Hacker News Reader

ion_trapperon The American Grilled Cheese Sandwich Essay (2024)

Always a trip reflecting on this hyperbolic and profanity-laden style of comment from the old internet. Cringy by today’s standards.

ion_trapperon Physicists developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source

The Venn diagram of "useful" and "not possible on a classical computer" has demonstrations on both disjoint ends but is currently empty in the intersection. For now. I fully sympathize with the hype-fatigue though.

ion_trapperon Physicists developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source

Is there a QC out there that can perform a commercially useful computation? No, not yet. And yes snake oil is abound. But the reality is not two categories, it's a spectrum. Some are more useless than others.

ion_trapperon Physicists developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source

This effort is likely aimed at industrial/academic entities and not "you" as in a single person. But anyway, it needs to be emphasized that the phrase "quantum computer" is today used to mean anything ranging from

-a useless machine that produces a signal indistinguishable from noise TO -a highly sophisticated marvel of science and engineering that performs otherwise impossible calculations

Many industrial quantum computers today fall closer to the the former category than the latter. A single person or small team with minimal funding has basically no hope of building anything meaningful.

I don't know of any other device that has such a broad range of quality represented under one name. Maybe like calling ELIZA and Opus 4.6 both "AI".