micheles

I mostly do numeric simulations and claude is extremely good at turning half baked ideas into real implementations that can be tested and discarded (sometimes even accepted). That gives me a huge bonus in time saved chasing dead ends. It also knows a lot about numerical optimization, more than I do, so it can suggest interesting algorithms and solutions. Moreover, it is extremely good at understanding complex scientific code bases, since it also understands the science behind it. often use it to explain what some module does, to summarize scientific papers or to explain some concept I am unfamiliar with. Then it can be used to write down articles/reports with plots and tables, to be refined manually at the end. Not to mention the time saved in debugging, probably its strongest point.

I don't consider the browser a tool.

I am unable use non-CLI tools, so I don't care about this app. However, I have a question about codex CLI: currently I am using pi agent and I am happy with it, using codex CLI would give me some advantage?

I am in the top 3% but I don't know if that means a lot or not much :-/

I have always maintained that real mathematics starts when you address the infinite. I don't see how you can get anything interesting (like analysis, differential geometry, topology) without the assumption that the infinite exists.

BTW, the article is really badly written.

> uutils now runs the upstream GNU coreutils test suite against itself in CI. That’s the right scale of defense for this class of bug. That's the minimum, it is absurd that they did not start from that!

The article is badly written. This has nothing to do with fractals, they are talking about the assumption that there is an UV fixed point for all physical laws, which can even be true and personally like. It means there are no ultraviolet divergences and that at some point quantum field theory becomes finite. Over a certain large mass scale (which still can be much smaller than the Plank scale) all the coupling constants freeze, there are no radiative corrections and all is simple and well behaved. The problem is, you need some extra fields to do that, with some symmetry cancelling the divergences over the mass scale (it does not have to be supersymmetry) and we lack a theory for that. Moreover, the low energy physics will be nearly independent from the high energy modifications, so the predictive power is low. Yes, they predicted the Higgs mass, but it could very well be a coincidence. If they could predict something really new, though, then it would become quite interesting.

As a former Theoretical Physicist, this result is remarkable. I myself I tried to use AI for calculations in Perturbative Quantum Field Theory and I was impressed. I agree with the authors: it looks like the future of Theoretical Physics would be more in verification and consistency checking of AI-assisted results rather than in manual calculations.

My barber is 75+ and he says that he has no intention of ever retiring, until he is forced to by health reasons.

I like far-future concept-driven science fiction, is there something for me too?

I am old. The time of the old Internet corresponds to my Ph.D. years, so I was very much an adult. I still miss it ;-)

Nowadays I am on the other part of the fence, I am the interviewer. We are not a FAANG, so we just use a SANE interview process. Single interview, we ask the candidate about his CV and what his expectations are, what are his competences and we ask him to show us some code he has written. That's all. The process is fast and extremely effective. You can discriminate week candidates in minutes.

Finally somebody making sense in this thread!

I am scientific Python programmer. 99% to 100% of my programs require parallelism, but it is ALWAYS embarrassingly trivial parallelism, nothing is ever mutated and I never need locks. Right now I am forced to use multiprocessing to get the performance, with all problems of multiprocessing, the major one being that I need to use more memory. For me using multithreading could mean the difference between running out of memory and not running out memory. The GIL removal matters for people like me, the proponents of the GIL removal comes from the scientific community.

I remember when I took my course of "Theoretical Physics" (so called, it was an Introduction to Quantum Field Theory in actuality) and I realized that particles do not exist. It was quite an enlightenment. Particles are a convenient description of Quantum Fields in the perturbative regime, but what Quantum Fields are is not known, not even at the mathematical level. When you live at frontier of knowledge, as a Theoretical Physicists, reality becomes fuzzy. But that's life.