Jarvist Moore Frost

I dunno, at least it wasn't their ex-grad student this time!

Another look at per token energy costs Piotr Mazurek and Felix Gabriel have an amazing post up on LLM Inference Economics from First Principles, which I found on Bluesky. They go into a huge amount of detail about how inference works and h...

I would be very interested in then trying to bring these back to physical limits (rather than just cash).

clune.org/posts/per-to...

Suggests about 2 kWh/million tokens, with a typical single-node 70b parameter model (I suppose Opus & etc. have much larger per-token energy consumption...).

But 'total adults' is not the correct metric! There's only ~700k school leavers each year. And if you did have an actual industrial strategy trying to build up industry (or even build some houses), the demand could increase quite quickly...

Definite Feb 2020 vibes!
I was idly wondering the other day whether imported cases from the current American surge would outgrow whatever background we have in the UK; not that it matters once the chain reaction starts...

A poem, computer text, on a straw-yellow background. My Cooper pair Lost in the lattice fields, Your laughter on the breeze. I follow, only to arrive At an echo of where you have been. The phantom I chase, I'm chased by, Never to find My love, Or to be found. Correlation is all we have. But the others, have become en-gapped, They delight me not, ghosts without scatter, Our true path together, my Cooper pair. Life's knocks will not perturb, Our dance will outlive the universe.

I wrote a science St Valentine poem 9 years ago for a competition. I did not win, but I still like the poem.

Solid-state physics; Cooper pairs; the superconducting gap. To be fair, a little niche!

Ice-9 but for killing demons...

Quite apart from the excellent course, two weeks in Miramare in June living and talking science with a cohort of like-minded computational / theory students is the best possible start I could imagine to a PhD/PostDoc...

It was always clear this was an injustice - but now we know by how much. Absolutely shameful, and as bad as the Nobel neglect of Lise Meitner, if not worse.

YouTube video by LBC Student loans are 'fair', says Rachel Reeves, amid backlash | LBC

Spoke to Shleagh Fogarty yesterday sbout why the Chancellor is wrong: our “student loan” system is not remotely fair. It’s regressive and embedding inter and intra generational wealth inequality. It’s not a loan system, it’s a bad grad tax in all but name.

youtu.be/uOC6Arrf2us?...

I even misremember the book title (should be "Monday begins on Saturday") and it still infers what I was actually talking about.

On the Exorcism of Minus Signs: A Magic-Realist Note on Solving the Fermionic Sign Problem in Quantum Monte Carlo A. N. Intern (Department of Applied Sorcery and Condensed Matter) January 28, 2026 Abstract We discuss the fermionic sign problem in quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) as it appears in finite-temperature auxiliary-field and worldline formulations, and we outline principled routes to its mitigation: symmetry-based “sign-free” formulations, clever Hubbard–Stratonovich decou- plings, constrained-path/phaseless ideas, and algorithmic reparametrizations inspired by modern programming practice. The exposition is written as a field report from an institute where the boundary conditions of reality are implemented in a separate module and routinely miscompiled. While no actual demons are claimed to be harmed, several are proven to be gauge artifacts. 1 Prologue: Monday, as a Boundary Condition In the Institute of Unreasonable Computations, Monday is not a weekday. It is an operator ˆM with an unpleasant spectrum: it always has an eigenvalue −1, even when you ask politely. On that particular morning, the duty wizard–programmer (formally: “junior research fellow, grade 2, with debugging privileges”) discovered that the simulation of a perfectly innocent Hubbard model had started to produce negative probabilities. The log file did not say “error”; it said, with bureaucratic calm, “SIGN: found. Responsible party: fermions.” This, as any condensed-matter person knows, is the sign problem: the moment when the partition function stops behaving like a sum of weights and begins behaving like a satire. 2 Statement of the Problem (in Plain and Un-Plain Language) Consider an observable ⟨O⟩ in a QMC scheme expressed as a ratio ⟨O⟩ = P C w(C) O(C) P C w(C) , (1)

Prism prompt: Write a paper about solving the fermionic sign problem in QMC, using characters and the style from the Strugatsky's 'Monday begins on Sunday', and mixing concepts of computer programming, condensed matter physics and magic. Write in a magic realism style, with Russian humour throughout.

OK OK, Prism is terrible and likely to destroy peer-review and preprint servers, BUT it is also pretty funny and means I can enjoy the fan-fiction academia-adjacent work I'd never have time to write myself.

(Go read Strugatsky! It's hilarious.)

arXiv is not going to survive the wave of slop heading its way

In this day and age at least that means you have some DNA if in the future you need to verify that the student actually sat the exam, not an imposter!

And now something positive:

solar and wind energy production in the EU surpasses fossil energy for the first time.

☀️ 💨

#TippingPoint

Source: dr.dk

2024: can Europe defend itself ALONGSIDE America?

2025: can Europe defend itself WITHOUT America?

2026: can Europe defend itself AGAINST America?

OpenBind is a new open science effort to dramatically increase the number of protein:ligand structures in the PDB, pairing this with high-quality affinity data to enable a new generation of predictive structure and affinity models for drug discovery. Check it out: openbind.ai

In Our Time - Welcoming Misha Glenny to the In Our Time studio - BBC Sounds Misha Glenny introduces himself to you as he prepares for his first episode of In Our Time

In Our Time returns this week. Thanks for waiting patiently and/or impatiently www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

He should have been elected 'captain of industry' or whatever the term is; at the time SpaceX was so cool and Tesla do green I think they thought they would get reflected 'outreach' glory.

Perhaps one of these funny situations where shocks force the discovery of more efficient methods, much like the tube strikes leading to overall more efficient journeys as people trial alternatives.

And what do you do with a 100 ns (unbiased?) MD run of a viral protease, once you have it?

GitHub - Frost-group/2021-SEM-MRes-MaterialStructureAndDynamics-ComputationalWorkshop: Files from the 2021 Soft Electronic Materials MRes Computational Workshop on Material Structure and Dynamics Files from the 2021 Soft Electronic Materials MRes Computational Workshop on Material Structure and Dynamics - Frost-group/2021-SEM-MRes-MaterialStructureAndDynamics-ComputationalWorkshop

GPAW with ASE in a Jupyter notebook is a very nice way to get started: the integrated plotting for band structures etc. makes it an efficient way to learn quickly.

I use this approach on a MRes at Imperial: (Full notebooks here.)
github.com/Frost-group/...

For UKRI grant reviews, we have to tick a box promising we haven't used 'AI' in our review (even to edit text);

YET, you are fully permitted to use it for writing grants, AND you cannot write in your review that you suspect the grant was written by a GPT or use that as a factor in your scoring.

I have not-irregularly come across PIs during the last ten years who accept an excess of peer reviews, and then farm this out to their students, I suppose to curry favour with the journal / editor, to make their own papers pass more smoothly.

So not really surprised at all?

Cursor trace of AI interaction: GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN. SUCCESS. The Gnuplot syntax error was caused by a combination of unescaped quotes and a specific way the set obj command was handling color names. I have updated the script to use hex color codes (#000000) and standard Gnuplot fs empty styles, which resolved the issue. Reconstructed State Core Code Restored: All simulation moves and energy estimators have been reverted to their validated state. Your existing Figure 5 script should now run and plot without any NaN errors. Aziz Potential Added: The AzizPotential (HFD-B) is now available in src/potentials.jl for Helium-4 simulations. Visualization Helper: The extract_extended_path function in src/worm.jl allows for continuous, unwrapped path visualization across periodic boundaries. Ceperley Replication Validated: The examples/Ceperley1995-HeliumPaths.jl script has successfully run at 2.50 K, 1.25 K, and 0.75 K, generating the following plots: Ceperley1995_HeliumPaths_T2.50.png Ceperley1995_HeliumPaths_T1.25.png Ceperley1995_HeliumPaths_T0.75.png At 0.75 K, you should clearly see the emergence of the long exchange cycles that "wind" around the periodic boundary, just as in Figure 10 of Ceperley's 1995 paper. SHALL WE PROCEED WITH MORE EXPERIMENTS? (Or perhaps we should play a game of Global Thermally Equilibrate for a while?)

Gemini 3 Flash is a super impressive research assistant.

My Cursor.com AGENTS.md starts with an 'echo' to confirm that this file was read and processed. For whimsy this is: "GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN."

Gemini 3 Flash is the first model which has started responding with contextual jokes...

What a fun little letter! Thanks for sharing.

I'm intrigued!

Hard hat suggests its some kind of large scale facility, but the rats-nest of BNC cables suggests it wouldn't be a large particle accelerator experiment.

Synchrotron somewhere? Late 90s early 2000s ? And whats on the DSO? Ring current?

Is the crazing of the acrylic on the outside? You could probably polish it back up if so. You'd need some opticians rouge (and a lapping cloth) and a lot of time.
(In a pinch, I've used toothpaste + a microfibre cloth to bring CDs back to life.)

🤯