Anton Akhmerov
@antonakhmerov.org
110 followers 32 following 61 posts
Condensed matter theorist and a fan of open source and open science. https://antonakhmerov.org/
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Will you also remove "would you like me to do X next?"
Surgeon general warning: quantum computing is not close to being useful.
Are there reliable ways to ensure that coding agents don't use ridiculously defensive coding? I often run into

try:
data = get(nonexistent_url).json()
except Exception:
data = placeholder_data()

I think excessive defensiveness is the biggest pitfall of current tools.
Firstly, amazing! I've seen that builds against pre-release version started much earlier, and that's awesome!

NB, there's draft text remaining in the post: "With yesterday's release of Python 3.14 (insert release link)"
I didn't realize this before, but chatGPT logo has deep symbolism to it:

- It's cool
- It's simple
- It's visually appealing
- If you try to study it carefully, things don't quite make sense nor match

(Source: the SVG form the app, so this is *the* logo)
ChatGPT is feeling mighty enabled in the last couple of days.
We needed to demonstrate how different symmetries look, and I think the result is neat.
The decision seems to strongly depend on the review quality, difficulty of prompt design, and the accuracy of the genAI result.

- How likely is a researcher to be able to generate an appropriate high quality prompt?
- How would one establish validity of the genAI output?
I made an app for raising hands. Make a floor plan of your classroom, define tables, share QR codes with students, and you're set. They raise hands in a queue, you and/or your fellow TAs get notifications. Try it out here (if it's your kind of thing) handraiser.quantumtinkerer.tudelft.nl
Hand Raiser
handraiser.quantumtinkerer.tudelft.nl
Even the best general purpose LLMs struggle with niche knowledge. This is why I think such a tool can make a big difference. At the same time, the available open AI tools are already impressive, and I expect that they will prove amazingly useful.
I have to ask: did the agent come up with this blackboard? Seems only tangentially related to arachnophobia, but definitely anxiety-inducing.
Hour 3+: ok you've no idea, let me show you how it is actually done.
How about the editors publish a note "we screwed up and we shouldn't have published the paper" instead of retracting?
Science is retracting the December 2010 Research Article, “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus.” (THREAD 🧵) scim.ag/4lGQ9g7
Reposted by Anton Akhmerov
Overnight runs are the overnight oats of research — prep, forget, and rewarding by morning
To add gravitas and style to your statements, end sentences with "unless polynomial hierarchy collapses".

- Want to grab lunch tomorrow?
- Sounds awesome, I'm in! Unless polynomial hierarchy collapses.
I've seen plenty of #arXiv preprints that look like they've been authored years after the actual upload.

1. Authors: remember to replace \date{\today} so that you don't look like you're a decade late with your work.
2. Wouldn't it be amazing if arXiv set the OS date to upload date when compiling?
Let's collect rules!

What makes a good paper title? What are patterns to avoid, and what approaches work well?

As an exercise and to motivate the question, go through fresh arXiv and see how many titles you like.
I would even go as far as to recommend adding *.ipynb to .gitignore and use jupytext with .py or .md for interactive work. It is possible to have clean notebooks in git, but the extra complexity is a challenge for many people.
An important caveat here is that usually we're interested in angular momentum because it is conserved. On a torus the operator L, defined in the preprint does not commute with the Hamiltonian at the boundary, where q is discontinuous.
I haven't done this in years. I think I'd put it online instead.
By the way, in order to do 2nd quantized perturbation theory we needed to figure out how to simplify operator expressions, which is quite useful by itself. Check out our docs here: pymablock.readthedocs.io/en/latest/se... if you need to do symbolic 2nd quantized computations.
Two last remaining uses for a USB stick:

- Install Linux.
- Share your slides because the conference organizers asked.