Hacker News: gpcr1949

Grok's Profile Fills with AI Bikini Edits Sparking Consent Backlash

gpcr1949 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 19:56:32 +0000

Article URL: https://x.com/i/trending/2006228476395938248

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447684

Points: 17

# Comments: 0

New comment by gpcr1949 in "XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa"

gpcr1949 — Thu, 15 May 2025 15:20:10 +0000

I think it is an underestimation to say ~800 people died in the Gaza war. The Ukraine number also seems like a serious underestimation.

New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

gpcr1949 — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 15:27:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.mersenne.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41838410

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by gpcr1949 in "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024"

gpcr1949 — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 13:36:41 +0000

Israel is committing what some experts are calling a genocide. In any case, they killed a lot of civilians. It can probably be debated whether this is noble or "striving to be better". But either way, the political beliefs and hobbies of the laureates aren't interesting to me, and I can't imagine the Nobel committee seriously taking this into account.

Meta 'pauses' AI data collection in EU following Irish DPC request

gpcr1949 — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 15:13:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/meta-pauses-ai-data-collection-in-eu-following-irish-dpc-request/a2000443736.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681644

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by gpcr1949 in "Editor in Chief of eLife replaced for retweeting The Onion tweet about Palestine"

gpcr1949 — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 22:04:55 +0000

I am really surprised they fired him for a really relatively mild series of tweets. I know some of the Israeli scientists leading the campaign against him also pointed out he tweeted "Fuck Israel" in 2018 [0]. Due to the date, May 15 2018, he is probably referring to IDF slayings the preceding day during Palestinian border protests [1]. Nature also did a factual write up of this guy's firing [2].

[0] https://twitter.com/mbeisen/status/996404294529138688

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/prominent-journal-ed...

New comment by gpcr1949 in "The Destroyed Libraries of Louvain (2012)"

gpcr1949 — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 17:18:09 +0000

Writing Basel as Bâle would be silly and non-standard too, yes. Maybe "wrong" is too strong of a classification. But for example, I wouldn't immediately recognize it as Basel in a headline. FWIW Leuven refers to itself in English as Leuven on their own website: https://www.leuven.be/en

Also somewhat interesting to me is that for some reason people think Belgium is mainly a French speaking country, but in fact there are actually more Dutch speakers than French speakers (56% vs 38% native speakers according to Eurostat in 2015) - I have the sense referring to Flemish cities by their French name reflects that

New comment by gpcr1949 in "The Destroyed Libraries of Louvain (2012)"

gpcr1949 — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 15:43:40 +0000

Interesting history, but people in Leuven call this city Leuven and not Louvain. No need to use the french term in a flemish city where almost no one speaks french as their first language. In fact, french language was the subject of some amount of political struggle in the 1960s, resulting in the founding of the french speaking university in "Louvain-la-Neuve", a planned city that was built in (french speaking) Wallonia for this purpose. You can read more about the politically important language discussion that occured in the 1960s here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_of_the_Catholic_Universi...

New comment by gpcr1949 in "The rise of the new tech right"

gpcr1949 — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 20:52:36 +0000

https://archive.vn/lByGj

The rise of the new tech right

gpcr1949 — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 20:52:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/09/rise-new-tech-right-iq-cognitive-elite

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37501572

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by gpcr1949 in "Identifying organic compounds with visible light"

gpcr1949 — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 13:07:26 +0000

They use a random forest classifier, which is an ensemble model that gives a consensus result of several decision trees. One way to achieve this consensus is voting. Random forest models are commonly used in building chemical models like this (and in QSAR), because they are quite robust. Due to the typically small size of chemical data sets (dozens to thousands, typically), more sophisticated methods are not usable and do not perform better.

New comment by gpcr1949 in "The case for free-range lab mice"

gpcr1949 — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 23:32:24 +0000

High-throughput screening (HTS), i.e. testing a large amount of compounds in simple biochemical assays can't be compared with testing 10 compounds in monkeys. The point of HTS is finding active substances in a large collection of compounds (finding needles in the haystack), and then using this as the initial step of a whole chemical optimization research program that may lead to a new drug candidate down the line.

Conversely, the 10 compounds tested in monkeys will usually be advanced drug candidates just before phase 1 trials in humans. If you would give monkeys 10 compounds from a HTS collection you would learn nothing about what works in human disease because most compounds are inactive at a given target.

Every large pharma company has HTS infrastructure and uses this for early discovery (in addition to animal experiments at later stages of drug discovery campaign) - and these companies are interested in making profit by discovering new drugs that meet the requirements to get approved, not in generating publications or boasting about their fancy HTS robot.

New comment by gpcr1949 in "Not-such-better-living through chemistry"

gpcr1949 — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 17:44:10 +0000

You can read about the development of this new route and its advantages here [0]. Ctrl+F for ibuprofen or go to p.54.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/B978-0-12-804190-1.00004-5

New comment by gpcr1949 in "Not-such-better-living through chemistry"

gpcr1949 — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 17:34:11 +0000

Agreed the process is very simple. The innovation that makes the resolution worth it is (as Derek also mentioned in the blog post) an efficient way to re-racemize the L-meth to DL-meth, which can then be resolved again. With steady state production and pooling this means it can be done using just one batch size (and not ever smaller "brsm" style bathces). If these steps are efficient enough you definitely get much more bang for your buck. Here is one such method[0] which probably inspired these drug manufacturers (as they use thioglycol and AIBN, which has been found in clandestine lab seizures).

[0] https://sci-hub.se/10.1021/jo061033l (published in JOC in 2006 - so only a mere 2 decades behind the curve)

New comment by gpcr1949 in "Startup releasing particles into the atmosphere to tweak the climate"

gpcr1949 — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 17:46:07 +0000

This is really a scandalously misinformed stunt. The chemical they released is SO_2 - one of the gasses and car pollutants causing acid rain.

New comment by gpcr1949 in "The U.S. military is poisoning Okinawa"

gpcr1949 — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 12:48:19 +0000

I was wondering the same thing. I found this in a guardian article

> The military’s firefighters use aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, which contains extremely high levels of PFAS, in training exercises and emergencies. Though AFFF is effective, it has led to widespread contamination around bases and airports, and Congress just mandated the military check for PFAS pollution at 700 facilities while earmarking $571m for cleanup, though observers say the cost will likely be much higher.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/06/military-bas...

New comment by gpcr1949 in "Galactica: an AI trained on humanity's scientific knowledge (by Meta)"

gpcr1949 — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 01:22:47 +0000

Good to see the results respect Benford's law and are therefore not fabricated.

New comment by gpcr1949 in "Show HN: Game of Life on non-square topologies with 2^32 update rules"

gpcr1949 — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 11:59:43 +0000

I may be misreading it, but doesn't the GoL as commonly understood also depend on diagonal neighbors (i.e. 8 direct neighbors)? In that case the rule space would explode beyond the 32 bit integer one. (to a 256 bit one)

New comment by gpcr1949 in "An unidentified illicit drug has been discovered by Australian chemists"

gpcr1949 — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 15:50:18 +0000

BOL-148 is not like the others. All others are N1-acyl analogs of LSD, so unlike bol148 they rapidly metabolize to LSD proper. This also means until they make a prodrug or analog law, it will be easy to keep on thinking of new LSD prodrugs. Here are a few free ones that will certainly work, no payment to me required: isovaleroyl, cyclobutanecarbonyl, oxetanecarbonyl(both isomers), cyclopropylacetyl.

New comment by gpcr1949 in "An unidentified illicit drug has been discovered by Australian chemists"

gpcr1949 — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 15:06:59 +0000

They definitely will, this is after all the intended purpose of these firms, and some of the more professional among them are producing cGMP APIs at scale in a completely legitimate context. Although if you have a need for ACE2 inhibitors (not sure which kind of binders you need for which purpose ...) that are marketed and formulated it may be more convenient to just source a large amount of the pharmaceutical product, though I can't comment on the legality of doing that.