Leo Betschart @betschart@social.cleverlibre.org
live in Zurich, Chemical information consultant, organic chemist, Swiss, baker of breads, drinker of stouts, cooker of meals, enjoyer of coffee, reader of fantasy, listener of power and prog metal. MY opinions only.
#chemistswhocook #chemistswhobake #chemtoot #chemtoots #chemiverse
Joined Nov 2022
Leo Betschart
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Seriously though, fedi was *built* by furries, trans and queer folk, disabled neurodivergent people.
This is *the reason* the culture here is what it is. Why CWs are a thing. Why image descriptions are a thing. Why privacy matters here. Why moderation tools not only exist, but are usable — and used.
If you had joined and asked yourself "wow, how come this place is so chill and kinda… nice?" — that's thanks to all the nice people from communities some people call "weird".
So #KeepFediWeird.
Leo Betschart
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I saw a toot about how Mastodon isn’t a suitable network for social movements.. posted on a social network with 8 million accounts that has no adverts, is volunteer run, is open source, has no owner and is end to end free of big technology companies.
Leo Betschart
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Boost if you
- love reading books
- love buying books
No one will know which one.
Leo Betschart
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Sixty month anniversary of me coming out as trans 🏳️⚧️❤️
Leo Betschart
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65 years ago today, the first antidepressant, Imipramin, was discovered by Roland Kuhn.
However,Kuhn, a psychiatrist, conducted unethical and scientifically questionable research on patients without consent in a Swiss psychiatric hospital for decades.
Leo Betschart
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Got to say my experience of other Andy Brunnings has been entirely negative.
There’s one who’s sat on the andybrunning Twitter handle for years without tweeting.
And now there’s another who’s racked up thousands in debt that I’m getting debt collection letters for.
Leo Betschart
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Wish Derek Lowe was on Mastodon as well as Post but until then here’s the link to his commentary on the brouhaha at #ACS. #chemiverse https://post.news/article/2J91CQVKL7ReRTzyxP60lsB3eim
Leo Betschart
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Considering my change of job this year I was mulling over what to do with my ACS membership. The two biggest reasons I maintained membership were access to C&EN (because of the great coverage of the chemistry community) and the reduced conference rates. The latter I no longer need and sadly the former may no longer be a compelling reason to stick around. 25 years ain't bad, but I think I'm done. Good luck to all the former C&EN eds & those still holding the fort.
Leo Betschart
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We've flown the coup and are now fully active on Mastodon! Come engage with us.
Leo Betschart
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People on the other site keep telling me that Mastodon is just an echo chamber... which... is not at all how I'm experiencing it. Lots of people seem willing to disagree with me and make their disagreements clear.
They just don't suggest that I don't deserve to live when they do. And that seems healthier.
Leo Betschart
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If you’re wondering about Mastodon’s impact, Twitter is now automatically marking links to mastodon as “sensitive” (aka dangerous) and forcing users who get them to “appeal” the claim. In case Elon didn’t seem desperate enough for you already…
Leo Betschart
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Leo Betschart
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Why do organic chemists still place NMR spectra and HPLC chromatograms at the end of the SI instead of right after the procedure? I am old enough to have experienced evenings creatively using the photocopy machine to add spectra at the end of the SI, but I see no reason to continue doing it this way. Isn't it easier for both the author and the reader to show the spectrum right after the procedure? Old habits die hard. If you get that suggestion from a reviewer, you'll know it's me! #chemistry
ChatGTP, please write my a rhyming chemistry poem on failing reactions and frustration in the synthetic organic laboratory with a silver lining of a small success.
"In the synthetic organic laboratory,
Frustration often fills the air,
As failed reactions pile up high,
And our spirits start to despair.
We mix and we stir,
But the results are not what we desired,
Our hopes are dashed,
And our confidence is tired.
But then, at last,
A small success we do find,
And though it may be fleeting,
It helps to clear our mind.
For though the road to victory
May be long and hard to tread,
With perseverance and determination,
We will succeed in the end.
So let us not give up,
But continue on our quest,
For even in the darkest hour,
A glimmer of hope still exists."
Not too bad for something that took 3 seconds or so to produce.
Leo Betschart
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Next generation of GPT bot rumored to so realistic that when you ask it to write something important to meet a deadline it goes ahead and cleans your house.
Leo Betschart
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@ct_bergstrom @ct_bergstrom What I find stunning is the depth of the deception.... that the implicit effort that's put in to create a believable facsimile of a source is every bit as deep as the effort to generate an answer in the first place. It's babble, but it's exquisite in its detail... a Potemkin village where all the tiniest details are thought of.
Leo Betschart
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That's a wild story. What a trip.
#Galactica did the same thing, and I found that profoundly irresponsible given its claimed abilities and purpose.
Even when the citations refer to real papers, the claims associated with them are often nothing like what the cited paper asserts. That's the problem with an LLM in this context. When it adds a citation, it has no representation of what claims are or are not in the paper it is citing. The citation is just more just convincing babble.
Leo Betschart
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@ct_bergstrom It turns out that those citations are ENTIRELY MADE UP.
Even though one would expect that the ACLU and Wired would've written about the NSA's collection practices, as far as I can tell, those articles never existed; nor did the Times or Smithsonian articles on Clever Hans even though it would've been natural to see such a piece in their pages.
Even the URLs are constructed to look plausible. But they're total fictions. I think.
Very creepy construction of fake knowledge.
Leo Betschart
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Playing around with #OpenAI's #GPT3 text generator led me to perhaps the creepiest behavior yet. As @ct_bergstrom noted, the AI bots are able to cite the sources of their own writing.
I decided to see if it could function as a plagiarism detector. But when I put a few snippets of my own writing in, it found several uncited sources. (Attached.)
Aha! Someone must have plagiarized me! Or so I thought. But the truth was much stranger....
Leo Betschart
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Via @grwster an interesting observation to which I am still looking for a counter-example.
If you take text generated by #ChatGPT and ask it "Was this text generated by you or by a human", it correctly identifies all text it wrote.
It does, however, mistake text written by other AIs (e.g. lex.page) for human-generated text.
Anyone have a positive or negative counterexample of ChatGPT's ability to identify its own writing?
live in Zurich, Chemical information consultant, organic chemist, Swiss, baker of breads, drinker of stouts, cooker of meals, enjoyer of coffee, reader of fantasy, listener of power and prog metal. MY opinions only.
#chemistswhocook #chemistswhobake #chemtoot #chemtoots #chemiverse
Joined Nov 2022
