fsh

For most users (me included), there is zero difference in user experience between using wifi or Ethernet for their TV. Otherwise, running wired Ethernet would probably be a lot more popular.

The problem with selling inferior technologies is that sooner or later people are going to stop using them (even in the Grad Basin region). Not exactly a recipe for success.

This section from the marketing blurb doesn't sound too promising:

When atmospheric conditions disrupt the light, our adaptive rate and hybrid architecture maintains the connection, with minimal downtime.

In the long run, all these wireless technologies (satellite or optical/microwave terrestrial links) will have a very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber.

GPS signals are atomic clock signals. The receiver triangulates its position by comparing the time delays between the signals originating from different satellites. The receiver itself doesn't require a good clock since it only compares signals with each other.

Yes, they use superposition of the most "classical" quantum states (coherent states). These are called (Schrödinger) cat states, since his thought experiment was about a quantum superposition of a very classical object (a cat): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_state

With an optimistic 10% annual return, this would amount to 1/5 of Cornell's budget.

As a European, I cannot make any sense of the low-contrast pictograms in "modern" software (VS Code, Obsidian, etc.).

They have never demonstrated even a single physical qubit.

Microsoft has claimed for a while to have observed some signatures of quantized Majorana conductance which might potentially allow building a qubit in the future. However, other researches in the field have strongly criticized their analysis, and the field is full of retracted papers and allegations of scientific misconduct.

The recession due to COVID made it pretty much impossible for an incumbent party to win an election in 2024.

The VSCode agent is so bloated that it tends to OOM raspberrypi pies. Truly remarkable for a piece of software whose job it is to forward some text.

This text is so confidently incorrect, that I have to wonder if it is LLM-generated. The control loop for a frequency comb is actually very simple. Generating the carrier-envelope offset frequency signal is the hard (Nobel prize worthy) part.

Frequency combs are optical synthesizers. This means that the frequency of the nth comb mode is exactly n times a radio frequency (+ another radio frequency), where n is a (very large) integer. The speed of light does not matter at all. This is very important since the speed of light (and hence the wavelength) depends on environmental factors such as air pressure and humidity. One way to determine the speed of light (in air) would indeed be to measure the wavelength of a laser whose frequency is calibrated using a frequency comb.

The speed of light in vacuum cannot be measured in SI units since it is the fundamental constants that defines the unit "meter".

Willow has only ~99.7% 2-qubit gate fidelity and poor connectivity. This is many orders of magnitude too low to run Shor's algorithm for a 50-bit number. The improvement has also stalled quite a bit over the last years (in 2019 they had 99.5% fidelities with similar qubit numbers).

I doubt that "land use" is a big issue in one of the least densely populated countries on earth. Surely one could find a place for an industrial site that is not within 5 km of the world's prime telescope site. Using the existing infrastructure probably makes it slightly cheaper though.

In the case of MH370, this was most likely intentional, not due to a system failure. Hard to defend against a pilot with a death wish.

I find the wording highly deceptive. The main feature making the internet globally scalable is not that it goes through fibers, but that it uses package routing. Nobody knows how to do this with qubits, so quantum communication doesn't scale at all. Instead, the community started doing these publicity stunts with very limited applicability.

No [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

The gravitational redshift is proportional to the gravitational potential (~1/distance), not to the gravitational acceleration (~1/distance²). This suppresses the effect of small masses nearby a lot compared to the effect of the earth.

A decent frequency counter can resolve a frequency difference of 1E-15 in a few minutes of averaging. Modern GPS-based frequency comparisons (dual-band, post-processed using precise point positioning) are also accurate to the 1E-15 level with around one day of averaging. Note that these counters operate with radio frequencies. The best atomic clocks use optical transitions and are accurate to around 1E-18. In this case, one gains around 6 orders of magnitude in frequency resolution by translating the laser frequency into a radio frequency using an optical frequency comb. The accuracy of the relative frequency measurement is not limiting at all.

The gravitational redshift amounts to around 1E-16 (not 1E-15) when moving the earth one meter closer or further from your clock. You standing next to it is going to have absolutely no effect.

Wuhan has a BSL-4 lab since 2018, but it wasn't used for coronavirus research.

Most unversity cities have virology groups, and coronaviruses became a popular research subject after SARS, particularly in China. The probability of finding a coronavirus researcher group in any large Chinese city was probably fairly large in 2019.

The report spends 5 pages on COVID origins (re-hashing tired old arguments with zero hard evidence), and 46 pages on shit-talking Andrew Cuomo. Clearly, finding truth was never the objective.

Most countries use way more primary energy for heating and transportation than for electricity generation. It would be disingenuous not to include this.

You can measure the flow of power by calculating the vector product of the current and voltage in the power line. EEVblog has a very good explanation video how this is done in an (analog) domestic watt-hour meter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_3DXcB9-xE

France has 12% of Europe's population, and its primary energy is 45% from fossil fuels and 40% from nuclear power. The effect on Europe as a whole is therefore pretty small.

According to the IEA [1], 43% of the energy consumption is oil (transportation, heating), 18% is natural gas (mostly heating), and 25% is electricity. Switching to resistive heating would require doubling the electricity production. Using heat pumps is much more efficient.

[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix

It's a very simple explanation why the fire killed his children and not him.

It is undisputed that Willingham's kids slept in the room where the fire broke out, while he slept in a different room. This is a pretty solid explanation for what happened.

This doesn't make any sense. Germany has storage for more than a season's worth of natural gas. The price went up because Russia stopped selling cheap gas to western Europe after its attack on Ukraine.

£54 bn over eight years is around 0.2% of the UK's GDP. A lot of money, but doesn't sound unreasonable for a major overhaul of a central price of infrastructure.

Ruling out the possibility of storing energy at industrial scale might also not age terribly well.

The same devices were put up among others in Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Portland with zero incidents. So yes, it is surprising that the Boston police decided to treat them like IEDs.