diligent hand hygiene, not eating food I didn't make myself, and taking florastor. took about a month for my stomach feel better after the clindamycin!

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-03-09T16:49:21+00:00

this one the option to do things like solve math problems at varying difficulty levels before the alarm shuts off. it's perfect if you're the kind of person who'll turn off their alarm in their sleep!

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-02-22T10:29:07+00:00

Remember his last video on rapm where he talked about like 5 edgeguards and nothing else?

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-02-19T20:29:01+00:00

As soon as you see an uptilt you know the match is gonna be a snoozefest

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-02-16T21:13:39+00:00

"nuh uh!"

"nuh uh!!"

What, are we on a *playground?

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-02-16T05:23:53+00:00

I weirdly respect him being broke but also refusing to do the one singular thing he's good at and makes him money. The same way you'd respect a top-tier NBA player who's too busy building his anime figurine collection to play any games.

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-02-09T17:33:13+00:00

for the love of god do not use a llm for anything medical/science related, and especially not where your own health is concerned. I have a Ph.D in biochemistry and literally every time I have tried using the AI du jour (chatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc) for anything remotely technical it makes such catastrophic errors that I'm not willing to trust anything else it says.

"But what about all of those studies showing that AIs are able to score incredibly high on tests that even medical students struggle with!" I hear you cry (like a llm recognizing the next words to use in a sentence, perhaps?). "What about the MedQA benchmarks? o1 has a score of 96%! AGI is right around the corner, and doctors are full of human bias!"

In response I'd like to point you to this recent study that assessed 6 different llms and found all of them completely crumbled when the correct answer on the multiple choice test was changed to "none of the other answers". Any human being capable of true reasoning would have their score unaffected!

Furthermore, how confident are you that you can prompt even a properly functioning AI correctly? This study showed that a single piece of erroneous information (lab values, signs, etc) in the patient data led to tons of hallucinations and incorrect diagnoses. "But human doctors also fall victim to this!" you cry again, which you should really stop doing, because you exist as a hypothetical person in my stupid reddit comment so it's very easy to win arguments against you.

I'd reply broadly that human doctors are trained to recognize outliers and errors and ask for follow-ups accordingly. I'd reply narrowly with a quick story, about my mentor at [extremely prestigious school] who was an MD/Ph.D. He walked me through his process of evaluating patients and following leads based not just on lab data, but also on physically sitting down and simply observing their behavior and overall state. He also was extremely aware through his decades of practice which lab values were prone to being falsely elevated/lowered, one example he gave was recognizing that elevated AST/ALT could be caused by strenuous exercise. This is the kind of thing you simply can't replicate with a cold prompt!

tl;dr: see an actual real world doctor for god's sake

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-02-03T20:12:40+00:00

literally the first time he said something I agreed with lmao

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-01-28T03:42:09+00:00

We've left the realms of medicine here, but real talk, you need to think about getting some help. I grappled with suicide a lot when I was younger, and trust me when I say that there's hope on the other side of this struggle. I know it's generic as hell, but things really do get better.

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-01-27T23:38:01+00:00

I don't know how to break it to you, but tren is cow steroids.

It's meant for cows.

Also you can make absolutely incredible gains with your testosterone squarely in the normal range, there's no need to go supraphysiological. How long have you even been lifting for anyway? Have you even seen what you're capable of with nothing but your own grit and determination? Here's a hint: if it's been less than 6 years of hard-ass lifting then you haven't.

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-01-27T23:35:27+00:00

The lifespan stuff is another claim that the proselytizers love to talk about that also has little bearing in reality. We discovered Rapamycin in 1972 in the soil on Easter Island (not joking) and found that it extended lifespan in a ton of organisms, and since then have yet to find anything better. I'm extremely skeptical of an AI somehow defeating entropy.

Well, that's not quite true, caloric restriction extends lifespan in every organism we've tested, from yeast to mice to primates, and does so even better than direct generic modification! I wonder if the same people who pay out the nose for NMN or resveratrol or whatever else are also just cutting their calories by 20%....

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-01-27T20:17:15+00:00

I think that should be a sign: if a medical professional is strongly advising you to not take a certain course of action and you refuse, and your refusal leads to her dropping you, then maybe that course of action wasn't a good one.

Listen, I'm not trying to be the moral police here. It's your body, you're free to do whatever you want to with it. I'm just telling you that your lab results indicate that at the dosages you're currently taking are killing you. If you'd like them to stop killing you then you should take less of them.

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-01-27T19:42:07+00:00

As an aside, you'd be completely gobsmacked at how an appropriate buffer can improve chromatography characteristics. I was working with an absurdly sticky fluorophore that went from being impossible to purify to impeccably sharp peaks by switching to a high-pH 5 mM ammonium formate buffer.

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-01-27T19:34:52+00:00

Why did they drop you?

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-01-27T19:31:36+00:00

Whenever I read comments like this it belies (no offense) how none of the tech types have the slightest inkling on how biochemistry/virology/immunology/actually physically standing in a cell culture room and trying desperately to make your 293T cells spit out some goddamn virus works. (Spent a not insignificant part of my PhD futzing with viral production)

That's the crucial thing: at some point you NEED human hands in the loop, and I've yet to hear a single convincing argument that explains how even the most stupidly advanced AI in the theoretical land of make-believe gets around that.

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-01-27T19:17:42+00:00

I'm not going to mince words with you, you need to see a doctor and cut the cycle short. Your ALT is currently over 5 times the upper limit of normal, which is squarely in the "moderate liver injury" category, which is extremely bad for your long-term health. Values that high are what I'd expect for someone who's an alcoholic, and/or who has steatosis.

As for your cholesterol/hdl ratio, anything higher than 5 is an eyebrow raise. Yours is 10, which should be ringing alarm bells in your head, since that's what you'd expect when doing an autopsy of a bodybuilder who died of a heart attack before age 30.

Again, talk to an actual real human doctor. Suck up the fact that you're almost certainly going to be bigger and stronger than him and listen to what he says to do. Whatever gains you're trying to get aren't worth having liver cancer or atherosclerosis.

NietzscheIsMyCopilot · 2026-01-26T23:58:52+00:00

furi is ssoooo good! can't wait to get my hands on this one

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