LLMs/RAGs/Transformers are the newish thing that's here to stay.

I've seen my colleagues vocabulary regress from "training transformers" to just "using AI", without clarifying if are using claude or actually building a network. I was recently told that no one says "vibe coding" any more (now it "agentic AI", I was told). My colleague who does ML research was told he was the only one at his workplace that wasn't doing AI.

So the problem isn't the technology (a lot of the technology is great), it's that the discussion around it has been dumbed down by hype.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-04-rescan

But it turns out that water is a pretty good bet most of the time:

- Settled snow is around 0.25

- Dried wood is around 0.5

- Soil is around 1.2

- Rock is around 2.5

Which is pretty good if you want to answer "how much does that truck / ship / mountain / lake weigh?".

Of course there are some anomalies: Tungsten is around 20, but it's not like imperial units help here, and the name literally translates to "heavy rock".

The real advantage of metric is that you only have to do math once to calculate something. A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg. It's just easy. A deep lake over a few square km? O(1) GT. Understanding orders of magnitude is a useful trait in a democracy.

You hit the nail on the head here though:

> My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.

Like any language, as long as you're translating you're loosing. Post signs in km and report temperature as C and everyone will understand it in less than a decade. A few years after I had a metric thermometer in my car C seemed easy.

It's not like the US failed to think of this. In the 80s they were posting signs in km. But back then there was a real economic cost to conversion for factories and machines. Now that's mostly gone, what remains is cultural resistance.

In reality heavier isotopes of hydrogen fuse, conserving the total number of nucleons, but the resulting hydrogen has a lower rest mass than the parent particles. The extra mass is released as energy and the total energy is conserved.

By his logic the system either violated energy conservation (by creating nucleons while releasing energy) or was endothermic (creating nucleons from the surrounding energy).

There are a million places where a computer can interact with a non-digital system in a loop.

- Tune an FPGA, or a whole data-center, or just a physical computer.

- Make a drone fly somewhere.

- Design a selective toxin (or anti-toxin).

Or, you know, get more people to click on adds. All totally possible to automate.

But he was a great teacher anyway. He was engaging and kept the kids in line and learning. I eventually learned the truth, and most of my classmates forgot about it. Teaching, like flying a plane or driving a train, might become more about keeping watch over a small group of people and ensuring that things don't go off the rails, and that's fine.

It got me thinking: could I somehow pay them now? There's some sad news here: one of the original creators, Peter Cartwright, passed away [1] in 2026 :(

His project to remaster EV: Override, Cosmic Frontier, was fully funded after his death though!

[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...

But in this case I was hacking the shareware payment enforcement. Rather than shutting down completely the game would send an invincible and fairly destructive enemy (Hector) after you. It was really a clever trick from the developers to make the game mostly unplayable if you didn't pay after the trial period.

The game was shareware and he'd show up to ask you to pay the fee. After the trial period he'd start lobbing missiles at you. There was a basic editor you could open to adjust all the ship stats and weapons, so while you couldn't turn him friendly you could at least de-claw him.

I remember thinking it was weird how "easy" it was to work around, but it's hard to imagine the studio would care much: a pre-internet 14 year who loved the game that much is probably more useful as an ambassador than a paying customer.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_photomultiplier

If the restaurant has a foul smell and the food is served by a twitchy waiter who insists that the food totally free, I think most people will think twice.

We need a cultural shift toward code hygiene, which isn't really any different from the norms most cultures develop around food. It's a mix of crude heuristics but the sense of "eeew" is keeping billions of people alive.

Awesome graph! Worth stating that the increase in the relative fraction of He isn't so much because there's a lot of He out there as because there's a lot less of everything else. Overall density falls off roughly exponentially but lighter elements have a longer tail.

So once you get out to a few earth radii quite a bit of what you see might be ionized helium but that doesn't mean you can do much with it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chemical_composition_of_a...

GP ain't wrong, but the phrasing implied we'd have it closer by than it actually is.

If the people fought before they'll keep fighting, even after their robots are gone.

As for why accuracy and perplexity aren't reported: the experiments generally choose a threshold to consider something a "b-hadron" (basically picking a point along the ROC curve) and quantify the TPR and FPR at that point. There are reasons for this, mostly that picking a standard point lets them verify that the simulation actually reflects data. See, for example, the FPR [1] and TPR [2] "calibrations".

It's a good point, though, the physicists should probably try harder to report standard metrics that the rest of the ML community uses.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.06319

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05120

https://www.nowcast.de/en/

it's an array of VLF/LF radio antenna.

Everyone needs to agree on a place to put the LHC, and a lot of the accelerator team is on sight and probably should be payed by CERN, but they have a clear set of KPIs for that: they need to get the machine up to design energy and luminosity and hold it there. The CERN accelerator and civil engineering teams are pretty impressive and have mostly done their job.

The rest of the scientific community can (and does) organize into pseudo-autonomous collaborations that draft proposals for what to do with the real-estate around the collision points and beam dumps. The vast majority of these people don't work for CERN.