

Huh, didn’t know that gardeners were essentially doing silica sol-gel syntheses. A note of caution: contact with TEOS and other organosilicates can and will cause permanent eye and lung damage (converts to silica, and, broadly, rocks in lungs bad). Make sure your work area is well ventilated and ideally use some kind of eye protection against splashing, don’t touch your face, and wash up when done. TEOS is less reactive once in contact with water (it hydrolyzes to silicic acids and eventually silica, with rates depending strongly on pH).
Also note that adding TEOS to water does slightly lower pH due to this hydrolysis reaction, but it is much less severe of an adjustment than potassium silicate.





Ah, voluntoldment. We just had a big round at my workplace, but at least
no oneonly a couple people up the chain are engaging with the autofellatory fiction that AI will pick up the slack. Even still, they canned the hypercompetent plant engineer that everyone liked, so half his team left and a couple of our projects are dead in the water because of it. /ventedit: chemical manufacturing, not software