Is Google Gemini 3 the best?

 There wasn't a post yet on this somehow, but Google's latest AI is reportedly quite a bit ahead of others in performance:

https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/google-gemini-3-just-killed-every

AI slop at the labs.

I find AI slop on the internet a lot and in some submitted papers. This year I am seeing this slop for the first time the lab. It is mainly from lab managers. It is beyond obvious they are using is it. Suddenly you had managers who could barley write suddenly put out these long winded posts with fancy words that sound nothing like the manager in terms of how they to speak or write. You also see lots of weird complements that seem out of place in the writing and the topic is off or it seems like the comments on the subject matter are using weird terms. If you email some of them you get back a response in minutes that are rather long but seems to repeat what you said but adds nothing. Also if you talk to them in person about something said in the email they often do not recall, or seem confused, indicating they are not even reading the AI slop that was generated for them.

On the technical side I have noticed. (1) People who I would say are rather poor scientists are now saying AI can write a paper for them. I find that a bit odd. (2) I have noticed more papers that are clearly written by AI. They are grammatically correct, and the data is correct but the topic is just bizarre, in the sense that no real human would want ask or study this problem. It always seems like bad high school science but with high quality writing. In the past I would reject papers that are not at the level of the jounral, are interesting but the data is not good enough, have a clear error, or are badly organized. For the first am now rejecting papers, simply because they add nothing even remotely interesting or of value to the field. In some lower level journals the work only needs to be correct and readable to be accepted and these AI papers meet that criteria so I guess some of it gets published.

It seems like AI is lowering the quality of lot of things as opposed to improving.
I suspect that what you are going find is that places like Harvard or Caltech are going become even more elite simply by using less AI. I have to ask what is AI going to to do the quality of the work done at the NNSA lans and the staff. I think a real danger is it will just end up lowering the standards and quality. I have already seen this with the NNSA manager emails, where the managers seem to not even know what the email said.

NYT hit piece on NNSA and Labs

 NYT hit piece on NNSA and Labs

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/science/brandon-williams-nuclear-weapons-nnsa.html

(Apparently it is now a sign of incompetence and desperation to promote the idea of keeping nuclear secrets protected. Can somebody explain this to me?)

U.S. Nuclear Arms Chief Warns Against Leaks of Secret Information

The email sent to atom bomb officials by Brandon Williams highlights the managerial challenge faced by the former one-term congressman.

Brandon M. Williams was just weeks into his job of supervising the nation’s arsenal of thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads when President Trump put him at the center of a storm over whether the United States should change its posture on nuclear weapons testing.

Now, Mr. Williams, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, has ordered his subordinates to step up their vigilance against leaks of classified information, signaling a need to preserve the secrets that empower the world’s deadliest weapons.

“This is not a suggestion,” he wrote on Saturday in a memo emailed to the heads of the nation’s nuclear weapons labs and their associated physical plants. “It is an order. Our national security permits no alternative.” The subject line of the note read: “URGENT: Upholding Our Oath.”

The message seemed unusual for its harsh tone and wide distribution.
...
Unlike many of his predecessors, Mr. Williams has no deep technical roots or experience in running the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. The former Navy officer and one-term congressman from upstate New York was described in a lengthy 2022 Syracuse.com profile as a multimillionaire who starts each morning by reading a section of the Bible.

In taking the N.N.S.A. job, Mr. Williams inherited what some federal and private experts consider an aging world of incompatible parts that can verge on ungovernability. The agency has a budget this year of roughly $25 billion, and its facilities employ some 65,500 people at sites from coast to coast.

“Look at how many contractors they have,” said Henry D. Sokolski, formerly a nuclear policy official in the Defense Department. He added, “You have to accept that your ability to control information, and how the money is spent, takes a hit when you contract out.”
...
Last month, President Trump made a surprise announcement that the United States would resume explosive testing, throwing the nuclear complex into disputes over his proposed agenda. Among the objections were those by officials at the N.N.S.A., according to CNN.

Mr. Williams has made no public comments on the swirling controversy, and his letter seems to be directed primarily at the institutional failings and missteps of the giant weapons complex he now oversees rather than on media leaks.

Among the letter’s recipients was the head of a sprawling plant in Kansas City that makes the mechanical guts of America’s nuclear warheads and is bigger than the Pentagon. An investigation concluded this summer found that secret information on the design and production of nuclear arms was compromised in three separate incidents at the site. No criminal charges were filed
...
Another recipient of the Williams letter was Thom Mason, the director of Los Alamos, the lab where the atomic bomb was born and where weapons are now designed. He has served in that role since November 2018. Last year, the organization was cited for a security breach.

The violation was characterized as recurring incidents in 2023 and 2024 that involved the introduction of unauthorized items into secure areas. They included cellphones, earbuds with microphones and coffee makers equipped with Bluetooth for remote operation.

trump’s new radiation exposure limits could be ‘catastrophic’ for women and girls

 This is an interesting story regarding a proposal to raise radiation exposure limits in particular, for the general public in the United States,

https://thebulletin.org/2025/11/trumps-new-radiation-exposure-limits-could-be-catastrophic-for-women-and-girls/

This isn't innovation!

It is like a child playing with an unfamiliar toy. Now, does he understand he has a responsiblity to future generations to stick with renewables?

Trump Energy department drops renewables, promotes fusion in office reshuffle

 https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/21/trump-energy-department-drops-renewables-promotes-fusion-in-office-reshuffle/

CA Cost of Living

Are Livermore Lab employee raises and retiree colas, keeping up with the CA cost of living? If not, is this impacting recruitment and retention?

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/639ba3621a72923685807b82/6914c26e40d0c8ed334f2bb5_TF_Report_CostOfLiving2025.pdf

DOE opposed to nuclear testing

 According to CNN, top energy and nuclear officials in the trump administration are planning to meet with the White House and National Security Council in the coming days to dissuade President Donald Trump from resuming testing of the nation’s nuclear weapons

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/14/politics/nnsa-nuclear-testing-white-house-meeting-exclusive

NASA's moon program

 This critique of NASA's moon program was posted recently, presenting evidence that the program is in some ways, an expensive failure.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/

Not enough talented people in America?

 

https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/what-the-fck-is-this-trump-supporters-rip-president-for-saying-there-arent-enough-talented-people-in-america/

Trump is now in some in some other hot water bout bringing foreign talent.
President Donald Trump received backlash from his own supporters on Tuesday after he suggested in a disastrous Fox News interview that there were not enough talented Americans.

"After Fox News host Laura Ingraham criticized H-1B visas during an Ingraham Angle interview with Trump, the president replied, “Well, I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent.”“We have plenty of talented people here,” shot back Ingraham, to which Trump insisted, “No, you don’t.”

Trump of course want to kick out migrants claiming they take American jobs, which is base loves but now he is saying we need to bring in foreign talent since we do no have enough talented people in the US. I get that there is a difference but it is hard to get around some of the contradictions.

That being said in the US science and tech have a huge number of foreign workers, sure we have some very talented US citizens but if you look at some these tech firms and graduate schools it is well more than 50% foreign born so cutting it is off is going to be problem. Not sure how MAGA figures this out.

What?

Chris Wright, DOE secretary,  claims to have the evidence to prove that climate change isn’t dangerous.  

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2025/chris-wright-doe-climate-change-report/

More on Chinese AI

 This is more information on the latest Chinese AI breakthroughs:

https://siliconangle.com/2025/11/07/moonshot-launches-open-source-kimi-k2-thinking-ai-trillion-parameters-reasoning-capabilities/

https://youtu.be/s_YfqQ_KHYA?si=Q4uqGKeK25GvQW1y

https://youtube.com/shorts/hYuATUunpIU?si=a7R8V0427mnAVVmg

Nvidia CEO predicts China will win AI race

 Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says Washington has lost its edge in artificial intelligence and warns that China will win the AI race. 

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/china-is-going-to-win-the-ai-race-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-decries-the-price-of-electricity-in-the-us-contrasts-it-with-chinas-subsidized-pricing

Testing. testing...

 https://bbc.com/news/articles/cpd26yxxx3lo?mc_cid=0aa7388267&mc_eid=7fcce66b91

trump's planned tests are 'not nuclear explosions', US energy secretary says

Concerned about AI-induced layoffs

 Are material HR layoffs, HR

Voluntary Separation Programs (VSP), or HR hiring freezes, expected at LLNL as a result of AI expansion?

Amazon layoffs loom: 15% of HR team expected to be cut as AI push accelerates

https://mynorthwest.com/local/amazon-layoffs-hr-ai/4143613

The ills of bureaucracy

 This is an interesting video, a lecture on the ills of bureaucracy. Evidently there is a valid critique that too much bureaucracy is problematic, and an associated viewpoint that many organizations have too much of it.

https://youtu.be/hk_yhi3-prw?si=cWDuQNkrF3lDCw3F