Yesterday, one of my readers (thanks, Mr. Carbuncle) showed me a URL for the OSTI entry for the report that I mentioned in my blog post about my decision to retire. You may recall that at the time, they had declared that this report would be export-controlled, thus removing it from the watchful eye of OSTI.

Here it is https://www.osti.gov/biblio/3362881

It was taken down, no idea why (the mind whirls). I put a copy on the blog, the next post: https://bill-rider.com/2026/07/01/report-in-question/

I opined that this was a corrupt decision, not supported by any technical facts, but rather by our incredibly poorly written export-control law. This was part of the chain of events that led to my retirement. I can honestly say this particular decision wasn’t the one that drove me out, but rather the entire corrupt fiasco around management’s review of the report.

That said, the powers that be apparently arrived at the right decision in the end. I can only wonder whether my airing of this dirty laundry forced their hand. I’m sure that even if it did, it’s not something they would ever own up to. As we know, people who are corrupt and dishonest will simply fabricate whatever they want to be true rather than tell us the actual facts. It’s their basic nature.

Nonetheless, the report is there for you to look at and see what the big deal is. I was an internal reviewer. The report is well executed, and the results are solid and technically correct.

That didn’t mean I had no criticisms. I had many, and most of them remain completely unaddressed. This is yet another fault of the management where I worked. Had they been genuinely interested in quality, correctness, and technical excellence, they would have requested that my review be given more weight. Nonetheless, here we are. The fact that it was ever an issue at all amply demonstrates their lack of commitment to technical excellence.

Let me elaborate briefly on the things you won’t find in the document:

  • There is the mere fact of an integrated conservation of energy as a metric. No connection is made to the flux-conservative version of that law, which carries far more mathematical-method-numerical impact.
  • The carbuncle phenomenon can be witnessed clearly in the results, particularly for the Sedov blast wave. If you are unfamiliar with the carbuncle, this is a slightly odd place to see it: a spherically symmetric calculation.

There is very little analysis of the carbuncle phenomenon in the report, and certainly nothing deep, but there are lots and lots of results. This amply demonstrates how poorly led my organization was upon my departure. A major pathology exists in the code used for important applications, and nobody cares why the phenomenon occurs or how to fix it. They cared fuck all about quality. They only care about funding (money). If you’re curious about what led to my decision to retire, and want to see the level of pure incompetence and absent leadership, the report is there to be seen.


So now, back to thinking about thinking in the context of AI, and figuring out what I want to say about it.