billti

Right. And I run Windows for ARM64 (WoA64) in Parallels on my M3 Mac, and install VS in it (ARM64 version) and runs fine.

Shameless plug: But these types of areas of research (what types of problems can quantum computers solve and when) has been a big focus of our open-source Q# effort lately. You can see our last two blog posts (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/qsharp/) are about the resource estimation features we've recently built for exactly this purpose. You can give them a try pretty easily in VS Code or just in the browser (https://aka.ms/AQ/RE/Docs)

Disclaimer: I work on the Q# project (https://github.com/microsoft/qsharp) in a team under Matthias Troyer (quoted in the article).

Entirely personal option: I do think tempering some of the hype of the past few years/decades and focusing on the areas of highest potential is in general a good thing. Progress hasn't been what some optimists had hoped for, but hardware has been progressing quite quickly & consistently for years now, and I'm confident we'll get there eventually.

He covers this in a couple places in the post. There is no requirement under MIT to redistribute the source for any changes you make or anything you build with it.

If they redistribute the source then yes, but that’s not the concern in the post.

Open your maps app and go into satellite view. North of the main area most of Hong Kong is surprisingly green and unpopulated (until you hit the border with Shenzen).

I spent some time in India years ago and remember being amazed that a country with over a billion people could have so much vast open beautiful countryside. It’s incredible how much population can fit into a few (very) dense areas.

Yeah, we took a bet that writing our compiler, simulator, etc. in Rust and architecting correctly so it could compile to native and WASM would let us run native and in the browser too, and we’re pretty thrilled with how it turned out.

We just shipped 1.0, but this slightly older blog post goes into the architecture a bit more: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/qsharp/introducing-the-azure-...

Likewise. GE dishwasher got a fault after a couple years and spewed water everywhere. Got a Bosch and never had a problem in about 8 years now. It cleans way better too. Simple, reliable, looks and works great.

Engineering manager for the team here. Happy to answer any questions that I can.

There’s a page at https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/experience/quantum-crypt... designed to explore some of the resource needs and concepts on this topic you may find interesting.

Disclaimer: I work on the quantum team at Microsoft.

I think a common error is taking this view in isolation on each bug.

Fact is, if you ship enough 'low probability' bugs in your product, your probabilities still add up to a point where many customers are going to hit several of them.

I've used plenty of products that suffer from 'death by a thousands cuts'. Are the bugs I hit "ship blockers"? No. Do I hit enough of them that the product sucks and I don't want to use it? Absolutely.

You seem to be getting downvoted, but I agree with you to a large extent. He does say a ton of stuff I disagree with, sometimes strongly, but I also know if most other CEOs were as public and unfiltered they'd probably fair even worse in aligning with my positions on many issues.

When I'm thinking where to spend my money, I do appreciate that Tesla (and SpaceX) push the boundaries in high-tech industries, and that much of the R&D and manufacturing spend goes to employees in my home country.

> children can not be reasonable when they are in a tantrum

Are you supposed to grow out of that? I’m 51 and I still notice this about myself at times!

(Only half joking here. It is amazing how hard it can be to snap out of a “sulky mood” after some type of frustration or disappointment, even when you’re aware of it and that it’s doing more harm than good).

I think by now it should be pretty apparent that people are different, and some prefer working from home, some prefer coming to the office, some prefer open spaces and some prefer personal spaces. Most people are somewhere on a spectrum and like a different ratio of each. Posts like these are about as useful as an article on “Why I like gray socks more than blue socks”.

What I would love to see is some data on why so many companies that previously said during Covid “Oh wow, this remote work is great! We’re going to stay like this” are now saying “Sorry, changed our minds, now we want you back in the office”.

Office space isn’t cheap. Requiring employees be local limits your pool of talent. A lot of people like being remote. Companies must have a strong reason, hopefully with some data to back it up, but I’ve not seen any hard evidence for the about face yet. Anyone got any pointers?

This recently released page might be of a lot of interest to this discussion regarding crypto algorithms and the size of the quantum hardware needed. (Disclaimer, I work on the Azure Quantum team that builds this).

https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/experience/quantum-crypt...

It blew my mind when I learned that even if you could hand wire conceptually perfect switches and wires, once your board was over a few inches, the laws of physics (e.g., the speed of light) would mean you still couldn’t beat a modern CPU for clock speed.

It really is insane the level at which current hardware works.

Steve Jobs is practically an example of WHY top CEOs get paid so much. Apple was basically in its death throes when he came back. A few years later they had the iPod. A few years after that the iPhone. When he died in 2011 they were well on their way to being the worlds most valuable publicly listed company.

I do think a lot of CEOs are way overpaid. That said, if a couple hundred million package means the difference between a company folding and firing everyone, or being a multi-billion dollar business with thousands of employees, the math works out.

It credits Rustlings at the end of the page linked to (https://github.com/EmNudge/watlings#credits).

I find the Vim extension for VS Code has macro support that is good enough for most of my use cases (if you’re a fan of Vim key bindings - obviously).

https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/blob/master/ROADMAP.md#repe...

Or even the different scales of your own waste. Whenever I'm worrying about which bin to put my coffee stirrer in, I sometimes think about the shear volume of landfill that got hauled from our house when we did a major renovation. I'm sure 10 lifetimes of coffee stirrers wouldn't come close.

I think worrying about things like single-use shopping bags and compostable straws is great from a "keep pollution out of the environment" perspective, but I doubt they make a huge difference from a landfill usage perspective.

We bought our outdoor furniture from this company in the U.S. (https://lolldesigns.com/pages/sustainability), which states on that page "All Loll outdoor furniture is made with recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE), one of the most commonly used plastics in the U.S. <snip> Loll’s recycled material is sourced primarily from single-use milk jug containers".

It wasn't cheap, but it looks great and has been very durable (had it about 5 years now out in the sun and still looks like new).

(disclaimer: I work on the team developing Q# and its tooling)

That's part of the goal of Q#. It's designed to be a language which allows you to build up from quantum gates, efficiently work with quantum concepts such as 'adjoint' and 'controlled' operations, and build that up into a higher level of abstraction. You can see an old post as to some of the reasoning when it was first developed at <https://devblogs.microsoft.com/qsharp/why-do-we-need-q/>.

Another consideration to some of the points raised here, is that even on today's state-of-the-art hardware you typically only get a couple thousand gates at best before noise overwhelms the system and the qubits 'decohere' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence). So you do often want to develop at a level where you can squeeze every last gate out of whatever program you're writing. (If you intend to run it on a quantum computer and not just simulations).

Being that the post is about quantum simulation, you can see the one our team built in Rust at https://github.com/qir-alliance/qir-runner/blob/main/sparses... . This uses 'sparse' simulation, which means any state with a probability of 0 isn't tracked, which turns out to be quite a few in a lot of algorithms. This allows you to simulate many more qubits than you can with a full state simulator (where you need to track 2^n states for n qubits). It also does some other nifty tricks where you can elide or combine gates before they are performed to get even more perf. We use it in our new Q# stack (https://github.com/microsoft/qsharp) to run program simulations in our CLI or in the browser (such as on our new https://quantum.microsoft.com site), or inside VS Code (desktop or web)).

We are looking to evolve the Q# language and improve the quantum development experience, with a focus given to a 'scalable' quantum future where gate count and noise is less of a limit, and moving development higher up in abstraction - as you outline. So if it is something you have an interest in, we're more than happy to get the input on the qsharp GitHub repo linked to above.

I don't think many people are worried that what we have now is a major risk. The major concern is the implications of the trajectory we are now on.

If you look at what ChatGPT and Midjourney and the like can do now compared to just a couple of years ago, it's pretty incredible. If you extrapolate the next few similar jumps in capability, and assume that won't be 20 years away, then what AI is going to be capable of before even my kids leave college is going to be mind-boggling, and in some possible futures not in a good way.

I remember seeing this talk from Sam Harris nearly 6 years ago and it logically making a lot of sense back then (https://youtu.be/8nt3edWLgIg). The past couple of years have made this all the more prescient. (Worth a watch if you have 15 mins).

I thought China and India were still increasing quite rapidly (I could be wrong). Unless they start going the other way, that 7% will be less than the growth from others, so no closer to 0 globally.

Unless China and India cut emissions drastically it’s a drop in the ocean. There should be tariffs on the biggest emitters to the point where they can’t afford to NOT cut emissions if they want to trade good and services.

Portability, minimal size, and speed are all priorities. Building with Rust allowed us to really focus on all of these for both WebAssembly and OS binaries.

For example, if you go to the playground that we publish on every push to main (https://microsoft.github.io/qsharp/), and open the Developer Tools to see the network traffic, you'll see that our WebAssembly module is just 1.5MB (504kb over the wire) - which includes the not just the language (parser, type system, IR, etc.) but also the runtime interpreter and quantum simulator.

Similarly, for the native tools, on my MacBook (i.e. ARM64) the command line compiler ("./target/release/qsc") is 3.9MB, which is entirely standalone with no dependencies.

We do have many features to add, so I'm sure those will grow a bit, but we are focused on keeping things as small, portable, and fast as a general principal.

Disclaimer: engineering manager for the team building it

Yes, targeting WebAssembly, and the ability to then run in the browser, was a big part of it.

WebAssembly (will) also enable our language service extension to run in VS Code for the Web, as well as VS Code for desktop, with largely the same feature set.

It also means the core logic compiles to very performant native code for most platforms, which we use for the CLI.

It's early days for the project, with lots of work ahead of us, but I'm really proud of this first step. Happy to answer any other questions where I can!

You do recall that when the iPhone came out we already had Blackberry, HTC, Windows Mobile, Nokia already making smart phones with touch screens and apps right?

Sure the experience was terrible, but that's the same play here. Apple generally takes a technology space which is a little early and poorly done by others, and ships a great experience across hardware, software, and ecosystem to capture a market.

It's also the "entry point" price for a HoloLens (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy). Businesses will spend that on an AR/VR device that adds value to their use-cases. It seems pretty clear this is not intended for "mass market consumer adoption" at this point in time.

And I think that's part of the problem. I've done my taxes (in the U.S.) manually for the past couple of years (i.e. filling out a 1040 directly, no TurboTax etc.), and the amount of times I've read through some absurd item that is clearly only in the tax code to get the vote of some special interest is depressing. Like most 'benefits', there would be uproar if you tried to take them away now by the people impacted, but maybe they could be moved out into separate programs.

Seems like getting to a point where ~75% of the population didn't need to file would be doable if there was enough motivation for it. If your only income is on a W-2, and your only mortgage / banking / trading is with U.S. companies like Chase or Morgan Stanley, no reason that couldn't all be done for you.

This looks heavily geared towards graphics. I’m interested in the compute capabilities of WebGPU to build an in-browser simulator (e.g. physics/quantum). Anyone know of any good resources for that? (Samples, best practices, etc.)

I ruled cars out of my last purchase that didn’t have CarPlay. I didn’t realize wireless was available now. Having to hook it up is the one major pain. Wireless CarPlay will definitely be a requirement on the next purchase.