phonebucket
The engineering probably has some cool novelty: 39 qubit and 10 million layers is a very large circuit. But simulating a large circuit is very different to achieving a quantum computing breakthrough in CFD.
But, there are still reasons I reach for Julia.
Interesting packages where I prefer Julia over Python/R: Turing.jl for Bayesian statistics; Agents.jl for agent-based modelling; DifferentialEquations.jl for ODE solving.
I would much rather data-munge tabular data in Julia (DataFrames.jl) than Python, though R is admittedly quite nice on this front.
Personally I reach for Julia when I want to use one of the previous packages, or something which I want to code up from scratch, where base Julia is much preferable to me than numpy.
Janet seems really tempting for tiny footprint, distributability etc.
But I'm currently leaning towards to Racket just because it would be more or less compatible with a whole host of Scheme books that I'd like to read (The Little Schemer/Typer/Learner, SICP, Functional Differential Geometry).
Does anyone familiar with Janet know if those books can be easily worked through with Janet for a newbie Lisper?
ML-enhanced development neatly circumvents this: explainability and accountability is passed on to the developer. This includes bugs and license infringements.
I have no qualms about ML tools in development. But so long as the buck stops with me, I prefer to write from scratch.
Large language models have tradtionally been very weak at brute force computing (just look at how bad they are at multiplicaion of large numbers). If it can somehow excel at something which typically involves computing power like chess tactics deep into a game well after a novel position has been reached, then put me down as impressed.
Generative models are about characterising probability distributions. If you ever predict more than just the average of something using data, then you are doing generative modelling.
The difference between generative modelling and predictive modelling is similar to the difference between stochastic modelling and deterministic modelling in the traditional applied mathematical sciences. Both have their place. Neither is overrated.
Grab the best tool for the job.
If you answer all the questions after reading all of them, you could only get only question 100 wrong and get the other 99 correct, so reach a score of 99/100.
If you answer only questions 1 and 2, you get the answer to 100 right too, so you could score 3/100.
In the latter case, you could score 3/3 too, depending on how the examiner decides to mark it.
So which is it?
I decided to allow myself as many extra features as I wanted with one caveat: all plugins had to be pure vimscript.
Reproducing an exact dev environment is just a git clone away, because there are no external dependencies outside of vim itself.
This is not very restrictive: you have fuzzy search with Ctrl-P, get full-featured language server support with vim-lsp etc.
This is possible because Vim8+ (released 6 years ago) has a native plugin manager which is very easy to manage via git submodules.
But, after some thought, I realise that allowing such extension simply requires trusting a third party app access to so much of my personal information. They (understandably) need the ability to read every page I browse. Vimium-FF even requires clipboard access.
I do believe the authors have the best intentions. But the amount of trust I need to have in order for a third party app to have so much access to some of my most confidential information (online banking, emails etc.) is very very high.
> _nobody_ cares about any of this. Universities don't care, journals don't care, peers don't care, nobody within the academic system cares.
Please be mindful about generalising over such a large number of people. Maybe those who care have little power to do anything about it.
Neutral atom quantum computers (the type outlined in the article) work at room temperature.
Superconducting qubit based quantum computers do indeed require cooling to these levels, though.
"...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." [0]
My main gripe with LastPass is that they did not encrypt everything. Vast amounts of important information (email addresses, billing addresses, telephone numbers, IP addresses, website URLS [0]) were not encrypted on user's local machines with the master password, and subsequently have fallen into the hands of a malicious actor.
I would feel much better about LastPass if the security genuinely was safeguarded by a strong master password. But they've demonstrated that it's not.
Other password managers, as far as I can see, provide much greater protection in terms of encrypting everything. That's why I'd feel better about using them.
[0] https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-...
Some papers that are runnable on a laptop CPU (so long as you stick to small image sizes/tasks):
1) Generative Adversarial Networks (https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661). Good practice to have a custom training loops, different optimisers and networks etc.
2) Neural Style Transfer (https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576). Nice to be able to manipulate pretrained networks and intercept intermediate layers.
3) Deep Image Prior (https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10925). Nice low-data exercise in building out an autoencoder.
4) Physics Informed Neural Networks (https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10561). If you're interested scientific applications, this might be fun. It's good exercise in calculating higher order derivatives of neural networks and using these in loss functions.
5) Vanilla Policy Gradient (https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06778) is the easiest reinforcement learning algorithm to implement and can be used as a black-box optimiser in a lot of settings.
6) Deep Q Learning (https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602) is also not too hard to implement and was the first time I had heard about DeepMind, as well as being a foundational deep reinforcement learning paper .
Open AI gym (https://github.com/openai/gym) would help get started with the latter two.
But I've enjoyed the following texts to a larger extent than others:
- Algebra: Chapter 0 (Aluffi)
- Real Mathematical Analysis (Pugh)
- Mathematics and its History (Stillwell)
- An Introduction to Manifolds (Tu)
- Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity (Baez)
- A First Look at Rigorous Probability Theory (Rosenthal)
- All of Statistics (Wasserman)
There are some authors I trust and am happy to buy so long as the topic vaguely interests me: VI Arnold, Tristan Needham and John Stillwell.
I really like the list put out by @enriquto in a separate comment, but I've avoided duplicating those recommendations in the list above.
I'd rather use an extremely high entropy master password by itself.
I'm not worried about hammers when I have them. I'm worried about hammers when someone who wants to hurt me has them.
Same with ChatGPT.
It's almost like you are coding in a separate language altogether sometimes. E.g. you write something in Cython that gets compiled to C/C++. Same holds for things like numba/LLVM or Jax/XLA. PyTorch is going bigger on compilation in PyTorch 2.0.
Python can be seen as a common interface to write code that can be JIT compiled to multiple backends. It's quite convenient to be able to interact with all these backends, and bring the results back to a universally common interface (NumPy).
From this perspective, scientific Python itself is somewhat evolving by itself into something like Julia, which is JIT compiled to LLVM. Except Python's momentum has generated a huge number of backends for users to choose from.
I'm all for a new language dethroning Python in scientific computing. But I don't think it will be for reasons of speed. I think it'll likely be things like typing (e.g. from Dex lang) or library modularity (e.g. Julia).