iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 27/09/2026

I gathered an atlas of literature on Andreev states and the corresponding collaboration network. For now it lives here antonakhmerov.org/misc/andreev... Check it out for the citation hedgehog and to find your friends.

Interactive citation-network visualization of 8,067 papers. Papers are positioned by publication year and annual citation count on a logarithmic vertical scale; with publication year on the horizontal axis. Point color indicates physics subfield and point size reflects citation count. Faint lines connect citing and cited papers, producing a dense fan-like “hedgehog” pattern.

Collaboration network centered on Anton Akhmerov. Nodes represent researchers, with larger nodes indicating stronger collaboration links; lines connect coauthors. Prominent collaborators include Michael Wimmer, C. W. J. Beenakker, Attila Geresdi, Bernard van Heck, Valla Fatemi, Bas Nijholt, David J. van Woerkom, Chun-Xiao Liu, Ion Cosma Fulga, and others.

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Aaron Roth @aaroth.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

AI tools are very useful for mathematical research. But at present, producing good work requires a labor intensive step that I have been calling "deslopping" - making the thing readable. Please do not skip this step; even if the theorem is great an unreadable paper is worthless.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 20/09/2026

The best strategy as this is coming is, of course, to spam everyone in and out of your your network. Thankfully with AI it's really easy to do in a way that will be progressively harder to detect. /s

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 18/09/2026

I updated the Fermi surface viewer of elemental metals at solidstate.quantumtinkerer.tudelft.nl/fermi_surfac... by using the Materials Project database and a custom 3D viewer.

Interactive “Fermi surfaces” visualization for technetium (Tc, atomic number 43), showing five color-coded electronic bands as a sixfold-symmetric 3D Fermi-surface plot. The interface includes element selection, band toggles, rotation/zoom controls, and an “About the data” section.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 14/09/2026

Field-defining paper: Blonder, Tinkham, Klapwijk.

A citation network showing a paper cited by a majority of papers in the field.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 13/09/2026

The statement on AI in mathematics terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a... is fair. One addition. In my community (condensed matter, not math) the misalignment of community itself is already comparably severe: there is little incentive to focus on clarity and coherence rather than paper production.

terrytao.wordpress.com

A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics

I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 03/09/2026

Here is monthly publication rate of a colleague. Recent papers (after the dashed line) acknowledge Claude usage, and the publication rate goes 3x. The paper quality stays roughly constant.

Line chart titled “Submission acceleration.” Cumulative arXiv submissions from January 2024 to September 2026 rise roughly linearly at first, corresponding to about 15 submissions per year. Around June 2026, the slope increases sharply; a fitted rate changes to about 51 submissions per year. The underlying data are shown as monthly cumulative totals, with a dashed piecewise-linear rate fit and a vertical marker at approximately June 2026.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 29/08/2026

If it's really "lean", why does it take 7837 lines of code and counting?

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 16/08/2026

Pretty much this. If you can also not caring about getting "enough credit" is also helpful.

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Reposted by Anton Akhmerov

Martin Donath @squidfunk.com · 12/08/2026

I've changed my mind on AI-generated bug reports. They got genuinely better and helpful. Open Source maintainers: do you share prompts with your users to help an LLM gather data and debug before filing an issue?

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 11/08/2026

Both Anthropic and OpenAI now oppose the Leiden declaration on AI in mathematics, signing mathematical results “GPT” or “Claude”. Why not sign them “NVIDIA”? Or “silicon”, for its abundance and band gap. I agree with the mockery of authorship; I just don’t want a corporate logo on it.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 04/08/2026

I think it's straightforward to value the result according to its impact and the author contribution according to the effort invested. The latter is neither zero nor outstanding. And the most expensive ChatGPT is same scale as Mathematica license.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 31/07/2026

Anthropic: other labs and open models can't be trusted, we're the ones that care about AI safety. Also Anthropic: forgets to restrict internet access in a model security evaluation.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 30/07/2026

I think the distinction is useful to keep though, and therefore I propose to introduce "tradcoding". Look, I tradcoded an app!

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Victor V. Albert @vva.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

We're at a strange, specific moment. Takes range from "publications are dead by fall" to "I tried LLMs in November, they were bad." If you have an LLM-assisted paper, take full responsibility as usual. Do everything: arXiv, GitHub, website, and integrate with databases if appropriate.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 30/06/2026

Now I made a physics demo of x-ray crystallography. The reciprocal space and how X-ray works took me a while to understand, and I think this captures the idea well. antonakhmerov.org/misc/xray.html

Interactive X-ray scattering simulation with two main areas. The left side is a crystal editor showing unit-cell projections and a 3D crystal view. The right side shows reciprocal lattice points, a translucent Ewald sphere, an X-ray beam, a detector screen, and amber detector spots where scattering rays intersect the screen. Controls let the user edit atoms and lattice vectors, rotate the crystal, switch powder and top-view modes, and adjust the wavelength.

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Ran Blekhman @blekhman.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

open.substack.com

My Peer Review of The 1%

I wanted to like QED's new 1% ranking. I don't.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 26/06/2026

I think when ppl hear LLMs are good at code some think “whew! I always knew they should be restricted to narrowly technical uses (maybe protein folding?)“ but the thing that makes agentic application different imo is not the code—but the way it leverages context & augments human memory and patience

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 23/06/2026

Another interactive demo showing the propagation of a wave packet in a tight-binding dispersion relation: antonakhmerov.org/misc/wave_pa...

False-color plot of a localized tight-binding wave packet driven by an electric field E. The packet follows a curved trajectory, illustrating Bloch oscillations, with a wavy path marking its motion through the lattice.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 12/06/2026

Pretty sure this is what needs to happen in NL. Open weight models aren't competitive at high end of complexity, but they should be quite enough for education.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 02/06/2026

I made an interactive explainer of carbon nanotube dispersion relations for my class today: antonakhmerov.org/files/carbon..., and I find it amazing and very useful. Naturally it is LLM-made. Making the equivalent by hand requires expertise and time investment only available to extremely few.

Interactive educational diagram showing how a carbon nanotube is formed from graphene. The screen displays a graphene sheet with a highlighted wrapping vector, a 3D nanotube inset, allowed quantized k-vector cuts through repeated graphene Brillouin zones, and the resulting one-dimensional folded band structure.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 24/05/2026

Some time in the future a visible and published theoretical condensed matter paper will be discovered to be wrong due to being an AI hallucination. I give it about a year.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 12/05/2026

No. Because the risks to whistleblowers aren't due to technological limitations.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 10/05/2026

Curiously, working with other people has the same failure modes.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 17/03/2026

Found in the access.log Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Thinkbot/0.5.8; +In_the_test_phase,_if_the_Thinkbot_brings_you_trouble,_please_block_its_IP_address._Thank_you.) Very polite bots these days. Some of them anyway.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 12/03/2026

Made a simple app for quick quizzes that doesn't have annoying registration or limits and supports latex. ownquiz.quantumtinkerer.tudelft.nl

A screenshot of a quiz app with a question about Bose-Einstein distribution, the presenter panel, and join instructions.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 17/02/2026

Agents (claude/codex/...) generate a *TON* of code. Reviewing it is a pain, so I made a tool to help. It generates a local preview of changes with agent explanations. You make review comments and copypaste them in one batch to the agent. Here it is: github.com/akhmerov/pre...

A git forge style diff view with a couple of comments from the agent, one of them reading "Warning: Reviewer focus: Decide whether this temporary regression is acceptable for release gating or if shrink support should be restored before merge. Risk: Workloads that depended on reduced bandwidth from shrinked bands may see performance/memory regressions." A comment window is open with text "No, this will break existing code, let's actually fix it." This window has buttons "save", "copy prompt", and "cancel".

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 12/02/2026

I went with "Generated-by: <model>" Seems OK.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 09/02/2026

What git trailer to use to indicate AI-generated commits? Github uses "Co-authored-by", but I don't find this option appealing.

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Reposted by Anton Akhmerov

Dulwich Quantum Computing @dulwichquantum.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Every paper should be announced like this! 🤘

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 06/02/2026

Here's a power metal summary of scipost.org/10.21468/Sci.... It is fairly comprehensive and accurate. The text is generated by codex, the graphic by chatGPT, and the music by ACE-step. The research is of me and my coauthors :) I am honestly impressed by ACE-step.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 02/02/2026

My cursed fact of the day: Boltzmann distribution is the harmonic mean of Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein distributions.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 30/01/2026

The white flag of surrendering.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 28/01/2026

OpenAI introduced a collaboration tool for science openai.com/index/introd.... It's probably decent, but I find it funny that "Science" apparently means "collaborative LaTeX editing"—that's the front and center of the new service.

openai.com

Introducing Prism

Accelerating science writing and collaboration with AI.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 27/01/2026

Didn't try reproducibility yet, but chatGPT 5.2 thinking can reasonably identify low quality papers in my field these days.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 25/01/2026

The correct solution is of course to have the mayors write "grant applications" that would give them tokens allowing to hire polecats. And then once the "funding agency" approves the grant, they'd need to write a report that is used in further evaluations. Simple.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 19/01/2026

I expect that in 5 years, the publication model of theoretical condensed matter physics papers will either collapse or dramatically transform. This is because the effort of LLM-ing a paper that passes reasonable standards of many journals will become comparable to the effort of human review.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 07/01/2026

My personal no-go property of a platform is the login wall: I don't want to demand a platform account from my potential readers. Twitter had many last drops for different people, but the login wall a couple of years ago was mine. I've been avoiding LinkedIn for the same reason.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 05/01/2026

Okie dokie, in arxiv.org/abs/2601.00784 we invented a format for the AI disclosure statement.

A screenshot from a preprint that reads:

AI disclosure

We have used GitHub Copilot to provide typing completions and provide prompt-based
code generation and modification. We used ChatGPT to generate critical evaluations
of text and language quality. We used GitHub Copilot and OpenAI Codex to produce
rule-based text rewriting for consistent style. These tools were used with a range of models:
GPT-4 – GPT-5.2 from OpenAI and Claude Sonnet and Opus versions 4 and 4.5 from
Anthropic (only in Copilot). All AI contributions were reviewed and edited by the authors,
who take full responsibility for the content of the publication.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 19/12/2025

Educators wonder how to teach being critical about LLM outputs. What if we take a mid-range model, raise the temperature until its success rate on some standard task (think computing an integral) is 50–70% and let students solve the task with this LLM. Teaches validating LLM in real conditions.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 02/12/2025

Psst kids, want to buy some research projects?

Spam email screenshot with text

Hi

I came across Quantum Tinkerer online and wanted to reach out because we're working with other research groups that are offering research projects.‍

I’m currently working with a few research groups on campaigns that are getting their sales teams meetings with warm leads every month. We’re targeting people who need research projects using personalized email sequences.

If I could help you connect with potential clients like this, would that be helpful to you?‍

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 28/11/2025

A lesson I learned from software development: changes don't need to be perfect, and incremental improvements are often good enough. For example, TU Delft changed its motto from "Challenge the future" (!?) to "Impact for a better society". Perfect? Maybe not. Better? Very much so! :)

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 27/11/2025

What are the best examples of AI usage disclosure forms in coding and academia? I've seen a handful of "tell me everything", which seems fairly impractical.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 25/11/2025

I am by now convinced that disclosing genAI usage should become a norm in academia and education. I was initially skeptical—it's just another tool—but I am now convinced that the extra transparency is helpful. After all, I am all for sharing code, what's different here?

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 13/11/2025

Things language models apparently can't do yet: optimize a website. This is chatgpt.com eating half a gigabyte of RAM and 100% CPU to respond to a text-only query.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 13/11/2025

I want students to collectively decide on a formula sheet for an exam. How to organize collaborative work of 100-200 people on one document of fixed size?

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