fullsquare
@fullsquare@awful.systems
- Comment on Utter nonsense 2 weeks ago:
i don’t mean beta-oxidation, it’s just a series of separated normal reactions. i mean something like this: when first learning about ketones, you might learn about aldol condensation, which has enol as a nucleophile and another carbonyl as electrophile. at some other point you might learn about strecker reaction, which has iminium ion as electrophile and cyanide as nucleophile. but really, what you can do is mix and match, and you can pair enolizable ketone and iminium (mannich reaction) or carbonyl and cyanide (cyanohydrin formation) and then generalize, for example you don’t need strictly ketone for mannich, you can use any electron rich conjugated system like malonate or nitroalkane anion (henry reaction) or phenol or indole. to figure this out you need to study mechanisms. these last two are usually treated as variants of friedel-crafts reaction, but really categories like this are fake
and to get that right, you need to know how these reactive intermediates look like, how reactive they are, what influences their stability which means that ochem starts with discussion of carbocations, carboanions, radicals, their shapes and orbitals involved, hyperconjugation, solvent effects and the like. and then first reactions taught are sn1/sn2, because these showcase these fundamentals nicely, and from there, it’s about introduction of more compound classes
we only had synthons introduced during lecture at around 4th year, and only for ochem path, it’s not doing a lot at that point and imo would have much more impact right after ochem intro course
- Comment on Utter nonsense 2 weeks ago:
i always thought that the idea of synthons should be taught early on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthon
- Comment on Utter nonsense 2 weeks ago:
i’d say it’s more important to learn mechanisms because this way you can notice these patterns of reactivity easier. at some point you’d only get new reactions that are really just pieces of other reactions you know put in a new way
- Comment on Utter nonsense 2 weeks ago:
there’s zero reason to make chart like this, it’s both barely comprehensible and touching surface level stuff only (where are palladium couplings for one)
- Comment on Mom they're fighting again 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Physics! 3 weeks ago:
These things are under high voltage, so no. And then there’s several kg of mercury inside
- Comment on Physics! 3 weeks ago:
no, but they will also kill you (but not by magic)
- Comment on The AI that we'll have after AI (Doctorow) 4 weeks ago:
the same way they did in 2021
- Comment on AI might be creating a ‘permanent underclass’ but it’s the makers of the tech bubble who are replaceable | Van Badham 4 weeks ago:
ah yes chatbot seller says these things will become so capable, they’re gonna destroy the world, just you wait and see, but need trillion dollars in financing first. op have you already eaten your daily recommended pebble today?
- Comment on Have you ever been shown the "clarity"? 4 weeks ago:
if your brain does that without drugs i’d suggest you check it with a neurologist because it’s not usual. maybe there will be some new kind of epilepsy named after you
- Comment on Have you ever been shown the "clarity"? 4 weeks ago:
I have excellent vision normally and don’t need glasses, I can see things from extremely fair away and my eyes have a wide FOV (my peripheral is great)
it sounds a lot like psychedelics and not any usual human experience
- Comment on People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads 4 weeks ago:
can these things be reflashed?
- Comment on Cause and Effect 1 month ago:
i think that conspiracy theories are more about feeling special about knowing some secret knowledge, lots of people fall for this and even create conspiracy theories without realizing, no matter how smart they are
- Comment on Before modern-day authoritarian regimes, did people living under abosolute monarchies talk criticize the monarchs? Or did they just stay silent in fear of persecution? 1 month ago:
Radio transmission doesn’t require state-level capacity (yes there are other barriers like cost or skill) and waves don’t care about borders. Receiving foreign radio was a big thing and it doesn’t require special equipment
- Comment on yeah everything is probably made of like, idk, earth water, fire and air or something idrk 1 month ago:
Aristotle said so much dumb shit, like he said that womrn have less teeth and never bothered to check
- Comment on What use a smart card reader? 1 month ago:
New-ish EU national IDs have NFC capability and certificate in them so you can probably sign something with that if you figure out how
- Comment on Shape up. 2 months ago:
maybe his neck just did that
- Comment on More people are joining the military. A shaky US job market could be boosting the numbers. 2 months ago:
yeah and german toy makers were critical in supplying parts for arty fuzes in ww1. (i heard that soviet milk bottle filling machines could be repurposed for filling shells with molten explosives - both are dispensed hot, size is similar, not sure how real it is). company making complicated machinery out of many parts, requiring tight tolerances, made on-site, that already has tooling to make most of gun parts probably except barrels, makes sense that it could be pressed to make simple handguns.
so what. manufacturing got much more specialized, so that even if in past car factory could crank out entire tanks, they probably can’t do it today easily (parts, sure, even entire engines and transmissions. not armor plate, or ceramics, or tungsten inserts or whatever these have). that factory could make stamped steel parts of jdam, but probably not much more. mk80 series shells are basically 30cm-ish wide, 1cm-ish thick steel tubes, with notches on inside and necked down while hot from both sides. can’t do that without highly specialized machinery
- Comment on More people are joining the military. A shaky US job market could be boosting the numbers. 2 months ago:
there’s little overlap unless usaf decides to use samsung galaxy note 7 as warheads
- Comment on Microsoft Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward 2 months ago:
wdym, that’s the point
- Comment on Is there a word for the happiness in finding the exact right word? 2 months ago:
i think there is, but i don’t want to spread associated cognitohazard
- Comment on There are people young enough to not even remember Pokémon Red/Blue who are old enough to be parents now 2 months ago:
i’m saying that what you see as generational divide can be partially also class divide
- Comment on There are people young enough to not even remember Pokémon Red/Blue who are old enough to be parents now 2 months ago:
have you considered that there are people your age that were broke as kids, or non-westerners, that also don’t remember pokemon red and blue
- Comment on Spotifies come and Spotifies go, but that folder of badly-sorted MP3s will still be there in the 2050s. 2 months ago:
only if you keep backups
- Comment on Writing with LLM is not a shame. 2 months ago:
yes they do, wtf are you talking about futurism.com/openai-use-cheating-homework
- Comment on Writing with LLM is not a shame. 2 months ago:
if that task is offloaded to spicy autocomplete, all and any learning of this skill is avoided, so it’s not mega useful
- Comment on Thanks I'd rather my beer stay analogue 2 months ago:
and stops working when us-east-1 burns down
- Comment on Help. 2 months ago:
it also requires zero effort on their part
- Comment on UK government suggests deleting files to save water 2 months ago:
Show me how do you want to dissipate 10GWt without evaporative cooling towers, i’ll wait
- Comment on UK government suggests deleting files to save water 2 months ago:
Depending on local climate, season and proximity to cities or industrial customers, this is often done, but you’ll still have to dump lots of heat in the summer when space heating is off
