Software is a tool. I develop stuff that i know is of interest to companies working with everything from nuclear energy to hydrogen electrolysis and CO2 storage. I honestly believe I can make a positive contribution to the world by releasing that software under a permissive licence such that companies can freely integrate it into their proprietary production code.

I’m also very aware that the exact same software is of interest to the petroleum industry and weapons manufacturers, and that I enable them by releasing it under a permissive licence.

The way I see it, withholding a tool that can help do a lot of good because it can also be used for bad things just doesn’t make much sense. If everybody thinks that way, how can we have positive progress? I don’t think I can think of any more or less fundamental technology that can’t be used for both. The same chemical process that has saved millions from starvation by introducing synthetic fertiliser has taken millions of lives by creating more and better explosives. If you ask those that were bombed, they would probably say they wish it was never invented, while if you ask those that were saved from the brink of starvation they likely praise the heavens for the technology. Today, that same chemical process is a promising candidate for developing zero-emission shipping.

I guess my point is this: For any sufficiently fundamental technology, it is impossible to foresee the uses it may have in the future. Withholding it because it may cause bad stuff is just holding technological development back, lively preventing just as much good as bad. I choose to focus on the positive impact my work can have.

You are aware that what Israel is doing in Gaza is comparable to the nazi treatment of e.g. the Warsaw ghettos… right?

Take a step back, and look at the Israeli soldiers mocking Palestinian dead, mistreating the wounded and captured, and shooting at clearly unarmed civilians for fun. All this while they brag about it on video. Look at that and tell me that it doesn’t give you a sick feeling to your stomach of the type you haven’t had since you saw photos of concentration camps.

There are dozens of children that have literally STARVED TO DEATH in Gaza because of Israel’s actions. They’re dying the same deaths that Jews were put through in concentration camps. Don’t you see the horrifying irony in this?

Israel is at a point where humanitarian workers from recognised international organisations have been targeted and killed, and they brush it off as a “mistake”.

I cannot think about anything in the past 70 years that compares to what Israel is doing, and I hope beyond hope that some force will smite their government and armed forces such that the slaughter will stop. Because it is a slaughter. It’s not a war when Israel is counting its dead on its fingers, while there are enough missing Palestinians in the rubble to fill a football stadium. It’s just Israel wilfully bombing, burning and slaughtering, with nobody stopping them.

All this, and you have the fucking audacity to talk about antisemitism? Take a look at the world, and ask yourself how calling for an end to this can have anything to do with the religious beliefs of the perpetrators.

Israel recognised Palestinian civilian and security control of the West bank in the Oslo accords from the 90’s. They are blatantly shitting on their own promises whenever a genocidic occupier or their enabling security forces set foot on the West Bank without express permission from the Palestinian West Bank government.

You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.

As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).

We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.

In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.

You’re not seeing the whole picture: I’m paid by the government to do research, and in doing that research my group develops several libraries that can benefit not only other research groups, but also industry. We license these libraries under MIT, because otherwise industry would be far more hesitant to integrate our libraries with their proprietary production code.

I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus. Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.

Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.

I do exactly this: Write code/frameworks that are used in academic research, which is useful to industry. Once we publish an article, we publish our models open-source under the MIT license. That is because companies that want to use it can then embed our models into their proprietary software, with essentially no strings attached. This gives them an incentive to support our research in terms of collaborative projects, because they see that our research results in stuff they can use.

If we had used the GPL, our main collaborators would probably not have been interested.

Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something “from scratch”, i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.

(1) I’m aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.

I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn’t easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time…

But it might be beer!

Out of curiosity, since they way you put it it’s “the three of us” which sound beautiful: How would you (meaning two of you) handle it if one of the others wanted to break out? I mean, break-ups happen, so I’m just wondering if you’ve ever thought about how you would handle being the “only two left” in that kind of scenario?

If you have a fume hood that’s good of course, but since the question was about advising amateurs on safety, my advice is restrictive, because gases can be very dangerous in subtle ways.

As an amateur: Do you know how to properly work in a fume hood so that it protects you? Do you know its capacity, and what to do if something unexpected leads to gas development over that capacity? Have you had training in using this stuff, so that you can react properly and quickly if something goes wrong, rather than freezing up?

In short: Because the potential dangers when working with a lot of gases are harder to detect, and harder to mitigate, than when working with other stuff, I’m taking a restrictive approach in my advice.

For you question on pyrophoric gases: They can remain in contact with air for a while (several minutes, depending on concentration) before igniting. Worst case, the room around you can fill with gas from a leak before causing a gas explosion. In principle you can also inhale gas from this leak, such the the explosion also takes place inside you :)

Anther chemist stepping in here: Anything that produces an off-gas of any kind that does anything other than smell bad should be considered potentially lethal. People have died from working with liquid nitrogen or dry ice without proper ventilation. In addition, a gas explosion can be far worse than any other explosion you are likely to pull off by accident, and if you have a leak somewhere you may have no clue how much explosive gas is in the room with you. Some gases will react and form acid when it gets into your airways, essentially acting as an invisible acid that can jump from the table into your face.

In short: Stay away from dangerous gases and stuff that makes them, and consider pretty much all gases as dangerous unless you know for a fact that they aren’t. Other than that, the potential dangers of backyard chemistry can largely be mitigated by using common sense and working with small amounts of chemicals, good luck :)

That’s just disingenuous. The entire point of all my comments has clearly been that whether or not the mentioned claim is true is irrelevant to the fact of whether it’s anti-Semitic, because it is a purely factual claim.

You made incorrect assumptions regarding whether I believe those claims, and as an anecdote I corrected your mistake.

My point stands: I don’t need to take a position as to whether the claim in question is true or false in order to argue that it is a factual statement that can be supported or disproven by evidence.

You seem to struggle with the idea of supporting a concept vs. supporting a concrete statement.

Based on what evidence exactly?

You’re completely missing the point. A claim can be either factual or non-factual, whether the claim is correct is irrelevant in that regard. A factual claim can be supported or disproven by evidence, a non-factual claim cannot. Just the fact that you are disputing the quality of the purported evidence for the claim proves that the claim is factual, and can be discussed and proven/disproven by rational people that disagree without hating each other.

Defending someone that hates similar things to what you hate…

At no point did I say that I hate anything. In fact I wouldn’t say I hate any of the things discussed here. Just the fact that you think I do shows that you are confusing the discussion of a concept (whether a factual claim can be bigoted) with supporting that concept and possible consequences.

You’re literally defending “Christ killer” narratives

No, I never said anything about whether the statements were correct or not, what I said was that they can be discussed and proven/disproven without having an opinion about whether the people involved are good or bad people. Once again you are conflating the factual statement with the people making them, and attributing to them opinions they don’t have, because you seem to have a hard time separating the claims that are being discussed from your perceived consequences of those claims being correct. You also seem to have a hard time understanding that someone could be interested in discussing a factual claim, even though they don’t like the facts they find.

For the record: I haven’t looked into any evidence as to who killed Jesus, and frankly think that any historical evidence to the fact would likely be too old to be conclusive anyway. Finally, I don’t really care who killed him, that fact being established wouldn’t change the world, or my perception of it, by one bit.

No, it’s not hair splitting, it’s of fundamental importance if you are ever going to have a hope of discussing something conceptual like politics or ideology with someone.

Hating consumerism without hating consumers, and work together with consumers to prevent over-consumption from destroying the planet.

You can hate transness as a concept because you’re in love with a trans person and want children, and find a solution like adoption together with that person. In that case you would hate the concept because you love the person and want to be with them, but the fact that transness exists means that they were born into a body that doesn’t conform to their personality, and that causes a dilemma for your relationship.

You can hate religion, in general or a specific one, for conceptual reasons, and work with religious people on creating a world that is best for everyone. A bunch of religious people see the advantages to a secular state (a load of secular states were founded by religious people) and a bunch of atheists acknowledge the positive sides of religion.

The difference between hating a concept and hating people is crucial.

Finally: Stating that “Jews killed Jesus” is a factual claim. It can be disputed, proven or disproven. It’s not even a statement about whether they approve or disprove of said killing. Even if they said that they disprove, it would be a statement about an action that’s claimed to have been committed, not about a person, and definitely not about all members of that group of people. That makes it fundamentally different from antisemitism, which is about hatred for a people. It cannot be met by reasonable counterclaims, because hating a large, multifaceted, heterogeneous group of people in general is in itself unreasonable.

You’re completely missing a crucial point because of how you choose to phrase this. Saying “I hate religion” is completely and fundamentally different from saying “I hate religious people”. The same thing applies elsewhere: “I hate liberalism” is different from “I hate liberals”. When you move from ideologies to personality traits it gets a bit more messy, but in principle “I hate homophilia” is separate from “I hate gays”, in that the first relates to the overarching concept, while the second relates to the people.

You honestly can’t call someone bigoted for hating or disagreeing with something conceptual: Bigotry is about hating people (either individuals or groups). You can call them ignorant or close-minded, but bigoted misses the mark.

The person your responding to specifically stated that the have a problem with “religion”, and even specified that their problem was with the political role it plays. That is completely distinct from having a problem with “religious people”.

Exactly this: I remember meeting some Russians that had moved to Belgium a few years ago, and we got to talking about this topic. These were well educated young people, yet they told me the thing that surprised them the most when moving to Belgium was that people actually cared about elections, and that elections actually mattered. They had been completely convinced that elections in the west were just like the “elections” they were used to from Russia.

I don’t see Russia, or other authoritarian countries mentioned in the thread I’m responding to. This is about conscription in a democratic country where only adults are conscripted.

The step from “Denmark” to “Corrupted rulers” went a bit fast there.

You are aware that Denmark allows political parties and movements to oppose conscription, and that anyone strongly opposed can emigrate and denounce their Danish citizenship? Nobody is preventing anyone from doing those things. If you don’t do them, you are implicitly accepting the social contract in the country.

Ever heard of “solidarity”? You can’t just live safe while your countrymen risk their lives to defend you. If you don’t like it, you have plenty of time to emigrate in peacetime.

If shit hits the fan, it’s too late. YOU made the choice to stay in a country where you were obligated to defend you neighbour if called upon. You can’t reap the benefits of collective protection and responsibility and then run off when it’s time to step up and do the dirty work.