Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

baxtr

With the hype QC these days, I find it hard to separate hype from real progress.

View on HN

Reminds me the state of nuclear fusion.

Just a decade away now.

So just like AI?

Nah, it's a decade away from *now*.

nahhh, definately from *now* though - 100% this time

Now now or Just now?

* I've worked with too many Sth Africans.

For those of us who aren't familiar, what is the difference?

most of them live in a different time zone

The difference is how soon it might occur, except "now" can also mean they never get around to it.

"Right now" is probably the only one that literally means now as the rest of the English-speaking world would assume.

… and like fusion it will be a decade away, a decade away, a decade away, six months away, then we have it.

The “decade away” phenomenon comes from the fact that it’s basically impossible to time estimate innovation.

I went to school in Oxfordshire in the '80s. Some visiting profs from JET joked that fusion was 25 years away then.

Back then things were centered around "can we even do this?" and now it's more of "how do we keep this running more than 5 minutes?".

My impression back then from those profs was that it (fusion) would be inevitable but you do have to think long term, really long term. I'm old enough now (55) to understand that mentality.

I'd put money on something useful fusion related happening within the next 10 years or perhaps 20. I'm not up on the current state of experiments etc but it will happen.

AGI? - lol!

AFAIK superconductors are a major limiting tech. But we are slowly getting better ones, both by discovering more and by learning to mass produce superconducting wire.

With superconductors you can make magnetic bottles.

There’s also some interesting inertial confinement work happening. There the limiter is both confinement and the efficiency of the driver. Look up MagLIF for a hybrid magnetic inertial approach under study.

... and room temperature superconductors! If only we could sort out the feasibility, interdependencies, and priorities, but we just don't know, or well, I just don't know haha.

Fusion is a number of dollars away, not years. It gets almost no funding because it’sa science and engineering experiment that most likely will not lead to economically viable power plants in a market dominated by renewables.

That's progress, if fusion is always only 10 years away now! The running joke used to be that it was always 30 years away.

That's String Theory providing "answers", no?

They should ask Iran to do it, they're only a month away all the time.

The ETH article title is actually fine - "a new trick brings stability."

The hype is in the HN title.

That’s why we have “reading”. Literally the first paragraph. So in this case, pretty easy to separate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com