tired_and_awake

I'm a tech exec who misses their physics roots. In my spare time I'm interviewing "materials manufacturers" to come up with a viable startup idea. I'm hoping to build a company that leverages simulation and ML to accelerate material discovery.

Keeping key bits of the idea to myself. If this admittedly vague idea excites you let's find some time to talk.

Seriously impressive engineering OP, thanks for the awesome writeup too. Looks like you've got a ton of fans now, well earned!

Yeah I think he's just coming from a totally different operating domain. I cannot even imagine going from Typescript to C/C++/Rust. I'm even impressed OP maybe it this far...

I came here to share this. My first 3 years of management I struggled with the reward system and lack of code submission highs. You can find sources of growth in soft skills it's just harder to find.

Management is a fundamentally different career from SW development. So are the reward functions. It takes years to master management and years to appreciate that you are in fact mastering it. This is, IMO, why it's so important to have a good coach during this transition, to help encourage growth and development and point out where you're improving. This in turns help you know you're improving and definitely gets you that endorphin rush.

It's great the author is passionate about Waymo but wow this reads like an advertisement.

It's really a balancing act. It's also surprisingly difficult as an eng-exec with a deep eng background to correct some things without accidentally undermining those around you. Happy to provide examples of this comment is too vague.

I'm dying here, from the article;

> What about Raghavan’s career made this feel right? How has nobody connected these dots before and said something? Am I insane?

Yeah spend any amount of time in tech and you will learn this feeling well. There should be some long German word that describes it.

How many acquaintances do I know that have sold their useless startups for 10s of millions. Others that are promoted well past the Peter Principal into positions that have them leading thousands - and lacking the basic skills or empathy needed to understand what it is their orgs do.

This can either make you bitter and burn out... Or you can let it go. The universe doesn't owe us fairness. Ask the seal being played with by an Orca before being torn to shreds how it feels about fairness.

Go enjoy life friends. Luck dominates so much of what is perceived as success. There are more important things to worry about.

Surprised by the responses here.

Unit tests and smoke/E2E are like peanut butter and jelly, they're better together. And yeah they're expensive to build but it's almost always cheaper than deploying crap and hurting your customers.

Why all the drama?

I grew up addicted to IV but since I discovered how much of their music is basically stolen (more so than most artists), I simply cannot listen to them. The originals are great though!

Canada (in particular Vancouver), fix your absurd housing problem and we'll come back.

I completely agree with this post. Additionally, any manager that is actively interviewing with a company should interrogate not only their financials but the product viability. Your job depends not just on your ability to deliver but much more so on the success of your program / product. This may be entirely out of your control.

'How would you handle shutting down this program/product?' Should be a standard question for interviewing managers.

University hosted announcements (e.g. rice.edu announces a major breakthrough) have incentives that are so out of wack it's basically clickbait at this point.

Researchers oversell their results for publishing and funding purposes. Then the university oversells those results to draw in students/investors.

Curious if others feel the same way or if I'm just too cynical at this point...

I know someone that never eats breakfast. He does however eat a very big dinner and continue to eat late into the night.

Skipping breakfast is not necessarily a fasting technique, but a consequence of over eating.

Heh this strikes me as funny. I remember studying hierarchical image classifiers... If you think physics changes fast you should check out CS sometime.

If its real, it's going to excite a metric fuckton of funding in hightc superconductors research.

It doesn't have to be LK99. It'll be one of the other variants that we discover.

Others with more knowledge materials production please add more to this... but it's certainly encouraging there's no rare earth metals or anything radioactive as a component!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Ti...

I'm not intimately familiar with it, just guessing this is some orbital free method that theyve refined. Nothing new, just another approximation that cant model some effects.

DFT scales horribly so it's phenomenally expensive to run. You have to have some other mechanism for knowing the general atomic layout before entering the DFT realm.

Once you know the atomic positions you can then do little perturbation simulations to model phonon dispersions or ask electron density questions.

Isn't this a little bizarre? Didn't Google just layoff the entire EDR team? And then brain publishes an article on their work and credits the team that was shut down?

Am I missing something or is this incredibly tone deaf?

Its about the market, not just technology. There is appetite to reduce emissions now that didn't exist even 10 years ago.

If they can reduce fuel consumption 20%, maybe it's not a unicorn but it'll (hopefully) make some money. Also it gets creative people with novel motivations some real experience in the space, maybe they learn something and maybe they iterate.

Simple and fun, thanks for sharing! Have you thought of adding a wordle style variation - just a daily puzzle that's a different start orientation + velocity? Just a thought.

I feel the same way and tend to default to using the browser for things that have app alternatives. There are likely some devices where this will be a problem, but for the overwhelming majority of device users - where there's a Kindle app there's a browser.

From the consumer perspective perhaps this isn't a big deal? Are we missing something?

> human behavior can ultimately be reduced to mathematical equations

Wait what? Source?

From the future work aspect the author might consider adding an IMU to the device. It could mimic dice behavior or change state based on motion. Also a great opportunity to learn about dynamics and signal processing.

I remember attending a big American Physics Society conference, maybe 4000 physicists attending. They had many parallel tracks for presentations, labeled A through T or something like that. I remember reading through these and it was fascinating the breadth of topics covered, condensed matter through fluid dynamics, chaos, some astrophysics IIRC.

So at the end of the program there's some special session labeled Z and it was for "special physics". All of the talks had bizarre names filled with jargon terms "hyper quantum zener matrix dimensions".

I gather it was the APSs solution to quietly enable the quacks to talk amongst themselves instead of denying them any platform.