fastneutron

8 ms·

31.
by fastneutron 3y ago
By and large, the DOE isn’t doing this research. The federal workforce primarily consists of program managers who oversee how the money is doled out, but is largely hands off on the technical aspects. DOE is the biggest non defense R&D
32.
by fastneutron 3y ago
Exactly, so I can only speculate at this point on the motivations. I suspect undergrad admissions committees are incentivized to maximize the first year retention rate, so they are overly conservative when it comes to selecting for people w
33.
by fastneutron 3y ago
It's more smug when you read this article from the perspective of a recently-rejected 18 year old, knowing that you're the person the article is referring to. :) In all seriousness, the MIT admissions reps I interacted with at the
34.
by fastneutron 3y ago
100% this. I’ve been party to RLHF jobs before and the instructions nearly always state to prioritize conciseness in the model response. In aggregate, this is how you wind up with stub functions and narrative descriptions rather than full w
35.
by fastneutron 3y ago
I did study nuclear engineering, both bachelors and PhD, and in hindsight, the path I took is one I’d gladly take again. That said, everything I did in undergrad was eventually overshadowed by my graduate studies and early career experience
36.
by fastneutron 3y ago
More likely a functional radon source. With all the torched thorium mantles and radium dials, he was definitely getting plenty of that (and the subsequent daughter products). The quantity of neutrons would have been extremely low, certainly
37.
by fastneutron 3y ago
I applied to MIT in 2005, having built a functional Farnsworth fusor in my garage (which was fairly uncommon at the time), and was not admitted. Part of me wonders if the guy in the article was referring to my case, since the David Hahn sto
38.
by fastneutron 3y ago
And most people have a 1200 watt version in their kitchen for that exact purpose!
39.
by fastneutron 3y ago
In terms of cleaning up roadside litter in my area, I would anecdotally agree. But echoing the other comments, the alternative reusable bags I get mostly just wind up being shoved in the closet or thrown away when the handles inevitably rip
40.
by fastneutron 3y ago
Ditto. It’s not the breathless hysteria about child abduction or (conversely) busybody neighbors calling the cops on unaccompanied minors that keep my kids inside. It’s the insane drivers in 4 ton lifted pickups and the town’s refusal to lo
41.
by fastneutron 3y ago
"Sweet" means low sulfur. It's a standard industry term.
42.
by fastneutron 3y ago
> It's difficult to describe what this stuff is like if you haven't seen it. I want to echo this point, because it gets talked about in the popular media like it's just another kind of garden variety crude oil, when it is
43.
by fastneutron 3y ago
On reading the headline, everyone’s mind immediately goes to GPT-powered killbots, when in reality this is more likely to RAG its way through mountains of procurement paperwork and other mundane procedural documents.
44.
by fastneutron 3y ago
This is a timely debate in engineering. Historically, it would be customary do the most conservative reliability analysis possible, right up to the point of accounting for physically impossible parameter combinations, just to ensure enough
45.
by fastneutron 3y ago
Whether it's 1 Watt, 1000 Watts or 0.0001 Watts is utterly irrelevant. It's the activity that matters. Even at the power quoted in the article of 100 microwatts, you're still talking activities on the order of a full Curie, a
46.
by fastneutron 3y ago
The idea of this making it into any consumer product is science fiction, and articles like this can be safely ignored. Some back of the envelope math to illustrate why: - The decay energy of Ni-63 is 66 keV, but since the energy is split wi
47.
by fastneutron 3y ago
std::mdspan can't come soon enough...
48.
by fastneutron 3y ago
> Very few people care about that. While it may be true that the absolute number of people involved is small compared to the wider tech industry, long-term code reproducibility is critically important for engineering-heavy industries wit
49.
by fastneutron 3y ago
> Lists, dictionaries, strings (none of which is of any use to scientific computing) Disagree on this one. In my experience, the computational kernels of our newer scientific & engineering codes (Fortran or C++) are almost never invo
50.
by fastneutron 3y ago
This looks like it was posted in reference to the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38874885
51.
by fastneutron 3y ago
In the latter part of the book that covers PINNs and other PDE methods, it helps to frame these using the same kind of functional analysis that is used to develop more traditional numerical methods. In this case, it provides a way for pract
52.
by fastneutron 3y ago
With ITER (and tokomaks more generally), the original assumption was that scaling laws would enable you to reach breakeven just by making the thing big enough. The problem is that "big enough" means throwing $25B at it, and when t
53.
by fastneutron 3y ago
Some interesting science results, but essentially nothing in the way of economically-valuable computations. I think we'll eventually get there in the next decade or so, but even before that, there are immediately useful spinoff technol
54.
by fastneutron 3y ago
LLM-written content has a certain gestalt to it that’s pretty easy to sniff out once you’ve seen it a few times, just look at Quora and LinkedIn these days. While I think it’s probably fair for people with English as a second language to us
55.
by fastneutron 3y ago
Numerically, I’m currently what this would have looked like. I’m talking about the governing equation set, discretization methods, data, etc. It would be a fun project to try and implement a toy model like that.
56.
by fastneutron 3y ago
> rad-hydro These are incredibly expensive even on today’s hardware. If you look through some of the unclassified ASCI reports from the early 2000s, 3D calculations of this equation set were implied to be leadership-class computations. A
57.
by fastneutron 3y ago
When I see comparisons like this, the first thought I have is not the benchmarks, but rather what the most “heroic” real-world calculation of the day would have been on something like the Cray-1, and how to replicate those calculations toda
58.
by fastneutron 3y ago
Anything being done in the public sector (e.g. academia or government) is pocket change by comparison, and so bound up with red tape these days that most truly high risk/reward bets are passed over. That, and you’re at the mercy of con
59.
by fastneutron 3y ago
For all the people saying this is a scam/waste of money/always 10 years away, I’m curious what you envision the funding model for this kind of speculative tech to be. The government ceased to be the bankroll for this kind of stuff
60.
by fastneutron 3y ago
We got to this point because search engine results have become so polluted with sponsored links, low quality blogspam and SEO’d clones of Wikipedia and Stack Overflow that LLM responses are the only source of direct information that actuall

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