There was one day the bus was late so I drove in with a grad student who did density functional theory calculations of MOFs and asked him "How do you make a MOF?" and he said "Beats me, I'm a theorist" so I figured that I wanted a quick answer to that one myself and it turned out to be "mix up the ingredients and bake them in the oven"

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gsf_emergency_6 2 days ago | parent [-]

It looks like that the "theorist" might be replaced sooner, given the narratives that are being driven now.. (after the entry level coder)

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PaulHoule 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'll say grad students today often seem a bit sheepish and inarticulate. They're facing a very competitive market so I think it behooves the theorists to be able to talk about experiment a bit and vice versa. On the other hand they have a big hill to climb to just be successful with DFT.

One of my few regrets in grad school is that I didn't take a course in DFT, not like I was really going to use it, but DFT is an example of the kind of very complex calculation which takes a lot of care to apply. I got a little of this art from Sethna's class in renormalization groups and such but it was really

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Study-Stellar-Structure-...

by Chandrasekhar that taught me how to organize the kind of complex calculations that might involve numeric integration differential equations, using a computer, etc -- extracurricular for a cond-mat PhD but really a lot of fun.

I just made a breakthrough in selfobject technology (enough of a reformulation that I can take back the ideas that my evil twin published in such a way that I couldn't ever publish them under my name) and managed to get the evil out of my evil twin and I've been practicing "radiance drills" that get me into a state where I can really draw out 30y+ people but how it works with "kids these days" is an open question because since the pandemic grad students mostly seem like damp squibs -- I gotta give it a try.

I do regret I didn't figure this out much sooner (if I had I wouldn't have some things on my chart I do now) but right now I having so much fun I think other people should be jealous.

	▲	gsf_emergency_6 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Have you asked LLMs about the VASP codebase? With special reference to Tomas Arias' flow-chart(s) [0] Grad students these days will need to figure out their Altman-informed version of radiance (maybe easier if they spend more time on some dank corners of HN). I'm jealous you found Chandrasekhar :) going to look at this to train understanding of human and/or AI pedagogy. I too have my favorite Dover books (Lanczos, Yaglom, the "Green books") but I can't say I got any general techne out of them (yet) https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Analysis-Cornelius-Lanczos/dp... These are the underappreciated infra born of the preAI cold-war times (doubt postsoviet mathematicians have an equivalent. Especially not "Bourbaki" =P)! Worth recommending to gen-A/Z so they have an inkling what semifunctional social infra looked like before verflow/stackexchange [0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/juarezlfdasilva_flowchart-of-... Or page 95 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/8282/50420077...