#distillation

Desalination is the process of generating freshwater from brackish or saltwater, usually through the process of reverse osmosis. While this can be a very useful tool in water shortages, it also has some pretty huge drawbacks--reverse osmosis requires a lot of energy, requires chemical treatment of the water, and produces concentrated brine as a waste product which can be harmful to aquatic ecosystems.

Dang it, I want to reblog a post I saw yesterday, but. Can't find it again. And it's a news story, not a personal post, so:

Absolutely fascinating to me. I was always under the impression that home distilling WAS legal up to a certain, small number of gallons per year. Granted, I don't know where I ever picked up that 'fact', and it could possibly have been the Dukes of Hazzard for all I know. But, anyway, distilling is a bit more legal, now. For what that's worth.

And I'd do it! Even though I'm not a drinker, I just think it's interesting and very, um, regionally-approriate for me. For medicinal purposes, as the old-timers used to say. However, after multiple debacles with wine and cheese, I don't think I have any talent for fermentation. Rather proved I don't, in fact. Trying to do a diy project of fermentation followed by distilling sounds like a great way to ruin a whole bunch of ingredients.

Boiled and siphoned til the jug is filled

Then imbued with sun magic on the window sill

To make it powerful enough for a vampire kill

But flavored with caramel and a little vanill’

At last, the Alkahest of Iron Citrate. It is sufficiently powerful to volatilize the fixed salts of iron, and probably a number of other fixed salts.

The black Earth here will be dried, ground, calcined, ground some more, calcined some more, and alchemically calcined with bespoke strong mineral acids before reintroduction of the Earth to the Alkahest.

Alchemy is essentially a game of recognizing living matters, killing them, and finessing that fugitive life force into a simpler, 'thinner' host matter. The alchemist is the nurse, the undertaker, the funeral director, and the resurrector of matter.

The Alkahest, like the Eagle, carries the body of iron with it over the still head. Iron is the Eagle's food, and they become one essence.

When the Alkahest has utterly consumed the body of iron, it is then called Our Mercury. Philosophic Mercury. The Water of Life.

It is then useful for producing Third Order Alchemical Sulphurs of metals. They are incomparable precious sacraments, ingested by the drop, in order to achieve higher and deeper levels of mystical consciousness.

I have ingested all sorts of Alchemical Sulphurs, and those made by Our Mercury are the best.

The Sulphur of Tin prepared by dissolving tin oxide (Cream of Tin) in Philosophic Mercury and then distilling it off, will transmute hot copper metal into the finest silver.

The Sulphur of Iron tinges higher than that of gold, allegedly, according to Thomas Vaughan. I have been studying his works rather deeply.

A friend of mine has prepared the Sulphur of Copper, and he claims it is the best smelling most fragrant of the metallic oils - like perfume!

Common mercury Hg will dissolve in Our Mercury too, rendering a transmutation agent. I would be most cautious before ingesting such a substance however, since Hg is a pernicious toxin.

I’ve come across an article today that’s making me tilt my head a little. This isn’t uncommon, I might add. Very often I come across news that makes me wonder what people are thinking or expecting. I’ve talked about naivety in development teams before. This particular article is from TechCrunch, and is actually about Elon Musk’s recent testimony regarding how xAI was taught in his ongoing suit against OpenAI. His claim is that the company has violated its mission statement to be nonprofit, but has instead shifted towards a for-profit structure. Personally, I think this is a spurious reason to sue; we live in capitalism. The entire point of which is to make a profit. And it’s not like there aren’t free versions of these models available currently.

What caught my eye was the discussion in the testimony about distillation, which is where third party entities train their models on publicly accessible ones, like OpenAI and Anthropic, then market them at a significantly lower price. Musk went on to assert that it’s a ‘general practice among AI companies’, while trying to wiggle out of saying yes to the question of whether Grok was trained this way. Regardless of the testimony and lawsuit, the chemist in me perked up on a day when every other headline on my usual news feed seems to be some variation of ‘same vulnerabilities, new target’. (I get bored reporting on the same topics over and over.)

In chemistry, distillation is the process of refining a fluid to its purest form, typically by boiling a solution into steam and collecting only the desired parts of the vapor as it returns to a liquid state. Alcohol is probably the most well known application of this process, although it’s also used to make water free of minerals, sediment or salt. But let’s stick with alcohol for this analogy. If one walks into a liquor store, entire shelves will be lined with different versions of the same basic ‘model’ of drink. You might know that better as which brand they are. How many types of whiskey are there? Dozens. But at their core, they are all the same thing. A fermented grain of some kind, distilled and aged in a container that imbues additional flavor.

LLM’s fit this description too. At their core, they are all machines trained on pre-existing data. They all offer pretty much the same experience at the user end, as well. Branding and competition is mostly a matter of name recognition and reputation, with some infrastructure differences thrown in for flavor. TechCrunch even points out the irony of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic taking issue with distillation of their products when those products were initially trained on the intellectual property of others. In short, they don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to accusing anyone of copying their work.

But this indicates a shift in how the AI tech boom will move forward, I think. Soon enough there will be enough competition on the digital shelves that people can pick and choose which brand they want to give their money to. That is also part of capitalism. Free market, yes? Trying to keep a proprietary hold over the same basic programming will become fiscally unsustainable. Just as there are already dozens of types of word processing programs (Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Scrivener, Calligra Words, Apple Pages, etc). No one is suing each other over it.

‘Distillation’ is a natural evolution of any product, and I’m honestly surprised that this is the first time I’ve come across anything about it. The argument against it focuses on the wrong aspect, however. At least in my opinion. What we really need with all this AI growth is regulation. Just as all those brands of whiskey must pass an agreed upon level of standards, both to be marketed as such and to be safely consumed, we need that level of safety standards for LLM’s. Limits on what they can do, what they can access, how they can be utilized. I don’t really care how many companies are making the same aggregation and sorting tool. I care about the privacy and protection of my data if/when I’m using them.

Apparatus for the distillation of cinnabar, Alchimia, 1570

page 9, from Alchimia : das ist alle Farben, Wasser, olea, Salia, und Alumina, damit man alle Corpora Spiritvs unnd Calces prepariert, sublimiert unnd fixiert zubereyten : und wie man diese Ding nutze, auff dass Sol und Luna werden möge : auch von Soluieren unnd Scheydung aller Metall, Polierung allerhandt Edelgestein, fürtrefflichen Wassern zum etzen, scheyden unnd soluieren : und zuletzt wie die gifftige Dämpff zuverhüten, ein kurtzer Bericht. by Anonymous. Zu Franckfurt am Meyn : [s. n.], 1570.