Rabbit Holes a commonplace book,kept in the open
Musing · kept 3 September 2026

I got some links for you

File this under mad genius:

The German chemist Felix Hoffmann (1868–1946) famously synthesized two drugs: aspirin, one of the most widely beneficial drugs ever, and heroin, one of the most harmful of illegal substances. These two drugs represent the efforts of late-19th-century chemists to create new substances that could be used as medicines, not just to isolate active ingredients from natural products or to imitate them.

One approach toward this end was to modify known physiologically active substances; another was to perform chemical operations on one or more of the myriad organic compounds created as products or by-products of the synthetic dye industry, which had developed in the 19th century and was particularly strong in Germany.


And people say LLMs are useless:


Been testing flash and it seems very promising:


The scale of China, no matter how much you read, continues to astound me:

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