Psst kids, want to buy some research projects?

A lesson I learned from software development: changes don't need to be perfect, and incremental improvements are often good enough. For example, TU Delft changed its motto from "Challenge the future" (!?) to "Impact for a better society". Perfect? Maybe not. Better? Very much so! :)

What are the best examples of AI usage disclosure forms in coding and academia? I've seen a handful of "tell me everything", which seems fairly impractical.

I am by now convinced that disclosing genAI usage should become a norm in academia and education. I was initially skeptical—it's just another tool—but I am now convinced that the extra transparency is helpful. After all, I am all for sharing code, what's different here?

Things language models apparently can't do yet: optimize a website. This is chatgpt.com eating half a gigabyte of RAM and 100% CPU to respond to a text-only query.

I want students to collectively decide on a formula sheet for an exam. How to organize collaborative work of 100-200 people on one document of fixed size?

#Python 3.15 is going to be wild.

There is a persistent view in academia that you learn only by living through an experience. "My students implement everything from scratch so that they understand how code works." "If you don't write all your papers, you never learn." Active learning is great, but applying it mindlessly isn't OK.

I've been using @mattermost.bsky.social for almost a decade (since December 2015) for my group, some courses I teach. I ended up providing a chat for a few other research groups. Unfortunately with Mattermost Inc. backpedaling their open source stance, I'll find something else.

And this is how I learned about jupyter-ssh-proxy. Seems handy, and a lot less headache to set up than an actual ssh server into the hub. ✨

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.

I don't think I'd manage that long scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%2...

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.

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

I’m working on Kwantsplain, an AI tool that turns natural language descriptions into Kwant simulations. Your input can shape it! What simulations should it handle? Submit ideas: forms.gle/z6BpHNDKJfRN... #opensource #quantumtransport

How about the editors publish a note "we screwed up and we shouldn't have published the paper" instead of retracting?

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.

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.

Me, a year ago: "Perturbation theory is always the same, second quantization is just filling in the gaps." 6000 lines of code and docs later: Pymablock v2.2.0 released🎉 pymablock.readthedocs.io/en/v2.2.0/ We have bosons, spins, fermions, and Floquet, and I'm quite happy about it.

Learning #manim library to make video lectures for the solid state physics course. So far so good! Any useful links or resources?

An updated list of actual real serious academic journals where I'd like to publish already because of the journal name: - Blood - Chaos - Entropy - Omega: Journal of Death and Dying - Journal of Headache and Pain - Potato Research - Nature and Science (one journal, not 2!)

The ordering that maximizes the amount of number operators in second quantization (=number ordered form) is very useful for symbolic algebra because it allows fast multiplication and simplification. We used it to implement second quantization in Pymablock pymablock.readthedocs.io/en/latest/se...

Friendly reminder that in open source you cannot treat "a lack of response in an issue" as a decision not to respond. 99% of the time it is simply because the project doesn't have the time and resources to look at issues and respond to them reliably. Be patient.

A question to my condensed matter colleagues: when is the right time to start writing a paper? How do you decide "this is the moment"?

I have a second quantization question. Moving all creation operators to the left, and annihilation operators to the right is *normal ordering*. Is there a name for having as many number operators as possible, so ordering like (a^†a)³a²?

A common sin of scientific reporting is overstating the impact of research. It is always harmful when someone promises to solve the climate change with a quantum computer. The Microsoft press release news.microsoft.com/source/featu..., however, is especially cynical and bad. 1/2

Countless papers state that their "code and data are available upon a reasonable request". But nobody says what requests are reasonable. To help with formulations I made a form that provides a decent default choice. Request away! #OpenScience #OpenData antonakhmerov.org/misc/reasona...

I teach a project-based course computational physics compphys.quantumtinkerer.tudelft.nl. We just adopted this generative AI policy: * Everything you do is your responsibility. * Link to e.g. chatGPT chats, and we'll tell how to use genAI better if you mess up. I wonder about other viable choices.

I wrote censor, a tiny package that ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮. It can even censor only names, e.g. "I'm ▮▮▮▮▮ and I work in ▮▮▮▮▮". gitlab.kwant-project.org/anton-akhmer...

arxiv.org/abs/2501.18631 looks like a comprehensive set of policy proposals for improving reproducibility. At a glance, though this point > Research groups should have a stated policy and timeline for releasing in-house developed code. reads like a compromise and a half-measure.

An arbitrarily weak periodic potential opens a gap in a 1D Schrödinger equation. In 2D a very weak potential with simple periodicity does not open a band gap. Is it at all possible to open a gap in 2D perturbatively or is there a minimal strength to open a gap at energy E?

The most useful software for researchers using Python scientific computing that I found in the whole 2024 is pixi.sh by @prefix.dev. It solves the problem of managing dependencies of all your projects and ensuring that code runs for everyone involved.

There should be a package that: 1. Scans all the scripts for a project 2. Generates a .bib file for which papers to cite based on which packages you import Did you see anything like that?

While tinkering with pymablock.readthedocs.io, I computed the difference between the spectrum of H₀+αH₁ and the spectrum obtained perturbatively in α up to 100th order. For low α they converge to machine precision 🔬, but above convergence radius everything goes 🥴 Not a surprise, but nice to see.

Happy 2025 everyone, or so I measure. www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26... @bullshitquantum.bsky.social