physix

That brings back memories!

I wrote Monte-Carlo simulations to calculate the thermodynamics of oxygen ordering in a high temperature superconductor way back in 1993.

Calculating thermodynamic fluctuations on a 256x256 lattice took all night. And that, even though it ran on an HP 9000/750 with a 66 MHz PA-7000 (PA-RISC 1.1) 32-bit CPU.

While waiting, I used to look at weather satellite images downloaded from CERN using NCSA Mosaic. It was impressive. All the information available at your fingertips by using arrow keys and pressing return on underlined text to navigate to the next page! Emmm, link.

Isn't this just testing its training on statistical mechanics? It's sort of a specialized field of knowledge and perhaps not well trained on that.

It might be better at classifying the author from a piece of text, given N candidates. That's a dirac delta function, unless it's been plagiarized.

I've been cleaning up AI generated system/software design and architecture docs for an agentically engineered application, to translate that dense AI-speak into a clear human-readable form, cross checking it all against the actual codebase.

When I read the translated version, I felt a flush of relief, because I finally could confirm that it built the right thing and properly implemented the requirements.

I then asked in a fresh session which version was better for it as a reference for future work. It unequivocally voted for the human readable form, and gave it's reasoning with specific examples why.

So, I have a hunch that this "packing of lots of signals into fewer words" isn't really better. The incomprehensible prose just makes us think it knows what it's doing, like some mysterious magic that is only smoke and mirrors.

This just might save me. Claude has been driving me nuts with incomprehensible summaries after a long task, where it's actually really important to understand what was done (and what wasn't).

But I'd like that skill to only be used at the final step, when it finishes something.

Predictions are only one part of research. It's what theorists feed experimentalists with. Confirmation of predictions is by and large a very physical endeavour. Labs are not going away.

I do feel that it's exciting to see what AI will be able to do to help research and discover new things.

My gripe is with their messaging. Because a lot of people will misinterpret that, including politicians, possibly to the detriment of good science.

In many domains, scientific research is physical. Are they going to deprecate labs and sort of scale that out into a pure compute problem?

They are occupying a term in their headline messaging that is much broader than they can actually cover.

A common pattern these days. Overclaim, attract attention, iterate.

>a “good” workday, engineers spent 18 percent of their time “coding” (not including bug fixing, testing, etc.)

I must be a crap developer, because I probably spend twice as much time bugfixing and testing than "coding". (Both of which actually involve coding stuff, so I really don't like that distinction they make)

This is stuff AI can be really good at, so brushing that part under the table distorts the picture.

Having said that, I do agree with most of the myths they present.

Better would have been to offer a button to flag something that does NOT seem like AI slop on LinkedIn.

Has anyone noticed a change in "attitude" when coding with Opus 5 vs 4.8?

claude has this maddening principle of wanting to minimize the "blast radius", do the least amount of coding changes to get something done, happy to pile up technical debt by "deferring" problems encountered as side notes somewhere. No amount of CLAUDE.md tweaking, and setting .claude/rules seems to get rid of this attitude.

To me it appears like something deeply ingrained in the model itself. Kind of makes sense, since the bulk of the training data is pre-AI, so that it retains an approach of the past, where these facets were driven by completely different cost and time factors.

The past months, I've been hoping that the next model that comes out properly reflects the new reality of agentic development, so that it takes on a more natural stance compatible with how things work today, and we don't have to constantly fight against its fear of change, its drive to minimize coding efforts, refusing to recognize a design flaw and trigger discussions rather than baking in workarounds.

I'm not sure the current administration is fully driven by macroeconomic arguments.

I think the article is really good, until it starts to offer guidance and making suggestions for the future.

I can't pin it down precisely, but my feeling is that it doesn't fully recognize the fundamental shift taking place. In a sense it's not radical enough, trying more to keep a system afloat whose foundation is being dismantled.

The forces that gave rise to open source will find a new way, because they are based on the nature of the human spirit. We just don't know what it will look like yet.

So this isn't the way techies in Silicon Valley talk??

And here I was using my claude dialogues as a way to refine my speak and better connect with the heartland of innovation.

:-P

Wouldn't this be something a virus scanner would detect and quarantine?

Not an active Windows user, but I can't imagine any sane person working on Windows OS without malware protection.