cgranade

I'd be happy to share more of my thoughts; if that'd be helpful, I'd be happy to discuss my rates. Outside of that, though, I'll suggest that intuition is less helpful than experience in understanding what problems are more or less likely to have good quantum solutions.

That's why I emphasized one _logical_ qubit. I'll definitely argue that fault tolerance is necessary to achieve useful results, as you say, but there is some argument in the research community on that. Even setting that discussion aside, there's absolutely no way to run something like LLM training dirctly on physical qubits (unless there was an improvement in error rates that's probably on the order of 10^15 to 10^18), even if you had both enough to do so and had a good qRAM implementation.

The problem you'll run into for any application of quantum computing to large language models is that quantum computers just aren't very good at big data applications. There's two reasons for that:

- Current devices, as well as devices likely to be built in the near- to medium-term are quite limited in the number of qubits that they implement. The current record for the most fault-tolerant qubits in a single device is 1. That's a hell of a lot better than where the field was at a couple years ago, but it's far from the huge amount of data that needs to be processed for LLM training and evaluation.

- Even if you have enough qubits to store training data, looking them up on a quantum device is still challenging due to what's sometimes called the qRAM problem. It's not trivial to make a quantum oracle that returns the data stored at a given index, and it's still an area of ongoing research to figure out how to do that.

That's part of why you see quantum algorithms being developed less for big data tasks and more for big compute tasks like chemistry. There, the program might be very large, but size of the input that has to be stored within the quantum devices and the size of the output you measure back out are both quite small, even down to a single floating-point number in some cases.

(source: I've worked in quantum computing for about twenty years now.)

Hi, I'm a dev on Q#, and wanted to help clarify a bit how the Quantum Development Kit relates to LIQUi|〉. Microsoft's Quantum Development Kit is a successor to LIQUi|⟩ and we're excited for you to download it and begin writing Q# code. LIQUi|⟩ is focused on the efficient simulation of a quantum computer on a classical one. Q# is a language that will let you program actual quantum computers (in the future). As such, there are areas where LIQUi|⟩ can currently out-perform Q# when it is used on one of the provided simulators (which are striving to emulate the actual gates on quantum hardware). Over time, more simulators will be provided for Q# that will meet (and exceed) the efficiency of LIQUi|⟩ and at that point, we will fully retire LIQUi|⟩.

Hi, I'm one of the devs on Q#! We're excited to make this preview release of Microsoft's Quantum Development Kit available on Windows PCs. We're exploring the possibility of supporting other platforms in the future and will share more about this at a later time.

That would also break the trick of declaring something `const volatile`. While that seems like a contradiction, I've heard of it being used to force the compiler to include a symbol in the final object file. In particular, I've seen it used to make a poor-man's plugin architecture.

With that approach, each call to ``make_window`` produces a distinct type, such that isinstance couldn't be used to compare two windows. That kind of breaks the idea of a "type", I think, as being a collection of values.

No, not proof by analogy, but explanation by analogy. As Scalzi says in his follow-up, providing proof of endemic sexism is about as necessary by now as providing evidence that gravity exists when tripping over one's shoelaces. The evidence by now is clear enough that to demand evidence in every discussion is a distraction tactic, and not actually useful. Finding evidence is, because of the sheer breadth and extent of the problem, as difficult as using your favorite search engine to look up income stats, harassment at the workplace, unfair hiring practices, etc., such that demanding evidence is pretty much asking someone else to do your work for them.

(I should note that Scalzi did link to another post with more facts, over at http://www.jimchines.com/2012/05/facts-are-cool/, if you still demand that someone else go search for things online for you.)

"This move makes me very reluctant to work at google."

If removing barriers to getting good people interested in what you supposedly love makes you "reluctant," I think that says far more about you than about Google.

"Would my future career be limited, because women are favored in promotions and internal recruitment?"

No, but you might not be as favored over women as you are now. Men in CS, we're playing the game on easy mode (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...).

Krugman also backed his argument with data, notably the exact same data that Silver is disparaging by hiring people like Roger Pielke Jr. as staff writers. The data is in, and has been analyzed in a multitude of different ways: climate change is real. To ignore that is to ignore the role that expertise sometimes has to play in understanding and interpreting data.

While it's superficially true that this expertise can be used to enshrine unscientific dogmas in the trappings of science, to reject expertise period is to reject the role that knowledge can and must play in forming an understanding of our world. Data do not exist in a vacuum, but are collected in actual experiments, the complexities of which must be understood to gain insight from that data in a way that reflects reality. Not being wary of (or even intentionally misconstruing) how data is collected and represented leads to mistakes like normalizing away trends, then claiming those trends don't exist; this is precisely what Pielke Jr. did, and what Krugman was criticizing.

As long as you aren't female. http://t.co/PFuwmChLkQ

In a way, things like this are a part of the whole bloody point that opponents of the NSA have been making: if you put that much surveillance power into the hands of a relatively small number of humans, then they will abuse it. These sort of incidents reveal through their pettiness some of the ways in which massive surveillance invites abuse.

I agree with you, but I'd have hoped the outrageous shit happening now would be enough to break the two-party dynamic, but I'm rather doubting it, having seen that the reactions are defined by the media in an entirely two-party manner. I think if anything from the NSA leaks changes this dynamic, it will be the exodus of technology dollars from the US.

The discussion of power loss during the execution of RegFlushKey makes it sound like there's no journalling of the registry hives... is that accurate?

You got an accurate headline: approval was not obtained. You cannot call drugged up statements approval. You're trying to split a hair that isn't there, about what kinds of coerced approval can be counted as approval and what kinds can't. By doing so, you're ignoring that the prison medical staff abused positions of authority and abused drugs even to obtain consent for permanent medical procedures.

What you're arguing is much like arguing that if a woman had sex while drunk (under the influence of a drug that impedes judgement), then no headline should call it rape. In that context, the error should, I hope, be quite clear.

Given the history of forced sterilization in California, I think it's clear that at least some doctors do not hold themselves to a high ethical standard at all, but in fact, a quite low one. Pressuring an inmate or even offering if they are in labor a tubual ligation is now illegal as a result of that history:

"Since then, it's been illegal to pressure anyone to be sterilized or ask for consent during labor or childbirth."

Moreover, it has been documented in the article that at least some of the "approval" was given while patients were under sedation, which cannot be taken as approval in any ethical way, given the nature of the procedure. That is basically enough for an unethical doctor to cover his or her ass, but it is not appropriate for a journalist to refer to that as approval.

At any rate, it's good that you're asking why this is going on in this century. Just a shame you seem to be concern trolling about a very valid headline instead of addressing the issue at hand.

Approval under continual coercion, especially by people with significant authority over you, isn't actually approval in any meaningful sense. It's not a misleading headline at all.

So you're supposed to wait until you're alone with a woman before you sexually assault and/or rape her? That's not an improvement, and doesn't negate that it's still very much so a rape manual.

Given that they have unilateral control as to what can be installed on non-jailbroken devices, that's rather a cop-out. Apple does have a complete monopoly on content that can be purchased for use with iOS devices. If you don't like B&N's policies, you can very often find another retailer with better policies, but this is not at all the case if you are looking for software compatible with iOS.

My only real complaint with Firefox Mobile is that it doesn't play that well with Intent filters like the one the YouTube app uses to catch http://*.youtube.com/* requests. That said, I'm not sure how to fix that without introducing the annoying per-link popup asking me if I want to use Chrome or Firefox.

According to TFA, you get one NFC card with a pack of plain-paper cards, so that you can give paper to someone without NFC and lend the NFC card to someone with a supporting phone.

You need more classical resources to model a qubit in generality. This is because a qubit can be in the "0" state, the "1" state, or in any superposition between them. For a single qubit, you can describe an arbitrary superposition by two angles [1], each of which is a continuous real number. While you can't extract both of these parameters from a single measurement, a classical computer has to know both angles to simulate that qubit. Thus, it's more like that you need two floats to simulate a single qubit.

When you have more than one qubit, the requirements get much worse, as you can have superpositions over all of the possible classical states. When you work through the math, you find that you need a vector of 2^n - 1 complex floats to model a register of n qubits in full generality. Going from a classical bit to a classical trit does nothing to help with that exponential scaling.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere

Along a similar line, I'd love it if I could run an IPython Notebook instance in a packaged app for either Firefox or Chrome. There's a lot of little annoyances to using the notebook interface in my main browser, like having my notebook tabs mixed in with my general browsing tabs, not having a separate entry in my Alt-Tab list, etc. Using something like Prism and its modern descendants would help make IPython that much better, IMHO.

The fact that it was without intent indicates to me how poorly many people understand the effects of comments that objectify women's bodies. If there wasn't already a pre-existing culture in which women expect to find themselves judged for their bodies more than for their aptitude at their jobs, then 0xBI6B00B5 wouldn't matter so much. As it is, it serves to reinforce the existing perception (and unfortunately, the existing reality) that women are judged by different criteria from their male colleagues. Combine this with stereotype threat [1], and you get that the effects are decidedly harmful, even in the absence of sexist intent.

I doubt that removing the specific magic number in this case really helps much, though. Rather, I think that it is important to establish a standard that this kind of thing is not in keeping with professional standards or with human decency towards one's colleagues. Given that most people really do seem to mean well, having that awareness and empathy about the direct and indirect effects of seemingly innocuous choices like this can only help make programming a better career choice for all involved.

[1] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freethoughtblogs/butterfliesa...

At least MS backed down from calling their smartphone platform "Windows Phone 7 Series" (http://gizmodo.com/5471805/windows-phone-7-series-everything...). What the heck does the word "Series" even communicate in that name?

In my opinion, though, that's precisely a part of the problem: every couple years, there's a new One True Way to develop for Windows. I understand that breaking with old development frameworks is sometimes a good and necessary thing to do, but the sheer frequency of non-incremental changes to Windows development methodologies seems problematic to me.

Not until you consider the alternatives.

I get that there are compromises made in every decision I make, and that to that extent, I am complicit in the actions taken by the companies that I support. I certainly did not mean to exempt myself from that; rather, I was trying to argue against the philosophy that such considerations should be ignored. While I get that pragmatism is important, I disagree that we can disregard the actions of the companies we support.

As for the point about patents, I think that there's a difference between acting on infringement and actively seeking to expand their patents post-hoc to shut down competition. More broadly, I think that the USPTO needs to be much more selective about patents, to avoid precisely these kinds of problems.

"Evaluate technology for its tech, not for the company's legal team."

No. Doing so means that I can become complicit in legal actions that ultimately hurt me as a consumer by providing companies like Apple with the revenue they need to fund such attacks. One must consider the legal actions, the social actions, etc. of a company when buying their products; it's part of being a responsible and long-term self-interested consumer.

I was hoping for a discussion of why we don't more broadly adopt tools such as GnuPG, Tor, etc. to take some modicum of privacy into our own hands. That'd be a discussion that I'd love to see go mainstream, given how important it is, yet how much it's treated as unimportant in the culture at large.