contemporary343

Finding some new combination or iteration in the literature and running DFT is the kind of thing a senior undergraduate or first year grad student typically does (and typically with Claude anyway these days). (And yes, they'd probably use Quantum Espresso to start, like this writeup and its agent does). They'd probably show it at a weekly lab meeting where it would get ripped apart. And they would not be blasting a preliminary calculation around the world as if they'd made a new discovery.. but hey, we're in a brave new world; maybe they should!

It's an evals platform. The problem is to promote evals in scientific domains you need to actually know something about them. Otherwise you end up with slop like this.

This is what happens when Claude writes it for you (and you don't review it)

They used quantum espresso.. undergrads usually run this in certain classes: https://www.quantum-espresso.org They didn't do any work there.

They ran Quantum Espresso which is ok, but by no means the 'state of the art' for DFT. And in case, any DFT computation has to be taken with a few pounds of grains of salt before getting too excited about it.

No offense to the person writing this (assuming they did at all), but I'm not sure they really understand what they're doing..

I'm sorry but this would be a mediocre paper at best. And if this were a student presenting this for a qualifying exam, you can bet a committee would be ripping them a new one for presenting this with no understanding of what it does.

"I was shown a prompt and told the internal research model had simply been given the problem statement. Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used."

- This, from Tristan Buckmaster's writeup yesterday, indicates to me that there was more than incidental inspiration from Alpoge and Buckmaster.

"I was shown a prompt and told the internal research model had simply been given the problem statement. Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used."

One of the interesting threads here that is certainly relevant to the OpenAI writeup is the human role in the process. Buckmaster clearly points out that (exceptional!) mathematicians at OpenAI were certainly involved in correcting and guiding the process - and that their path/strategy was no doubt influenced by Alpoge & Buckmaster's work. It is always in OpenAI's interest to de-emphasize the role of people in the process, as is clearly the case here. Indeed, given sufficient compute and resources, I suspect Buckmaster could have also extended their approach to N-S.

If you haven't read it already, it's really worth digesting the arguments Vannevar Bush made regarding funding basic science in 1945 (Science: The Endless Frontier) which resulted in the NSF as we know it being founded:

https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2023-04/EndlessFrontier75t...

"A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowl- edge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill."

I think FROs are certainly worth exploring, but if we're diverting vast amounts of funding to existing research infrastructure and talent to funding them, the opportunity costs are huge. This is not well appreciated, but universities are in fact very cheap places to do research compared to any modern alternative one might construct. I suspect FROs will end up being much more expensive just for structural reasons, and will end up re-discovering the university bundle slowly and piece by piece. Moreover, for many types of research they will have to effectively rebuild a range of infrastructure (facilities, equipment, etc.) that already exists at universities throughout the country.

None of this justifies blowing up the extensive basic research infrastructure we have today in pursuit of unproven experiments. Once they're proven, a conversation can be had about how to reconfigure existing assets and new government-funded approaches. But such discussions must include congress, the appropriators of the funds.

I think it's also a way to reduce funding to universities (which are politically disfavored), since other things like arbitrary reductions to indirect costs didn't work. It also defies both congressional will in the appropriations bill (which is directorate-specific) and of course the whole charter and mandate of NSF, from Vannevar Bush's original case for it.

Actually overheads for many universities were sometimes higher in the late 1990s (and there were some minor scandals associated with this). And remind me again, what fraction of our GDP is indirect costs to universities? (< 0.1%). And what are the benefits? Well, indirect costs are how the U.S. government builds up a distributed network of scientific and technical infrastructure and capacity. This capacity serves the national interest.

If you think you're going to help debt by cutting indirect costs and crippling university research permanently, may I introduce you to the foundational notions of a knowledge economy and how fundamental advances feed into technology developments that increase productivity and thus GDP. Permanently reducing growth is another way of making debt servicing worse.

In light of all of their actions, I really, genuinely do not understand what DOGE team members' mental model of the world is and what they view their purpose as. None of these actions align with any publicly stated goals, or even the privately reported ones. All I see is a destruction of state capacity that has already left America significantly weakened and less capable of responding to threats.

Definitely seems like a drug problem to me. He seems strung out of his mind if this article's sourcing is correct: https://www.wired.com/story/katie-stephen-miller-elon-musk-t...

“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” they wrote. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”

“‘Move fast and break things’ may be acceptable to someone who owns a business and owns the risk. And if things don’t go well, the damage is compartmentalized. But when you break things in government, you’re breaking things that belong to people who didn’t sign up for that,” said Cordell Schachter, who until last month was the chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Are you familiar with how organizations have annual budgets? Doing it with zero notice in the middle of a fiscal year will be chaos. This is purely an attack.

Notice how no one is going after the F&A (indirect) rates for DOD R&D contractors…

The worst part is that it is immediate and retroactive to ongoing grants. This will immediately cause every single academic and medical research center to have an unsustainable deficit. It will simply cost too much to actually have researchers do the grants. They might return money to NIH and lay off faculty annd grad students.

I anm almost certain this will get a TRO from a federal judge while it’s litigated given how insane this is.

This is truly unconscionable and completely indefensible. All the Musk defenders have to realize that mass firing and zero base budgeting is fine and well for a private company like Twitter. But not for governments. Even if you don't believe in foreign aid, it is completely immoral and unethical to abandon all these people who are participating in clinical trials. You do it in an orderly way, allowing ongoing trials to finish the phase they are in.

This is a great entrepreneurial story too. Colin began this company out of his PhD research at Stanford a decade ago. A long, steady grind and finally out to production. Kudos to him and his team - a very rare accomplishment, and inspiring to see.

Worth remembering that ~2/3 of U.S. students in college are in public colleges and universities, not private ones like Vanderbilt. Prices have gone up there too (especially since state governments subsidize their public universities significantly less than they used to), but they are still pretty good deals given U.S. GDP per capita. In many states they can also be practically free depending on income level and typically provide excellent educations and career opportunities for most students.

I’m really not sure why this got flagged. It seemed like a well sourced and technology-focused article. Independent of this particular conflict, such automated decision making has long been viewed as inevitable. If even a small fraction of what is being reported is accurate it is extraordinarily disturbing.

If you insulate it in vacuum with an IR transparent window (unfortunately $$$) you can get substantially cooler than ambient: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13729

We've been pretty satisfied with Room and Board furniture, which is typically made in the US. While a bit more expensive it's not really that different from the $3K garbage price point and seems to last (so far).

Bluey is great. For younger ones, Tumble Leaf (sadly now discontinued) is also wonderful - clay-mation, gentle with lovely music and promoting a sense of discovery.

Surprisingly, perhaps less effects on the youngest cohort: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

"At 4.5 years of age, pandemic kids had higher vocabulary, visual memory, and overall cognitive performance compared with pre-pandemic kids."

The authors suggest that pandemic 2-year-olds developed better problem-solving skills, accelerating the increased cognitive performance by age 4.5

Although pandemic 2-year-olds had more socio-emotional risks early on, these seem to disappear by age 4.5

Most materials, aside from metals, of sufficient thickness have high high infrared emissivity. All white paints, for example, already did radiate heat upwards through the atmospheric window. These more reflective films are no more emissive than previous paints (they're all quite emissive to begin with!)

The only difference, optically speaking, really is that they are better solar reflectors.

There’s been a ton of development in super reflective materials since the first demonstration of daytime radiative cooling at Stanford in 2014. Ultimately though, reflectivity does drop with dirt and pollution exposure over time, even for these kinds of materials. So most super reflective materials plateau at a lower number long term outdoors.

Also, just for reference, Spectralon, a sintered PTFE reflectance standard has had this level of solar reflectance for decades. So, in a sense, not that much new here. a sintered ceramic is gonna be expensive and will have a hard time competing with the simplicity of a paint based approach. Super white paints using various pigments have been well studied the last 5 years.

As a sidenote, this is from Gang Chen, former head of MIT's Mechanical Engineering department who was (rather shamefully in my opinion) wrongly targeted by Trump's China initiative. The government finally dropped the case acknowledging there was nothing there.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/science/gang-chen-mit-chi...

Some of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure.

The really distasteful thing here is Penn as an institution. They have reaped the benefits of her work in terms of mRNA patent royalties (a very large number I believe), and of course reputationally. Yet, they treated her truly terribly and have never - and it seems like will never - acknowledge it. For example, Sean Grady, mentioned here as the one that essentially cleared out her lab in 2013 without telling her is the chair of neurosurgery at Penn Medicine. Will he apologize? I doubt it.

Some of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure.

I'm genuinely not sure! The virtual pre-screen interview has become the de facto norm in my field, so it's not like it's surprising or unexpected. And it's not like we are looking for TED speakers here - anyone should be capable with sufficient practice and preparation.

If anything, I've seen people that look great on paper, coming from the pedigreed lab/ and fancy PhD institution fail at this stage. So perhaps there's some overconfidence there. Indeed, no one in our department had any connection to, or prior knowledge of, the candidate who was ultimately given the offer. Once they got past the initial screening, through both virtual and in-person interviews, their technical depth and breadth, teaching skills and overall collegiality shone through.

All that being said, I don't doubt that all the questionable things mentioned in the article above occur, and perhaps widely. But, there is hope! And there's no better place to start than those of us who are younger faculty.