Leo Betschart @betschart@social.cleverlibre.org

Just read a great idea that we should start naming mass shootings after the NRA-owned lawmakers whose districts are closest to the site of the slaughter that their negligence condoned.

So with that in mind, for the recent Louisville Bank Shooting, I hereby nominate Rep. Thomas Massie.

His district borders Louisville and he loves guns so much that he dedicated his Christmas card to them.

From this day forward the Louisville Bank Shooting will be known as THE THOMAS MASSIE MASS SHOOTING!

There it is: Germany's second big public broadcaster is teasing, that it will start posting on #Mastodon tomorrow as @ZDF That account has 3200 follower, on #Twitter its 1,4 million.

I'm sure it will start to grow quickly and get a headstart on the other big public broadcaster #ARD, which has labeled its first account a test (@NDR).

Of course it would also be a headstart on the big public broadcasters, that are arguing with #Twitter.

#NPR #PBS #TwitterTakeover #ElonMusk #SocialMedia #BBC

There's also a rapidly-expanding set of GPT variants trained on specialized data sets, like this one trained on PubMed. This definitely is more than an afternoon of work or whatever, but if you want it to know Stata, training it on Statalist is realistic. https://github.com/stanford-crfm/BioMedLM

For moderately sized stuff like if you want it to speak in the language of a particular technical book, you can feed it that book as an embedding via LangChain; this I've done and it's not suuuper hard to figure out (although pls don't ask me for help). https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain

I have not yet pursued this myself, but if you're trying to use GPT for [niche topic] and it doesn't work that well because it's not a popular enough topic (like Stata, or the lingo of formal causal modeling), it doesn't appear to be THAT difficult to train your own.

A fun little April Fools story for fans of chemist RB Woodward:
https://cen.acs.org/education/science-communication/Tales-April-fools/101/i11

The 2023 Chemistry Jobs Scramble is open! http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-2023-chemistry-jobs-scramble.html #chemjobs #facultychemjobs

I'm quite puzzled as to whether #ChatGPT has gotten better with citations or not.

On one hand, it wrote a paper for me about bullshit that contained only references to actual papers. I don't think it used to be able to do that.

Balsamic vinegar, malt vinegar, rice vinegar... This graphic takes a look at the chemical quirks of the different vinegar types and how they're made: https://www.compoundchem.com/2023/02/20/vinegar/

@joopdelfijn @juliegrrl I think she reffers to 1-chromosomes, 2-hormones, 3-hormone expression, 4-internal genitalia, 5-external genitalia.
In my opinion, for humans that seems about correct (I would add secondary sexual characters, but I'm no expert).

It's 18 years since Leeroy Jenkins. I still invoke his name from time to time.

Please read this, it’s long but eye-opening. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md We as a community/society need to take better care of the folks providing the infrastructure work we all depend on.

Say hi to my first “search engine.”

Some gutsy product placement decisions at Costco today: #chemistry

The dude’s rock way to identify dangerous chemical agents

RSS is really an under-rated [largely unknown?] way to keep up with YouTube channels.

YouTube ~used to~ include the RSS links right on channel pages but these days they try and hide 'em (they're still there)

Feedly is my RSS reader of choice and it'll automatically add a channel just from the URL but if you need the actual RSS, they can be found with a little digging.

right-click, 'View Page source', ctrl+F to find 'rssurl' in the page source - it'll be formatted to look something like www·youtube·com/feeds/videos·xml?channel_id=bunchanumbers

Like any RSS feed, when your fav creators update, you'll see it come up close to real time. & you might prefer that over the YouTube home page or notification options.

Been doing a #ChemDraw workshop where I specifically show students how *not* to do it, and ask them to count the errors and then try to fix them.

Avert your eyes organic chemists, the example will cause you pain.