This has been posted to a bunch of different communities, and I’m gonna be a stick in the mud each time.

I’m a process chemist. I do this for a living. I’ve made kilo-scale batches of pharmaceuticals at work that have gone through the regulatory process and made it into people. I went to school for ten years to do this.

This is a colossally dangerous thing.

Every time you run a chemical synthesis, you generate impurities. Slightly different temperatures, concentrations, reagent quality, and a million other things will vary the identities and concentrations of those impurities in your product.

The nature of biochemistry is that most compounds, even at very small concentrations, can have effects. Usually bad ones. So drugs have tight specs on how much of each potential impurity can be present. Usually it’s in the 0.1% range, but sometimes a lot lower.

Detection of impurities at that level cannot be done with ‘hacker’ gear in your garage. So if you do this, you’re going to be taking unknown quantities of unknown impurities.

There are trade-offs. If you’re definitely gonna die without the medicine, then the worst that can happen is you die faster, or more painfully. If it’s medicine to maintain quality of life, then you might die fast and painfully.

I’m not saying the current system is good at all. Medicine is too expensive. It shouldn’t be limited by right wing nutjobs. Those things are true. Those things require a solution.

This is not a good solution.

I sort of feel bad about raining on the parade of the person distilling isopropanol in his garage earlier, but it really is dangerous.

But most of us chemists also need to be reminded of it. To the point that someone had to write a paper whose entire point is “don’t distill isopropanol”.

Billionaire evil is a sliding scale from normal rich guy evil to comic book villain evil. He’s less bad than his peers, even if the stuff he does (like the cost plus drugs thing) are maybe just for PR.

We eat him later than others. But we do eat him.

I also genuinely do not understand the appeal. But I also don’t understand the appeal of reaction videos on YouTube or network cop dramas, and they are also profoundly popular with stupid people.

In the entire history of NASA, they’ve never manufactured any boosters for themselves. Redstone was from the army. Titan, also military. Saturn I and V were designed by NASA but contracted to big aircraft manufacturers as contractors. Shuttle was Boeing / Rockwell for the orbiter, ATK for the boosters. SLS is basically all the Shuttle contractors, again. (That was the point.)

I hear what you’re saying. But NASA would need to spin up an entire company from scratch to build their own rockets. That’s not what their mandate is, and it’s not what they’re good at.

I worked on a similar (but competing) technology to this one for a few years. Depolymerization is absolutely the way forward for most polymer recycling.

For most uses, manufacturers want plastic that’s colorless and has good physical properties. Melting down clear plastic can work, but it degrades the polymers in hard-to-control ways. And if there’s any pigment in the plastic, forget about it.

If you break down polymers into their constituent monomers, you’ve turned a polymer process into a chemical process. Polymers are hard to work with. Chemicals are, comparatively, pretty easy. You can do a step or two to extract all the color and impurities, then re-polymerize the cleaned up material and get plastic that’s indistinguishable from brand new.

If your depoly process is good, it can distinguish between different polymers, so you can recycle mixed waste streams. Ours was even pretty good at distinguishing nylon from PET, which I sorta doubt the zinc process will be. But hey, more competition in this space is gonna be good for the world.

A better question would be why Microsoft went with a nonstandard layout when they designed the Xbox controller. Nintendo had been using the A-to-the-right layout since 1990.

I’m not sure I understand your complaint – if you two-finger tap anywhere on an Apple trackpad made since around 2009, it’s interpreted as a right-click.

Reply to edit: “I forgot that I changed it to make it worse and I’m mad at Apple about it” is maybe the most Lemmy comment I’ve ever read

Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks would like to have a word

The axe forgets, the stump remembers

I cloned the original website (it’s just a bunch of JavaScript) once the NYT deal went through and still self-host it. I changed a bunch of the UI text, specifically removing all the references to “Wordle,” and I think it’s just me and my friends that use it. Still works!

I know you’re trying to help, but do you understand how much negative comments like this tend to stick in a person’s brain? They’re doing their best, and although you intended to be helpful, your intention doesn’t matter much if the outcome is that they feel crappy.