I think it would be just as viable as Monk up in the front lines. As a lvl 4 monk, you’ve probably got 18 Dex and 14ish Wis. That’s AC 16. Dance Bard will have 14ish Dex and 18 Cha, so also AC 16. Same d8 hit die as Monk, too.

The industry standard is HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography). Those things go for tens of thousands of dollars up front, plus maintenance and consumables.

If there was a less costly way of doing it, you bet companies would have settled on that by now.

make the best decisions they can

I would recommend an HPLC and a competent analytical chemist to gather data and decide whether or not a batch is safe to consume.

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 feel bad for laughing at this

Technical people that move into management usually (but not always) suffer from something I’ve started calling management brain rot. They’re exposed to the spreadsheet warriors and their corporate jargon, and it doesn’t take long for the good ones to give up and the bad ones to thrive in a, let’s call it, “low-information environment.”

o7

Drawbacks are mostly the economics of it. You have to convince people to put time and energy into turning waste into monomers. If the monomers you get from crude oil are cheaper, you’ve got an uphill battle.

The catalysts can be complex, but the good ones are really simple. The zinc one in this article is pretty easy to understand. Ours was an organic molecule, but a really abundant and cheap one. (We could easily recover and re-use the catalyst, too, which I also doubt most of the metal salt catalysts are capable of). Part of the project was optimizing that catalyst. We found ones that worked a little better, but were like 10x as expensive. So we just used a little more of the simple one and figured out how to use it over and over.

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.

1. Hack together a proof of concept
2. Works well enough that management slaps a “done” sticker on it
3. Pile of hacks becomes load bearing
4. One or two dependencies change, the whole thing falls over
5. Set evenings and weekends on fire to fix it
6. Management brags about moving fast and breaking things, engineers quit and become cabbage farmers and woodworkers
7. New graduates are hired, GOTO 1

I work a 9ish-to-5ish in a science field, salaried. Nobody really cares when I arrive or when I leave, as long as the work gets done. Sometimes science stuff goes off the rails and I have to arrive early or stay late, but I keep track of my hours and arrive a little early or leave a little early on other days to compensate.

I mean, it took four years of college and more than six of a PhD to get to this point, which stunk. But now I can monitor my chemicals stirring in a flask for a few minutes while hanging out on my phone, which is nice.

I understand the sentiment, and I’m definitely not a Boeing apologist. But the first version of the Apollo command module killed three astronauts. They had growing pains, too.

At work, my work PC laptop drives two 1080p monitors. I don’t keep it open to use the onboard one because Windows is so terrible at handling displays of different sizes, and the fans run so much when driving three displays that I think it could take off my desk. So I know what you’re talking about.

But. Have you ever used a Mac with two displays? A current-gen MacBook Air will drive a 6K@60Hz and a 5K@60Hz display when closed, and it’ll do it silently. Or both displays at “only” 4K if you want to crank the refrsh rate to over 100Hz. You think that’s not enough for the least expensive laptop they sell?

I’m really tired of people who don’t know what they’re capable of telling me why I shouldn’t enjoy using my computer.

What percentage of people who buy the least expensive MacBook do you think are going to hook it up to more than two displays? Or should they add more display controllers that won’t ever be used and charge more for them? I feel like either way people who would never buy one will complain on behalf of people who are fine with them.

limit it

There isn’t some software limitation here. It’s more that they only put two display controllers in the base level M-series chips. The vast, vast majority of users will have at most two displays. Putting more display controllers would add (minimal, but real) cost and complexity that most people won’t benefit from at all.

On the current gen base level chips, you can have one external display plus the onboard one, or close the laptop and have two externals. Seems like plenty to me for the cheapest option.

I have a Mac with multiple monitors. It handles them a hell of a lot better than my PC at work.

It’s not AI, it’s PISS. Plagiarized information synthesis software.

Well, or when some yeehaw state botches an execution of one

Let’s be real, everyone has a number that they’d be willing to sell out for. But this one hurts. Affinity make great software.