https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3880
I like his update - a message to Hacker News commenters:
"On the Hacker News thread, some commenters are lamenting that such a brilliant mind as Ewin’s would spend its time figuring out how to entice consumers to buy even more products that they don’t need. I confess that that’s an angle that hadn’t even occurred to me: I simply thought that it was a beautiful question whether you actually need a quantum computer to sample the rows of a partially-specified low-rank matrix in polylogarithmic time, and if the application to recommendation systems helped to motivate that question, then so much the better. Now, though, I feel compelled to point out that, in addition to the potentially lucrative application to Amazon and Netflix, research on low-rank matrix sampling algorithms might someday find many other, more economically worthless applications as well."