gaze

Elon is famously managed up by the point people at his companies. I don't really know how much credit you can give him besides having the bravado to greenlight stunts like this. Which, you know, cool -- it appeals to the 12 year old in all of us, which is about how mature he is.

cryogenics are largely off the shelf commercial things. For half a million you can have a dil fridge delivered to your house. There's also lots of room to make them cheaper. A few lasers (where a neutral atom system needs many) can easily total to half a million. Having worked on superconducting quantum computers and now on neutral atoms, I now am a bigger fan of neutral atoms, but I do find that people outside the fields get hung up on what don't seem like the difficult parts to me.

I have a manual mill and CNC and use them in roughly equal proportion. They make plenty of sense -- especially if it's a hobby and you don't want to use another computerized thing. Manual machining is very zen.

if you're explaining, you're losing

Vlatko tends to show up on papers with let's say, big claims. Consider the superconducting qubit/Tardigrade paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07978

rsync.net is a special exception. Maybe the most reliable and trustworthy service money can buy.

Who said anything about trying to make anyone poor and/or fat? I’m saying they try to maximize profits. Why does the room have to have smoke in it? They meet in a room — and now you’re doing “no true Scotsman”

Why not simultaneously shrink at the rate the market will bear AND increase the price to what the market will bear AND decrease the cocoa to what the market will bear

Corrected, sorry about that.

Atom Computing | Many posititions | Boulder, CO/Austin, TX/Berkeley, CA | REMOTE (US)/ONSITE

We're hiring software engineers, hardware engineers, RF engineers, FPGA and ASIC engineers, Optics/Mechanical/Optomech engineers, and Physicists with a background in atomic physics and/or characterization of quantum systems.

We trap Ytterbium atoms with lasers, and then use each atom as a qubit in a quantum register. A flash of green light accomplishes the quantum analog of a NOT gate. Two atoms held sufficiently close followed by a flash of UV light accomplishes the quantum analog of an XOR gate. The company is well funded and growing quickly. We have an endless supply of rich and interesting signal processing challenges. Atoms, famously used in atomic clocks, are very precise and sensitive to all the imperfections in your system. This makes for very demanding signal paths. Compiling programs for this architecture also involves interesting compiler challenges/optimizations. You'll have fun.

https://jobs.lever.co/atomcomputing

is this the author's attempt at washing their hands of the damage they've done? Smart enough to win all these prestigious economics awards and hold all these prestigious positions but too naive to be able to predict the consequences of what they've been fighting for? Things that were, in my opinion, very easy to predict, given all the regulation in place around existing markets. What does this say about the author and the field of economics? Every day we get to play the "dumb or awful?" game.

This isn’t healthy, man…

This looks like LLM output

I've noticed that tech people will respond to an encroachment on civil rights with a technological alternative. I think this is a mistake, because the excuse is presented in bad faith, and to present an alternative is to accept their framing. The correct response is something to the effect of "I know what you're trying to do, fuck off."

with sufficiently many public/private partnerships, what's the difference?

I'm super curious what alexia massalin is up to these days, besides collecting microunity patent royalties

For superconducting qubits, yes. For other architectures everyone is doing their own thing.

I think that's the datacenter with the gas turbine generators that operate without permits because they're "portable." Data centers have tremendous externalities but colossus is a particularly nasty offender, and not just due its size.

Edit: They did it with Colossus and now they're doing the exact same thing with Colossus2. https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

sure but it seems spiritually wrong to use an LLM to debug a slop paper. Who knows, maybe claude generated it in the first place?

the irritating thing about LLM generated papers like these is that they're wrong but are generated using LLMs that are capable enough to bury the absurd claim pretty deep in there.

this paper looks AI generated to me... I mean, there's no experiments to go along with it.

see terry pratchett's boots theory of economic fairness. They'll get into the market with something that costs more long term...

I mean I get your argument but it feels like one should adjust for wage growth instead. One labor unit of value converts to a shittier backpack.

for making research grade devices you barely need a cleanroom

You just need unitarity.

There are NO alternatives. There's nothing else that stays liquid at 4 K and absolutely nothing else comes close.

2d materials are so awful to work with but keep yielding these stunningly beautiful results so physicists must persist.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

The power of quantum computing is constructing the solution to a problem out of an interference pattern. Classical probabilities don’t interfere, but quantum probabilities do. Loosely, quantum probabilities can be constructed to cancel, since their amplitudes can be negative.

Shor’s algorithm works on the quantum Fourier transform. The quantum Fourier transform works because you can pick a frequency out of a signal using a “test wave.” The test wave can select out the amplitude of interest because the information of the test wave constructively interferes, whereas every other frequency cancels. This is the interference effect that can only happen with complex/negative probability amplitudes.

The communication here is clear as mud. WHICH quantum systems? D-Wave? We know D-Wave is a joke!