Fortran is alive and well in science and engineering. The more modern standards are much nicer to work with, but largely backwards compatible with stuff written 50 years ago.
More seriously, spin polarized D-T fusion is known to have an enhanced reaction cross section, so there are labs out there researching how to implement it more reliably.
Thanks, fastneutron! I might give you the code if you send me an email and you explain your intentions. No problem. For now, it is not full blown open source because I don't want the added headache of managing that (double checking security & quality... I have no time for this is a sideproject).
Another problem is the propensity for Congress to want to do "immigration reform" as a giant omnibus action. The discourse inevitably gets bogged down in mudslinging over the southern border, and any useful discussion over topics like this gets lost in the noise.
We use paper ballots in my jurisdiction (NY) and they’re counted electronically with a scanner. This gives a real time tally, but preserves a paper trail that can be audited.
This Optical Scanning system is a disaster in tight races. I would know. I was a volunteer in the Tiffany Caban queens election back in 2019 and I saw first hand how in a close race this system allows the more politically connected parties to push outsiders out by disregarding ballots that may have had any possible ambiguity: For example, there was a mustard stain on a ballot and the scanner tossed it out as invalid, it was only discovered after a lawsuit was filed and a manual count was done. In the end there were enough ambiguous ballots where they could not reach the voter that it swung the election to Caban's opponent.
Instead if you had DRE with Paper Trail generated by the machine like NJ has switched to, then you could have a clean concise re-count with no ambiguity.
I’ve been building a RAG mini app with txtai these past few weeks and it’s been pretty smooth. I’m between this and llamaindex as the backend for a larger app I want to build for a small-to-midsize customer.
With the (potentially) obvious bias towards your own framework, are there situations in which you would not recommend it for a particular application?
I recently wrote an article (https://medium.com/neuml/vector-search-rag-landscape-a-revie...) comparing txtai with other popular frameworks. I was expecting to find some really interesting and innovative things in the others. But from my perspective I was underwhelmed.
I'm a big fan of simplicity and none of them are following that strategy. Agentic workflows seem like a big fancy term but I don't see the value currently. Things are hard enough as it is.
If your team is already using another framework, I'm sure anything can work. Some of the other projects are VC-backed with larger teams. In some cases, that may be important.
With all the hype around AI, deeptech, etc., I’m wondering if there’s a market for R&D consulting as a form of technical due diligence. I see money being thrown at some of the most hare-brained nonsense that could have been avoided with a bit of critical analysis. I would think sophisticated investors and customers would find this kind of service useful, but maybe I’m missing something.
Does anyone have experience with this kind of work?
There is a market for technical due diligence consulting, but the work is typically done by friends of investors; it's a difficult and tiny market to get into.
While most of LANL's CPU cycles are likely being spent on that, the code mentioned in the article (PARTISN) is used pretty routinely in nuclear reactor and medical shielding calculations. You can even get a copy of the source code from RSICC if you were so inclined.
