Viewing profile — rsfern

Right, I did specifically say that most of the DOE scientists are contractors, but I concede the phrase “government scientist” is a bit ambiguous. I appreciate the extra detail you…

Let’s distinguish a bit. There are political appointees (Trump’s government employees as you say) who are mostly upper management, and there are career civil servants (all the gove…

I found this paper really thought provoking, but I think the conclusion of “world models are the solution” leaves something to be desired. People are already equipping agentic syst…

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Or they could store the reading traces and validate the user hasn’t edited them server-side? They could sign reasoning traces so they can’t be counterfeited?

The cell DAG enforces that there’s no implicit state, which reduces cognitive load for me a lot and provides some pressure to abstract experimental code into functions. In Jupyter …

My point with the force field example wasn’t to argue against neural scaling as a valid strategy, it totally is effective and a lot of groups are doing it. But I feel like we might…

I don’t think there’s a fundamental reason that performance has to be monotonic in model size or even training FLOPs. At least I don’t think it’s been proved to be so, so I think “…

I don’t mean to pick on you in particular here, but this approach has been bothering me a lot lately, and it seems like it’s super common. I get that it’s an early prototype and no…

I often start prompts with “please”, but I usually don’t thank the model. Framing a question or a request for help with “please” is in distribution for me, it’s a distraction from …

The DHS secretary seems to me to have the point of hosting international students backwards > This final rule ensures that foreign students remain focused on their primary purpose:…

True. But it has no idea that it has no idea, so it might be able to look back at the session trace and pattern match its way to actionable feedback?

I think JEPA is super interesting, but I feel like this example highlights some of the challenges of long horizon planning. For one, chunking the planning stage into a bunch of int…

What aspect do you consider basic? I haven’t had a chance to read more than the abstract because of the paywall, but the really interesting thing here is the mechanically induced t…

The science daily article is just incorrect to call this a superalloy, which it is not. This is a high entropy refractory alloy (HfNbTaTiZr), superalloys are usually based on light…

This is really cool metallurgy. They start with an alloy and deform it and because of elemental size mismatch they can cause the alloy to self assemble into nanoscale crystals with…

Terry Tao has actually been one of the more prominent voices in the math community exploring AI for cutting edge mathematical discovery. This particular post is a bit softer but he…

But this is true for lots of solids, not just glass. Consider creep deformation [0] which is deformation mediated by diffusion of defects in solid materials. It’s a big problem in …

Lab to product scale-up is a well known hard problem in materials (and chemistry), lots of public and private investment has been aimed at accelerating this for decades I think the…

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Maybe I have too optimistic a mindset, but “just be honest” in academia isn’t about being a rule-follower, it’s about not short-changing yourself by coasting though on autopilot in…

> You allowed a take-home exam which means students are able to use any and all resources. It was a closed-book exam. The professor shouldn’t have to hold students’ hands for them …

In my experience the input field lags on short chats too, sometimes in the middle of writing the second or third prompt. Are they running some kind of prospective evaluation or som…

If the explicit role-playing prompt is just to identify multi-valent terms, then revising the question to include more specific context without a role-play prompt should work just …