Viewing profile — fastneutron

Very cool! One possible nitpick: were you aware of the naming collision with Versor, the general purpose GA library in templated C++? http://versor.mat.ucsb.edu/

Ludlum is rare among equipment manufacturers in that they design with user-servicability in mind. They happily took phone calls and emails from my 16-year-old self about how to dia…

This sounds more like proactive outreach to PIs based on AI-automated market research rather than direct AI-based gatekeeping by the granting agencies. There’s certainly a case to …

> there aren't that many well paying jobs The irony here is that if you look at the job postings of quantum hardware vendors, they ask for a laundry list of skills that only a smal…

You could cut all of it and it wouldn’t solve the problems you listed. It would just create new ones by closing off a major valve to the country’s R&D pipeline. Assuming you believ…

Now do it for an applied physicist with a family and a mortgage! In theory, the work I do sits in that valley of death between where the government funds uncertain things at a $1e5…

While I dream of unshackling my research programs from the bureaucracy of the institutions they’re tied to, I do very much enjoy having an actual budget, paycheck, and health insur…

I’m no expert in formal methods, but of all the tools I’ve used, Athena [0] has been one of my favorites to work with. The proofs read much more like what you’re used to seeing in …

No, the non-exception is not absolutely necessary, and there are plenty of people on my staff who fit the description. There are also plenty more who Dunning-Krueger their way into…

Celebrity exceptions are exactly that; exceptions. Those people knew an opportunity when they had one, and were able to generalize their early successes into other domains by lever…

Disregard them. A lot of people fixate on the 1 in a billion celebrity exceptions like Musk, Thiel, Gates, Dyson, et al and go “look look you don’t need a PhD!” Yes, a highly motiv…

Most discussions I see online about whether or not someone should do a PhD tend to assume: - The student becomes hyper focused and pigeonholed into some esoteric and unemployable d…

Nobody pays tuition in a PhD program. Your work is funded by grants and fellowships and you get paid a stipend.

This might be a good candidate for the 2025 Ig Nobel prize in physics [1]. More seriously, NV centers are one of the most accessible quantum hardware platforms, and do very sensiti…

The idea of neurosymbolic systems has been in the air a long time, but every time I look at the commentary of an article like this I’m surprised at number the “OMG why didn’t anyon…

“All you need” considered harmful.

There must be some kind of inside joke at CERN about this. I’ve sat through more than a few conference talks by CERN researchers (not even LHC affiliated) where Comic Sans was the …

Fortran is alive and well in science and engineering. The more modern standards are much nicer to work with, but largely backwards compatible with stuff written 50 years ago.

Now that’s what I’d call nuclear engineering! More seriously, spin polarized D-T fusion is known to have an enhanced reaction cross section, so there are labs out there researching…

Very cool! Is the code open source?

Another problem is the propensity for Congress to want to do "immigration reform" as a giant omnibus action. The discourse inevitably gets bogged down in mudslinging over the south…

We use paper ballots in my jurisdiction (NY) and they’re counted electronically with a scanner. This gives a real time tally, but preserves a paper trail that can be audited.

Assuming good faith, It’s possible to ask for references and citations without being rude and unwelcoming. “Hi, interesting work! Do you have any other recommended reading on $SUBJ…

I’ve been building a RAG mini app with txtai these past few weeks and it’s been pretty smooth. I’m between this and llamaindex as the backend for a larger app I want to build for a…