lithobraking

I'm personally sad to see samples from Jezero crater with potential biosignatures [1] won't find their way back to Earth for the foreseeable future. I was _really_ looking forward to learning more about what we found.

Maybe in some ideal world the US and China would work together to pass those samples on to a Chinese MSR, but it seems borderline impossible.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09413-0

In meme form: https://imgur.com/a/rlmZuU1

(I hope this is ok to post on HN!)

This area seems to be moving so quickly. I wonder if it'll be worthwhile to start building a list of formal math problems whose solutions, or partial solutions, would help my subfield. (Though I work in the physical sciences, mostly with the messy, real world implementation problems which are likely difficult to formalize or directly connect).

Then, whenever a new SOTA model drops, throw it at the list to see if we get "free" research progress.

I'm interested to see where they want to land performance-wise (i.e. which point they choose on the scaling curve) and the niche they want to carve. They have a decent ways to scale beyond trinity large, in paticular on posttrain/RL before they are competitive with open-weights, especially internationally.

Deepseek is explicitly banned [1] at LLNL and I wouldn't be suprised if there's a blanket ban on all Chinese models. But nowadays models like tera/luna could fill this area of the pareto front, and LANL already runs openai models on their clusters [2]. Maybe it's in custom SFT/RL, for instrument control or sensitive topics? But you'll still have to compete with frontier models + a harness.

I would have also liked to see a carrot tied to their offer. It'll be hard to get teams to contribute RL gyms or curated text. But throw in a "we'll fund a postdoc/student to do that" and I think you'd have teams scrambling to apply.

[1] https://hpc.llnl.gov/about-livermore-computing/ai-ml-lc/lc-l...

[2] https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/nnsas-los-alamos-nation...

The data [1] says that the gov is fairly spread out. According to the OPM site, 7.4% of USDA employees work in the DC area. California has more USDA employees (10.3%) than DC.

Including all agencies, _87%_ of all federal employees work outside DC. Additionally, the percentage of DC workers seems to be going down over time, at least according to their data going back to 2016.

[1] https://data.opm.gov/explore-data/analytics/location

On this note, I'm seeing this pattern crop up in retail WoW addons. (It's maybe an even more literal interpenetration of the title.) Many of the newer addons are heavy vibe-coded due to last-minute WoW API changes, like ArcUI.

The addons have _so_ many ways to customize displays that their configuration menus look like lovecraftian B2B products with endless lists of fields, sliders, and dropdowns. I hear a lot of complaints from raiders in my guild about how hard it is to put together a decently functional UI. I wonder if these tools are allowing and/or causing devs to more easily feature creep the software that we build.

>After all, when I look at my W2 (yeah, I'm a working stiff), they sure as hell are taking out taxes still. That aint "shut down". It's a scam.

This is because a significant amount of the government is still running. [1] Around 50% of gov employees are currently working without pay (but with expected backpay). If _everyone_ stopped working major systems would immediately be disrupted: The military would stop all operations. Planes would be grounded. Weather predictions would cease to exist. Food & pharmaceuticals wouldn't be screened. Participants in medical studies would stop getting treatments. etc.

Contractors are also capable covering expenses with overhead. But soon, many will run out. For example, the contractors who perform nuclear weapons research [2]. At which time, they will have to shut down and employees will be furloughed without guarantee of backpay. (The current expectation is unpaid leave) As someone who works in a related civilian field this would severely impact our mission and the folks who work here. Especially the newer ones like postdocs who may not have much savings.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/who-is-still-workin...

[2]: https://sourcenm.com/2025/10/17/doe-secretary-nnsa-to-furlou...