ProgressReport 25 April 2025

Its short and sweet this week. Habits have all been good. Did my first real trip (to FNAL.. more below) without drinking, it was all good. I am in the teaching end-game; I gave my last in-person lecture and only have two make up lectures left, which I will give over Zoom. Modern Essentialls really is a great class to teach.

Wes had his thesis defense! His talk was much better. I have now seen "v1" and "v3", "v2", which was was given to FNAL for his interview. I just found out that he did not get selected. Steve Told me it was mainly because of the talk; v2 must have been closer to v1 than v3…

I have been working alot on integrating AI. I have started using Cursor – its great, but not clear it will take over from emacs…. I tried and found that I can actually make emacs more like Cursor. I setup chatGPT and copilot in emacs and am currently putting it through the paces. I also learned about Claude Code, a command line agent which is supposed to do a lot of what Cursor does without the annoying (VSCode) UI.

On the 4b side, progress has been slow. We are now "L2 approved" but will wait until the rest of the Run3 team is ready to unblind and give the pre-approval talk. Ive been slowly making progress on the cutflow challenge. I have found some real problems but have not managed to close the loop yet. While at FNAL, I had a good converstion with Marko. He is impressed with what we are doing and likes how we handled the politics of the Run3 4b.

Lot of recent work on HGC. I've spent most of my time preparing the slides together for the DOE workshop this week. This was definitely a productive excercise. The trip was a good chance for me to get a better sense of whats going on in the project and to team-build with Jeremey, Ted, and Zoltan. My talk went well, but there are definitely ways to improve for the next iteration in June.