Scott Kaiser

Theoretical chemist @VothGroup, middle- and long-distance runner. Formerly @haverfordedu

[Scott Kaiser @scottikaiser]

@Orbital_Ind Excellent work--particularly like the electrostatic treatment here for its simplicity. It's becoming clear that MLIP development is rapidly becoming a software/hardware co-design problem. I'm curious to see numbers for system size scaling and whether parallelization is possible.

[Scott Kaiser @scottikaiser]

@SylvainGariel I expect this is going to be a common theme as we scale up methods like hybrid DFT that were previously only useable on small clusters. The condensed phase is a different beast, and energy and force error alone are not sufficient to guarantee a good model there!

[Scott Kaiser @scottikaiser]

@SylvainGariel The trouble is even many RSH’s fail badly on things like water structure/dynamics! I get better results with some NNPs that include both lesser DFT and RSH DFT, as the errors cancel. Medium-term solution is probably some kind of careful fine tuning or post hoc correction.

[Scott Kaiser @scottikaiser]

@Tyler_A_Harper Proposing to ban technology entirely from campus is unserious. Remove the incentives to cheat at all by valuing the writing and thinking process itself and the problem largely disappears. Your own piece on Haverford from last year makes this clear.

[Scott Kaiser @scottikaiser]

@orionarcher_ @radicalai Ah, OK. So most of the speedup w/ contemporary models is coming from better GPU memory utilization with an emphasis on throughput for large numbers of small systems?

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

My big-picture explanation for Trump’s crushing victory is this:

This wasn’t the 1st post-pandemic election. It was the 2nd COVID presidential election.

You can’t explain Trump’s across-the-board romp without seeing the ways—obvious and subtle—that the pandemic haunted 2024

[Jack @tracewoodgrains]

It may be too early for an election retrospective. It's still election night, and technically things haven't been called. It's a good time to speak candidly, though:

There is not a single moment this election that I felt heard or represented by Kamala Harris. Not one.

But—people, and especially leftists, will say—you're a centrist! she ran to the center, did she not? spoke of unity, focused on fundamentals, stayed disciplined? And I confess: she did. But let's consider the nature of that "running to the center": well-oiled, precisely tuned gears of the Machine, turning and calculating that to win the vote, they needed to present as Normal.

Not that they were ever wrong. Not that any of their priorities were mistaken, that they had ever seriously overstepped, that they needed any serious re-examination. Just that they needed to slow-walk things, to be calm, to rely on running against Trump and repeating platitudes to waltz into the presidency.

"What will you do differently from Joe Biden?" A bold answer from Kamala: I'm not him, and I'm not Trump. Great. "What are we to make of your positions during the 2020 primary?" Well, it's not 2019 anymore, is it? "Did you ever, even once, go too far?" A laugh and a charming slice-of-life quip.

The Democrats tried to run an election on vibes alone. Kamala is brat. Kamala is normal. Kamala is all things to all people. Kamala is with the good guys and against the bad guys, with the good things and against the bad things, and shouldn't that be enough?

Look, I've been adamantly against Trump from the day he entered the national scene. I have never wavered on that. But I spend my time and my energy writing, shouting, begging someone to listen that people do not trust the Machine, and they do not trust it for good reason. Young, educated professionals are far to the left of the average American, and they are the ones in control of every institution. Institutions systematically represent their views, treating them as natural and everyone else as aberrant.

I'm on the fringes of that group, right-wing by young, educated professional standards, dead center by the standards of the country. And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all.

Kamala Harris never represented me. The Democrats never signaled to me that they heard and understood my voice and voices like mine, only that they wanted to pull the right levers and press the right buttons and twist the right knobs to convince that mystical creature, the Centrist, that they were on their side.

I don't know what will happen under what looks to be four more years of Trump. I don't think it will be as dire as the worst predictions, and hope it won't be, but I remain now as ever wholly convinced that he is temperamentally unfit to be President and the country is a more volatile and uncertain place with him in charge.

But what I hope is this: the Democrats don't take this moment to lament to themselves how everyone fell victim to misinformation and imagined grievances, that they were fine and good and the people were the problem, that their problem is they were simply not pure-Left enough. Now is the time for recognition that they fundamentally, wholly failed to understand and reach the frustrated center. They have four years to get serious about doing so.

[Scott Kaiser @scottikaiser]

@_alex_joshua One hell of a euphemism...

[Dan Pfeiffer @danpfeiffer]

Was there a law passed that required all debate questions about budget issues to asked with a Republican frame?

[Scott Kaiser @scottikaiser]

@_alex_joshua I remember him! Thats absolutely unbelievable...

[Yascha Mounk @Yascha_Mounk]

Democrats have an absurd, denunciatory idea of what Republicans believe—and vice versa.

Worse, the institutions that are meant to remedy misperceptions, from universities to news outlets, may actually make them worse.

Me @TheAtlantic

[Short Thread.]

https://t.co/hVlULVdGkZ

[NPR @NPR]

Dumpster fire (noun, US informal): "an utterly calamitous or mismanaged situation or occurrence: disaster." https://t.co/QINRGWk53u

[David Frum @davidfrum]

A parable I wrote after another gun massacre https://t.co/SOG9uG8J12 before laying out the rules you must follow in the American gun debate

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

the only definition of neoliberalism I've read that captures its true essence

[David Frum @davidfrum]

Skip the tweet, go for the comments https://t.co/Q30ivZK4Uz

[Nate Silver @NateSilver538]

If Jones wins by <=1 point, Republicans are going to be wondering if write-ins cost them the election.

If Moore wins by <=1 point, Democrats are going to be wondering if voter suppression cost them the election.

https://t.co/fc5Z7nfnaK