deepburner

I came to the comments to complain about how unreadable it was, saw that it was the movfuscator guy, went back to check if I somehow made a mistake but no, if anything that writeup is one of the egregious ones I've seen recently. What a shame, I really liked his talks.

I understand vibe coding a website if you only care about putting out the info but this is sloppenheimer levels of garbage. It reeks of stunted, far up its own ass Claude-isms everywhere and none of the prose is remotely readable without wanting to running headbutt a wall. Seriously, "Private Equity" was too long so you decided to write "Ownership Type: PE-owned"? I despise ai writing so much and shame on you.

I'm no ai maximalist, quite the opposite in fact, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the author as a person from a similar trade. However perhaps he is being overly emotional in his response. Purists have been decrying the defilement of the trade for millennia - "but this time it's different!" no. you think the purest form of math is the one you were born into because you didn't know any other way. people were doing math before the abacus and will continue to do so afterwards. here a hot take even: there's no finite amount of math, if you really cared about math you would be excited about all the math you could uncover. the computer solving the jacobian conjecture isn't fulfilling enough for you? maybe start thinking about what this discovery implies then!

Besides, doing pure math as a vocation was and still is an incredibly niche and privileged profession that 1-O(e^-n) of the population had access to anyways. If anything we will need more mathematicians, more engineers and more physicists to keep up with the increased throughput. Maybe journals will finally start EMPLOYING (gasp!) some referees instead of relying on free labor from broke graduate students even!

I'm rather tired of this ai apologism bit where every downside is explained away as "it would've happened anyways". AI destroying people's brains and causing paychosis? They would've gone psychotic anyways! AI causing company culture problems? The company was toxic anyways!

Instruments are not inculpable as you think they are.

I dont know where that “Those who cannot do, teach” bullshit came from but it's absolute nonsense someone made up to dunk on teachers.

It doesnt even make sense in your post because "programming" isn't "doing computer science". You're not better than a teacher in any notion because you asked chatgpt to generate some slop.

This whole article is just a nothingburger. Saying something is applied topology is only one step more advanced than saying something is maths - duh. These mathematical abstractions are incredibly general and and you can pretty much draw up anything in terms of anything, the challenging part is being able to turn around and use the model/abstraction to say things about the thing you're abstracting. I don't think scholars have been very successful in that regard, less so this article.

Yeah deep learning is applied topology, it's also applied geometry, and probably applied algebra and I wouldn't be surprised if it was also applied number theory.

Good luck helping somebody paralyzed from the neck down live a fulfilling life.

it... doesn't? threshold theorems are well known.

I'm sorry if this is nitpicky but your comment is hilarious to me - doubling something is doubling something, "changing the order of magnitude" would entail multiplication by 10.

Not only you're responding with an ad-hominem, which is blatantly bad enough; but you're doing it against Benjamin Franklin? One of the most influential thinkers of his time who has contributed to the liberty of way more people than you ever will?

Did you really think "they just call them grandma/pa" was a good argument against people not knowing their grandparents' names? What do you think people in other parts of the world call their grandparents?

"Maybe this person who did this for 20 years did not know what they were doing" is such an HN take.

Nowhere in the text you quoted (nor in the article body) it is said that simulation of this device can not be done. Had you read the paper you'd see that it _is_ about simulating this device. From the introduction: "After students are introduced to several projects in quantum computer simulation, they write code to simulate the operation of Mermin’s quantum device."

This is immaterial, however. It is a well known fact that BQP is in PSPACE and Clifford circuits (a subclass of quantum circuits) can not only be simulated classically, but done so efficiently. It is not controversial.

The first reference in the article you linked is titled "Computer simulation of Mermin's quantum device".

> there are known physical phenomena, such as quantum entanglement

QC researcher here, strictly speaking, this is false. Clifford circuits can be efficiently simulated classically and they exhibit entanglement. The bottom line is we're not entirely sure where the (purported) quantum speedups come from. It might have something to do with entanglement, but it's not enough by itself.

Re: about mermin's device, im not sure why you think it can not be simulated classically when all of the dynamics involved can be explained by 4x4 complex matrices.

I am not an expert on this but my suspicion is that human ear is not a linear time invariant system and thus it does not make sense to place a hard cutoff at some frequency over which you can not hear. The response might change wrt to the spectral content of the overall sound.

What is the point of this comment?

Quantum Computing is a topic that makes it to the front page from time to time and garners a lot of attention. I find this breakdown of short-term prospects of from QC very concise and readable.

You're talking in very vague terms here, what does """interesting""" mean?

Let me give you some numbers. Factorising RSA is order 10^6 logical qubits (and I'm being charitable here), simulating FoMoCo is around 10^7. The state of the art error correction is around (again, charitably) 10^3 physical qubits per logical qubit at the moment, that gives us 10^9-10^10 qubits necessary for the simplest quantum application. We're at order 100 right now.

Peter Shot thinks that error correction can go down to 100 physical-per-logical, that's an order of magnitude shaved off there, but the algorithm itself is pretty basic, i don't see it getting any better there. Simulation algorithms have much better odds in seeing improvements as I think the gates used there are rather non-standard and have avenues for better gate compilation techniques.

Quantum Computing/Information researcher here. This article is largely garbage, the original (~2 month old) paper is surprisingly readable [0] and I suggest you to check it out. Here's my $0.02: The efforts of the Google team is commendable in that they're trying to squeeze as much out of their noisy systems as possible until error correction is here (they need to, to justify their existence after all) and they are aware of the shortcomings of the paradigm. But personally I don't see anything useful coming out until error correction and number of qubits are improved many orders of magnitude to have fault tolerant QC. The jury is still out on their utility once realized; Shor's algorithm is an obvious one followed by quantum simulation algorithms that might benefit chemistry and fundamental physics, but it's not as big of a silver bullet as we thought before for simulation. Maybe someone can tell me what fast prime factorization is good for besides breaking encryption.

Also IBM released a paper[1] recently making similar claims ("quantum advantage without complete error correction") which got obliterated by 2 back to back papers [2,3] that did what they did for much cheaper on a classical computer.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.11119.pdf

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06096-3

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.14887.pdf

[3]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.16372.pdf

If a real person (not a bot) can tweet more than a 100 tweets per hour (i.e. 1 tweet every 36 seconds on avg) I would call them mentally ill, not power users.

Yeah mb

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.01768.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.11791.pdf

It really is not because this is a semi-common misconception and to me signals basic unfamiliarity with the subject. Schrodinger's eqn being linear has nothing to do with implementing non-linear functions. There's no question about how you would implement the said logic in a quantum computer - you can just do what the classical implementation does. Yeah we don't have nowhere enough qubits and it would be a gross waste of resources, but we _do_ know how to do it. Saying they don't know how to do it is a false statement at best. Again, I'm not saying we're going to be solving weather models with a quantum computer soon - even though I know folks are working on QC algorithms for (nonlinear) PDE solutions.

As a person who works in Quantum Computing, I can concur that there's hype in the field; one of the professors in my university has a quantum machine learning (TM) startup that seems to be performing well, even though most of the faculty and grad students can tell you that it's bullshit.

However. This paragraph straight up displays a fundamental lack of understanding by Hossenfelder:

> Last time I looked, no one had any idea how to do a weather forecast on a quantum computer. It’s not just that no one has done it, no one knows if it’s even possible, because weather is a non-linear system whereas quantum mechanics is a linear theory.

Unitary evolution generated by the Schrödinger equation is a linear map on _probability amplitudes_, just like how classical (probabilistic) computing performs linear operations on _probability distributions_. The commonly used quantum circuit model is a superset of classical logic gates and can accomplish anything a probabilistic classical computer can, so if anything is possible in a classical computing scheme, it's also possible in the quantum circuit scheme.

I don't have much sympathy for her since this is not the first time Hossenfelder has displayed a lack of understanding, recently she has published a paper criticizing another one [1], now replaced with a much shorter text due to being told [2] by the authors of the original paper.

Yeah I get it, it's dumb when the president of BofA is talking about how QC is "the next big thing", I know it's not coming Soon^TM, but saying "we will never have a quantum computer because the current ones suck" has the same energy as "the world doesn't need more than 5 computers" imo.

I'm so tired of these "jobs are rigged for social people!!!" or morning people or organized people kinds of posts. There's no rigging, if you want to work alone from 10 PM to 6 AM that's in your prerogative but just because most jobs require collaboration or most people prefer to sleep at night (gasp!) and work while the sun is out does not mean it's "unfair" to you; it just means that you're an outlier. Also the tone of this write-up is unnecessarily patronizing by accusing "morning people" of foregoing their health by sleeping less; hasn't it occured to the author that they might be sleeping early?

I'm writing this as a person who regularly sleeps at 3 AM and works alone in a very disorganized manner, but I have no illusions about the healthiness or ubiquity of my lifestyle.

Frankly "peer review" is the furthest thing away from wonderful. While the idea is legitimate, it is undermined at every step of the way.

* Reviewers are basically forced to it for free. If you're a researcher you won't have the time to properly fact check a 40 page paper for free, it just isn't going to happen. So they (we) don't. The review process isn't very rigorous.

* Journals are leeching off of the public money by double whammying both the scientists and the institutes while providing minuscule value. Their gains are absolutely disproportionate to what they provide.

* Even the most involved and convoluted peer review processes aren't as anonymous as you think. When there's already a handful of people in your field, you can pretty easily tell someone's identity from their writing style.

I would love to pretend that the system is great and works very well but it just doesn't and this pretense and the phenomenon of holding new systems to a higher standard than the current one is preventing us from actually improving the system.

you're phrasing it like web hosting is some gargantuan unheard of task.

> It is not free to publish journals, or keep tens of thousands of them, with millions of articles, around indefinitely, for instant access by anyone on the web.

it's not free but it's pretty cheap. you can pay a tiny fraction of what the public universities are currently paying for access to these journals to maintain a repository of scientific papers.

look at scihub, is it being funded by Bezos, Bill or Buffet? no. if a single person can host all those papers herself backed by only random donations, I don't think any government or hell, any university would have any trouble doing the same thing with marginal amount of support.

Thank you, looks very much like something I would be interested in.

Yeah. Any mobile network access is basically a beacon for your location but I doubt there's a very good way of getting around that. My main use cases for the smartphone are pretty much occasional messaging, the banking application, GPS/maps and listening to music. Even though Spotify is more convenient than I'd like to admit I think that portion can be handled easily with a portable mp3 player. I'm pretty unsure about how I want to handle the rest though.

This has the trademark hackernews "why would anyone use dropbox just get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" written all over it. Facebook has been involved in countless privacy scandals so that's the reason to believe this. Why you think it's easy for a random someone to dump a closed source, probably obfuscated piece of closed source embedded software and find a specific piece of code that does a specific thing is beyond me.