Managed to vote early ("absentee in person") in between meetings today Wisconsin voting always goes smoothly, at least here in Madison
Mikhail Kats
@mickeykats.bsky.social
Optics/photonics researcher, applied physicist, and faculty at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Personal account + opinions Was @mickeykats on Twitter
Some time in grad school, I read a transcript of Richard Hamming's talk at Bell Labs, called "You and your research". Every so often, I share it with a colleague There's so much there that there's no way anyone will agree with it all, but parts of it certainly affected my approach to my work
You and Your Research
cs.virginia.edu
Some time in grad school, I read a transcript of Richard Hamming's talk at Bell Labs, called "You and your research". Every so often, I share it with a colleague There's so much there that there's no way anyone will agree with it all, but parts of it certainly affected my approach to my work
You and Your Research
cs.virginia.edu
I have discovered that doing simulations on a high-throughput computing cluster is much nicer than doing them on my little laptop
Glad to be part of this new NSF-funded UW-Madison center on materials for extreme environments engineering.wisc.edu/news/new-uw-...
New UW-Madison center accelerates discovery where materials meet their limits - College of Engineering - University of Wisconsin-Madison
A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers has received nearly $25 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation for an initiative that leverages AI to accelerate discovery and developmen...
engineering.wisc.edu
Doing a crazy thing and heading to Spain for the Aug 12 solar eclipse. The eclipse will be just a few degrees above the horizon, opening up interesting photo opportunities. Debating whether I should get a new camera lens. 50 mm was not enough last time..
Mikhail Kats@mickeykats.bsky.social · 2y ago
I'm confused about how claude handles context windows. Basically the window fills up until you have to compact It doesn't seem like it would be hard to continuously monitor the context window and remove stuff that is definitely not important But they don't seem to do that?
Wow what a moon out right now. Too bad phone photos don't do it justice
Not surprising given the relatively simple simulations and fabrication, but the literature on thin-film optical coatings is so so vast Hard to get a handle on it, sometimes
Wrote an em dash and gently winced. Do they need to come with disclaimers now?
Just learned that 3M has their own (very small) lake, called the 3M Lake
With AI tools I now routinely end up on tangents where I spend 2-3 hours trying some idea, doing some calculations, etc., that I would not have spent time pursuing otherwise Can't tell yet if it's more of a distraction, or if it really expands the range of things I look at in a good way
Got to see Metric in Chicago yesterday. My hot take is that they might be the best Canadian band of all time (with apologies to Rush)
For the next "ways in which things have gotten worse intergenerationally" post, this looks like a much better stat to use than housing prices. It needs to be at 1 for everyone to be happy. It was at 0.95 in 2000, and is at 0.86 now.
Ryan Moulton@moultano.bsky.social · 2w agoI'm actually astonished at how clean this graph looks as a diagnostic for our housing ills. Note how close it is to 1 at the start. Houses per single adult or married couple.
Huh, IBM is buying HRL (all of it?) www.reuters.com/business/aut...
IBM buys HRL Laboratories in shift to two-track quantum computing strategy
IBM has agreed to buy HRL Laboratories, a private quantum computing research lab jointly owned by Boeing Co and General Motors , the company said on Thursday, adding a second pillar to IBM's quantum ...
reuters.com
Nice showing at UW-Madison, though given what I know about the number of applications, the overall success rate remains.. not very high!
UW–Madison Data Science Institute@uwdsi.bsky.social · 2w agoUW–Madison will receive 5 Phase I Genesis Mission awards from the Department of Energy addressing urgent energy, scientific, and engineering challenges with AI and advanced computing. @uwmadison.bsky.social earned more awards than any other public university in the US. news.wisc.edu/5-projects-a...
I must say, "Free [researchers] from the growing administrative burdens that now weigh them down for nearly half their working hours" is kind of funny to read This past year is the first year in my career, where admin burdens (including and especially proposal/funding things) took ~50% of my time
Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · 2w agoInitial notes: There's a lot of emphasis on the GRFP (and similar funding mechanisms, such as CAREER awards) because of its ability to target high-performing individuals on the basis of merit—in contrast to institutions and diversity programs.
I wonder if the Bluesky team knows that the experience for a large fraction of people is no meaningful engagement, leading to many people abandoning it I believe in the bluesky mission, so I've been posting here for 3 years (4K posts, >1K followers), and my median post gets no replies and ~1 'like'
I have no clue how students who have decently smart LLM tools available when they are in high school / college will ever learn to have their own writing voice Seems like a steep hill
When people leave the group I often don't take off their recurring meetings from the calendar for sometimes up to a year. Both because it feels weird and "final" to do it, but also because it helps buffer my calendar so I have some enforced gaps
Welp, it's light out, so I guess I pulled an all-nighter? I should really not do this anymore
Does anyone understand what will happen with the finalized DHS rule on "duration of status" (limiting F-1s to 4 years, among other things), given that there were comments on the proposed rule? There are not that many unfortunately, but can they be used in some way?
Establishing a Fixed Time Period of Admission and an Extension of Stay Procedure for Nonimmigrant Academic Students, Exchange Visitors, and Representatives of Foreign Information Media
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is amending its regulations to change the admission period in the F, J, and I classifications from duration of status to an admission for a fixed time period,...
federalregister.gov
Just got this (portion of a) review from a journal. They couldn't let me have my fun I guess =)
I don't know much about this sport but my understanding was that it is difficult to win if you take no shots on goal
I didn't watch the 3rd place match but I hear they scored some goals Must be nice