They showed a logical qubit that can last entangled for an hour, but to do that they had to combine their hundred or so physical qubits into a single one, so in some sense they have, right now, a single (logical) qubit
It would be nice if it was again possible to run it in current Mac OS. The original Half life still lists Mac OS but with incompatible information (newer versions of Steam require recent versions, but HL only runs on old 32 bit OSX)
The Mac is a weird counter example here, the move to 64 bits resulted in many games with official Mac ports (e.g. most of Valve's: Half Life, Portal, etc) no longer being able to run on modern versions of OSX
One thing that always kills my suspension of disbelief in SF movies/books is when ships arrive at asteroid belts and it's like driving through a hailstorm. Space is soooooo empty
The first author of the preprint [0] discussed by Scott Aaronson (Stephen Jordan) is also the maintainer of the quantum algorithms zoo [1], which tracks all of the quantum algorithms that have any kind of advantage over classical ones. It's still pretty bleak, not a lot of big wins for quantum algorithms, even assuming we had working hardware. As far as I know, Shor's algorithm is still the best one, after all these years.
My car doesn't have a CD player any more, but I still have a Minidisc player in the glove compartment with a maybe 20 discs that provide a guaranteed nostalgia trip (each disc has 20-50 songs with a very specific set of eigenvalues from back in the day). Also helps that the Minidisc player runs off a single AA, Sony built good stuff, I found it in storage after easily 10-15 years of its last use and it still played music off that one AA
The tarahumara in northern Mexico are famous for running very long distances (men and women have won several ultramarathons, often running with handmade sandals), they are also known for hunting deer by running them to exhaustion (more for fun and tradition than anything else, they have access to rifles)
One other very cool thing here is that this new treatment represents a whole new family of drugs (very sophisticated at that, per Derek Lowe's assessment). I thought back in the late 2010s with integrase inhibitors (e.g. dolutegravir), there was a real chance they could achieve the 90-95% reduction targets in new cases, and hopefully this new drug makes that even more feasible.
There's always the risk of losing previously effective drugs due to resistance, so the value of redundancy cannot be overstated
Keep in mind that you have be to registered and pay a fee to vote, but from the sound of this they don't verify names.
The total tally here is of less than 4,000 votes. It's not surprising that people game this, the economic gains of having a book listed as a Hugo award winner must be huge.
It's been amazing to see how it's affected sailing and other water sports over the past 2-3 of decades. Cuben fiber sails, Carbon-fiber hulls, hydrofoils on everything; something happened and then inflatable paddle boards were everywhere.
Matt Levine has covered this several times in the past, worth reading. From memory, the Purdue family had put away their money in legally sheltered arrangements, so even an unfavorable decision (to the Sacklers) would likely not be able to claw back much money. The previous deal traded the risk of trial for a perceived as decent compensation. My read is that the majority in the supreme court disagreed that you can always financial-engineer your way out of trials
I enjoyed the FAQ on resolving conflicts - basically don't be a dick, resolve the few conflicts that may arise by friendly consensus (or at worst flip a coin)
When looking at industrial optimization problems, it always appears there's an insane amount of money left on the table (e.g. nurse scheduling in healthcare, train/cargo ship optimization, etc). In my experience there are always undocumented (human) constraints that massively complicate things:
- German engineers balked at tightening features on pre-production vehicles because it would prevent their use for recreational purposes
- Billions were spent in overtime in a healthcare setting, seemed trivial to improve scheduling to reduce overtime, but there were numerous union constraints and simply not enough hiring supply
I wonder how realistic this google solution is (Houthi missile constraints?). In my experience it's often more valuable to develop solutions that can easily adjust to unplanned changes rather than provably optimal ones
Nitpick: Figure 2 should have been loglog, rather than semilog-y, I would love to see more details rather than the near vertical line (graph is Cumulative geo-located BSSIDs as a function of the number of API queries)
From a 2014 Wired article [0]:
"The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today"
I can see more real-world impact from this (and/or Sora) than most other AI tools
Nice article! I used to have a similar "friend" I liked to chat with and impress him with our modern marvels, not quite Benjamin Franklin though, I read a ton of pirate books and this particular Malaysian gentleman was pretty impressed by what modern artillery could do, and lately about those insanely fast hydrofoil sailboats/kitesurfs/windsurfs
I feel the opposite way, at least from the point of view of absorbing information. I often have a hard time with podcasts and often youtube videos because I feel I could have read the info there in a few minutes vs watching/listening to something for much longer
Reading between the lines (the institute gave the research team two days to leave..., their students’ incomplete experiments were now “impossible to save"...), it sounds like this was not a planned move or reno. One possibility could be that they had a leak and everyone had to be evacuated, but perhaps the more concerning one would be that they were working on H5N1 (release the genome on one of the human-transmitted strains?), and were stopped
There are a bunch of weird things in the article. HIV typically has three phases: acute for first 6 months (most contagious, perhaps cold symptoms), chronic for up 11 years if untreated, or much longer if under treatment, and then AIDS.
Per the report two cases were acute and one case (two?) had AIDS, yet they all fell within the same viral DNA cluster (AIDS if infected in 2018 would be rare). So it seems that they were infected at very different times, yet they share a common viral strand. One explanation was that the clinic was using infected blood rather than customers' own blood, but even that sounds weird.
Our local hackspace occasionally gets donations from Amazon, often very random things. One time we got a box full of these cow magnets. They're pretty strong, have mostly been used as fridge magnets though
I don't think Whatsapp gained anything by preventing this, if anything they gave people a little momentum to switching to another app. The one that clearly benefited was Apple, and I don't thing Whatsapp/Meta did it just to be nice.
I'm sure there's an argument to justify making it super complicated to move your Whatsapp content from IPhone to Android, but at the time I was having to dump the Whatsapp DB to recover the last messages from a dead relative it sure seemed like a convenient way to encourage people to stick around.
I don't know about the AI aspect, but this sounds perhaps related to probabilistic finance simulations (Black-Scholes, Heston, etc). I've heard rumors that these types of simulations account for an obscene amount of compute at AWS