Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Can we all take a moment to appreciate this absolutely wild take from Google's latest quantum press release (bolding mine) https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/
The more I think about it the stupider it gets. I'd love if someone with an actual physics background were to comment on it. But my layman take is it reads as nonsense to the point of being irresponsible scientific misinformation whether or not you believe in the many worlds interpretation.
these are some silly numbers. if all this is irreversible computation and if landauer principle holds and there's no excessive trickery or creative accounting involved, then they'd need to dissipate something in range of 4.7E23 J at 1mK, or 112 Tt of TNT equivalent (112 million Mt)
(disclaimer - not a physicist)
The computation seems to be generating a uniformly random set and picking a sample of it. I can buy that it'd be insanely expensive to do this on a classical computer, since there's no reasonable way to generate a truly random set. Feels kinda like an unfair benchmark as this wouldn't be something you'd actually point a classical computer at, but then again, that's how benchmarks work.
I'm not big in quantum, so I can't say if that's something a quantum computer can do, but I can accept the math, if not the marketing.