Posts

This is a test!

Today Tyler Cowen announced the 56th cohort of Emergent Ventures winners, one of whom was me!! I have money now! In addition, I received an email from {{REDACTED}} about being mentored, which seems cool! They’re a linguistics professor who dabbles in AI evaluation. One thing I noticed about their papers is that they have a much more prominently “academic” register. Reading (skimming) their paper was much more enjoyable than typical papers but also much more taxing. I felt the same way as I do when I’m listening to somebody who has a thick accent (particularly a thick French accent): I can understand the individual words, but the thought required to decipher the individual words expels from my working memory the knowledge of the previous words, making it much more difficult to comprehend a sentence. ...

Hello! Inspired by the neolab, I decided to read “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” by Roger WIlliams. Two things to start: there are SPOILERS AHEAD, and I would also like to repeat the author’s disclaimer from the book: This online novel contains strong language and extreme depictions of acts of sex and violence. Readers who are sensitive to such things should exercise discretion. This post will be family-friendly, but if you decide to read the original source, you should keep that in mind. In addition, I found some good suggestions on what parts to skip here (spoilers there), though I did not find this until after reading because I wanted to go in clean, and I’m not traumatized. ...

This is a test of details sections I’m testing this because I read a book I want to discuss while giving people a good spoiler warning and this seems like the best method

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done an daily update. It’s been 8 days. Since 8 days ago I’ve done a little bit of work for the [[Org Material and Process Simulation Centre]] at Caltech. I defined a system-of-interest, BiVO_{4}, then today I started running some proof-of-concept experiments for converging the width of the slab, and tomorrow I want to run some for getting the Hubbard corrections. {{REDACTED}} Tomorrow I will go on a bike ride. I want to go into the forest and photograph some geese. I also have to {{REDACTED}}. ...

Seems quite crudely derogatory towards the U.S. and contradicts many of my priors. They argue that the reason for the revolution was primarily economic freedom from Britain’s meddling and not for democracy, backing this up with examples of many seemingly undemocratic parts of the government (supreme court, electoral college, etc.). They also argue that it was primarily a war waged by the wealthy for which the poor were used as weapons. ...

Today I woke up quite late, around 11.00 EDT, because yesterday I slept relatively late (~03.00 EDT). I scrolled (x, email, whatsapp, reddit, etc.) for a few hours, until ~18.00 EDT, until I joined a coworking call with {{REDACTED}} and {{REDACTED}}. I created a plan with claude on how I’m going to review Ch121a-DFT, and then did some review. I learned that: the energy of a substance can be (lossily) modelled as a function of all of the positions of all of the nuclei within that substance, density functional theory is a tool for finding the function that gives the energy, geometry optimization is finding the positions of the nuclei (R) that minimizes the energy, i.e. finds the stable state, $$F_i = - \frac{\partial E}{\partial R_i}$$ Where $F_i$ is the force on the i-th nucleus. It’s negative because we’re minimizing the energy. In general, within an atom or molecule, the force of gravity is negligible w.r.t. to the force between electrons. Electrons are harder to model. Let’s assume a toy system, where there are three dimension x, y, and z, and 10 points on each axis. Now, let there be 60 electrons. For 10 points on each axis and three dimensions, that means that there are a total of $10^3 = 1000$ possible points. Then, we have to compute the amplitude of each electron at each point, which is $1000^{60}$ possible configurations!! Naively one would think that we can represent this as just 1000 different wave functions, but sadly we cannot, because the amplitudes of electrons are correlated. This is very bad, because even for this relatively simple system it’s intractable to store. Now, the solution here is to commoditize (non-technical language) the electrons: instead of computing the chance of finding each electron at each point, we compute the chance of finding an electron at each point (density). It should be noted that the chance of finding an electron at a point can be greater than 1, because we can have multiple electrons on a points (subject to the Pauli exclusion princple etc. etc.). The storage scales constantly w.r.t. the electron count, only scaling as we add more points per axis, which one can intuit as being because we just give a point in our space (e.g. $[-2, 1, 3]$), and then our magical functional gives us the density at that point. This is good and tractable! Now, finally, what you’ve all been waiting for, the energy as a functional of the electron density (Kohn-Sham decomposition): $$E[n] = T_{s[n]} + E_{ext[n]} + E_{H[n]} + E_{xc[n]}$$ Where $T_{s}$ is the kinetic energy of a fictitious system with our same densities, $E_{ext[n]}$ is the external potential energy, $E_{H[n]}$ is the self-repulsion of the charge cloud, and $E_{xc[n]}$ is the exchange-correlation, aka everything not covered in the other terms, and with no known exact form. After this I goofed around a bit with PySCF, scrolled some twitter, ate a turkey sandwich, went on a run for under 2 minutes, then wrote this up. ...

{{REDACTED}} Today I woke up, I took shower and whatnot, ate breakfast, scrolled X, left the house around 09.40, arrived at the gym, worked out, left around 11.20, biked down to a tim hortons. Yesterday I posted an unredacted version of my daily update by accident, so I had to scrape the github history clean and then “I”(claude) implemented a system so that all of my posts are screened by DeepSeek before being posted. Basically the way these work is that in Obsidian I write an unredacted version as an obsidian daily note, then I create a new page in obsidian in my blogs folder and redact it. That’s the way it should work ideally, but in practice what happens is that I remember something while redacting stuff, add it to the redacted version, then have to add it back to the unredacted version, and then sometimes I get mixed up and copy the wrong version. That’s sort of a tangent. So after that I biked to a park, took a few photos of some geese, and then biked home. After that I played D&D with my friends for a few hours. I’m going to do it in-person with {{REDACTED}} next week. After that I scrolled X for a bit, ran about 2 kilommetres, came home, read [[Reading Better Never to Have Been]], had dinner, wrote a blog post about it, scrolled X, messed around with an experiment on concept layers for pseudocode (inspired by http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19980), and then wrote this. It’s approximately 2 am EDT. ...

This is a blog-ified version of this X thread: https://x.com/amitavkrshna/status/2074987857446318454 1/9 This was a bad photo, the geese are restricted to the upper left corner 2/9 Another mediocre photograph, though now there’s a single brave goose venturing into the top centre box 3/9 I like this one a little bit more, but the geese aren’t looking anywhere in particular which makes it less dramatic 4/9 I like this photograph quite a bit, they’re looking at an elderly fellow who was sitting on a bench out of frame 5/9 This photograph does a poor job of highlighting the geese in my opinion, although I like the prominent traingles and the slight surrealism of the island between the water bodies making it look like one body of water is above the other 6/9 This will be great when cropped a little bit (see 10/9) 7/9 This photo probably did not need to be taken, pretty much the same as 6 8/9 This one is a little bit better than mediocre, but still doesn’t focus enough on anything in particular, feels a bit distracted 9/9 This one will be pretty good after cropping out the bottom goose (see 11/9) 10/9 I really like this one, apart from the low-resolution 11/9 6/10, needs to be straightened ...

Preface Relatively unremarkable, the only notable thing is that he seemed quite pessimistic about the expected impact of his work, though I suppose pessimism is what I would expect. The preceding sentence was not intended to be derogatory. Introduction Ibid means that the same source cited. He refutes the idea that this conclusion that it is good to not exist is absurd. That conclusion is absurd, because one can do no good for one that does not exist, because definitionally nothing can be done to them. He refutes this by inverting this, and arguing that existing is bad for those existing. I think that this is an as-of-yet unproven assertion that existence is bad for those existing, but I do accept the idea that existencecan be bad for those existing. He asserts that life is ultimately pointless. He argues that pro-natal views are inherently advantaged, which I accept given that I accept that a child is inherently more likely to choose views agreeing with their parents than against them. He speaks a little of social pressures, but that’s mostly uninteresting to me, apart from this quote: ...