krastanov

It is recent and still uncommon that private universities have a grad student union. The US also has many great public universities that have had grad student unions since forever

Who has been projecting FTL as a realistic technology ever? FTL is not possible according to the current laws of Physics, while AGI is at least not forbidden by them.

I read OP differently. I thought they said "we should invest in non-dystopian public safety[1] to avoid dystopian populist creating a 1984 version of public safety".

[1]: I imagine this includes things like mental heath help, housing, and other related social safety nets.

And that state of the art has not moved much in the last decade

This is far from true. On the experimental side, gate fidelities and physical qubit numbers have increased significantly (a couple of orders of magnitude). On the theory side, error correction techniques have improved astronomically -- overhead to of error corrections has dropped by many orders of magnitude. On the error correction side progress has been feverish over the last 4 years in particular.

This sounds incredibly naive. Competition does not magically prevent monopolies -- once you have a dominant player they just buy or undercut the occasional competing startup.

I am sorry, I did not mean to imply anyone else is doing something poorly. I believe glibc's (and the rest of the ecosystem of libraries that are probably more limiting) policies and principled stance are quite correct and overall "good for humanity". But as you mentioned, they are inconvenient for a gamer that just wants to run an executable from 10 years ago (for which the source was lost when the game studio was bought).

Wine's APIs are more stable than Linux's APIs, so it seems more plausible to me that Wine will become the first class target itself.

non-deterministic does not mean it is not biased towards a particular type of results (helpful results)

This is fascinating to me. I completely believe you and I will not bother you with all the common "but did you try to tell it this or that" responses, but this is such a different experience from mine. I did the exact same task with claude in the Julia language last week, and everything worked perfectly. I am now in the habit of adding "keep it simple, use only public interfaces, do not use internals, be elegant and extremely minimal in your changes" to all my requests or SKILL.md or AGENTS.md files (because of the occasional failure like the one you described). But generally speaking, such complete failures have been so very rare for me, that it is amazing to see that others have had such a completely different experience.

I know that China is an authoritarian near-dictatorial country that oppresses minorities and commits cultural genocide. And I am not an American.

That does not seem to be all that related to the original post I was answering to. An average person / citizen / visitor has way less to worry about around (trained) Chinese police than they have to worry about around an (gangster) American ICE agent.

Strict police does sound quite a bit less bad than fascist police...

As an aside, it is really interesting to see a computational package that, while supporting multiple GPU vendors, was first vetted on AMD, not NVidia. It is encouraging to see ROCM finally shaking off its reputation for poor support.

I am happy to hear that things as not as bad as I thought, but my experience being judge/mentor for a couple of years for the high school science fair near a top university was very discouraging and closer to what the author of the article describes.

Maybe the mass of the kids at the first round were what you describe, but very quickly the focus turned to the top 20% who were very much "reputation laundering" and "CV padding" internships at labs, not actual curiosity driven independent exploration

Reviewing a quick translation of a test to a benchmark (or another menial coding tasks) is way less soul-sucking than doing the menial coding by yourself. Boring soul-sucking tasks are an important thankless part of OSS maintenance.

I concur it is different from what you call vibecoding.

I maintain serious code bases and I use LLM agents (and agent teams) plenty -- I just happen to review the code they write, I demand they write the code in a reviewable way, and use them mostly for menial tasks that are otherwise unpleasant timesinks I have to do myself. There are many people like me, that just quietly use these tools to automate the boring chores of dealing with mature production code bases. We are quiet because this is boring day-to-day work.

E.g. I use these tools to clean up or reorganize old tests (with coverage and diff viewers checking of things I might miss), update documentation with cross links (with documentation linters checking for errors I miss), convert tests into benchmarks running as part of CI, make log file visualizers, and many more.

These tools are amazing for dealing with the long tail of boring issues that you never get to, and when used in this fashion they actually abruptly increase the quality of the codebase.

In my post I actually made a number of (seemingly unclear) claims diametrically opposite to what you surmise I claimed in my original post.

I find this type of posts unproductive, somewhat emotionally exhausting, and generally impolite.

Most of the time open source tools are a labor of love. If the tool is not for you, move on. But self-aggrandizing "this tool is not good enough for me" posts, when you have not contributed, and when you disregard the fact that the tool has been immensely helpful to many others (who might have even started contributing back) just creates negativity in the world for no good reason. Nothing good is created in posts like that (and no, such posts are not constructive critique).

And then there are "the language is dying" complaints -- I consider these the worst of all. A tool does not need to be the most popular tool to be useful. Let's stop chasing hockey-stick curves in all human endeavors.

(to prevent claims of sour grapes: I am not a Scala user, I just find this type of posts distasteful, no matter the target)

Usually they randomly shoot atoms at the substrate and then just search for a spot (among thousands) where it randomly has the configuration they want. Still pretty amazing.

Shor's algorithm does not start with the qubits storing anything related to the n-bit number to be factored. The n-bit number is encoded *only* in the XOR-oracle for the multiplication function.

Shor's algorithm starts with the qubits in a superposition of all possible bitstrings. That is the only place we have exponentially small amplitudes at the start (in a particular choice of a basis), and there is no entanglement in that state to begin with.

We do get interesting entangled states after the oracle step, that is true. And it is fair to have a vague sense that entanglement is weird. I just want to be clear that your last point (forgetting about amplitudes, and focusing on the weirdness of entangled qubits) is a gut feeling, not something based in the mathematics that has proven to be a correct description of nature over many orders of magnitude.

Of course, it would be great if it turns out that quantum mechanics is wrong in some parameter regime -- that would be the most exciting thing in Physics in a century. There is just not much hope it is wrong in this particular way.

The initial state was the example given. It is fair to then point out the consecutive states though. A few points still hold:

- I am not saying that you have to find a basis in which your amplitudes are not small, I am saying that such a basis always exists. So any argument about "small amplitudes would potentially cause problems" probably does not hold, because there is no physical reality to "an amplitude" or "a basis" -- these are all arbitrary choices and the laws of physics do not change if you pick a different basis.

- In classical probability we are not worried about vanishingly small probabilities in probability distributions that we achieve all the time. Take a one-time pad of n bits. Its stochastic state vector in the natural basis is filled with exponentially small entries 1/2^n. We create one-time pads all the time and nature does not seem to mind.

- Most textbooks that include Shor's algorithm also include proof that you do not need precise gates. Shor's algorithm (or the quantum Fourier transform more specifically) converges even if you have finite absolute precision of the various gates.

- Preparing the initial state to extremely high precision in an optical quantum computer is trivial and it has been trivial for decades. There isn't really much "quantum" to it.

- It is fair to be worried about the numerical stability of a quantum algorithm. Shor's algorithm happens to be stable as mentioned above. But the original point by OP was that physics itself might "break" -- I am arguing against that original point. Physics, of course, might break, and that would be very exciting, but that particular way of it breaking is very improbable (because of the rest of the points posted above).

When the amplitude has norm 1, there is only one nonzero amplitude.

Yes, that is exactly the point. The example statevector you guys are talking about can (tautologically) be written in a basis in which only one of its amplitudes is nonzero.

Let's call |ψ⟩ the initial state of the Shor algorithm, i.e. the superposition of all classical bitstrings.

|ψ⟩ = |00..00⟩ + |00..01⟩ + |00..10⟩ + .. + |11..11⟩

That state is factorizable, i.e. it is *completely* unentangled. In the X basis (a.k.a. the Hadamard basis) it can be written as

|ψ⟩ = |00..00⟩ + |00..01⟩ + |00..10⟩ + .. + |11..11⟩ = |++..++⟩

You can see that even from the preparation circuit of the Shor algorithm. It is just single-qubit Hadamard gates -- there are no entangling gates. Preparing this state is a triviality and in optical systems we have been able to prepare it for decades. Shining a wide laser pulse on a CD basically prepares exactly that state.

Changing basis does not affect the number of basis functions.

I do not know what "number of basis functions" means. If you are referring to "non zero entries in the column-vector representation of the state in a given basis", then of course it changes. Here is a trivial example: take the x-y plane and take the unit vector along x. It has one non-zero coefficient. Now express the same vector in a basis rotated at 45deg. It has two non-zero coefficients in that basis.

---

Generally speaking, any physical argument that is valid only in a single basis is automatically a weak argument, because physics is not basis dependent. It is just that some bases make deriving results easier.

Preparing a state that is a superposition of all possible states of the "computational basis" is something we have been able to do since before people started talking seriously about quantum computers.

This is completely missing the point. There is nothing fundamental to an amplitude. The amplitudes are this small because you have chosen to work in a basis in which they are small. Go to the Hadamard basis and the amplitude value is exactly 1. After all, the initial state of Shor's algorithm (the superposition of all classical bitstrings) is the perfectly factorizable, completely not entangled state |+++++++>

The magnitude of an "amplitude" is basis dependent. A basis is a human invention, an arbitrary choice made by the human to describe nature. The choice of basis is not fundamental. So just choose a basis in which there are no vanishingly small amplitudes and your worry is addressed.

Isn't 250 square meters already pretty small for a company of their size? That is a small McMansion, and in Serbia the rent is probably 1k$ per month.

I am currently writing this from an xreal one pro. I think it fits what you are asking for.

Stochasticity (randomness) is pervasively used in classical algorithms that one compares to. That is nothing new and has always been part of comparisons.

"Error prone" hardware is not "a stochastic resource". Error prone hardware does not provide any value to computation.

I think you will have best luck by searching for "open quantum systems" toolboxes in your language of choice. My preferences are, in order:

- QuantumOptics.jl in Julia

- QuantumToolbox.jl in Julia

- qutip in python

These are all "just" nice domain specific wrappers around linear algebra and differential equation tools. They do the "silly" exponentially expensive simulation technique that works for any quantum system. If you are interested in efficient (not exponential) simulation techniques that support only a subset of all quantum dynamics try out:

- stabilizer formalism (e.g. for error correction) with QuantumClifford.jl or stim

- Gaussian quantum optics (e.g. for laser physics) with Gabs.jl

- tensor networks (e.g. for arbitrary low-rank entanglement) with ITensors.jl

"deterministic", "superdeterministic", "measurement independence", "local", "causal" and more are well defined terms (with potentially poorly chosen names) in quantum information science and "quantum foundations". She is a crank, but a paragraph like that can be found in essays by well-respected mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists.

The description she gives of what she is doing is a stellar example of good scientific inquiry.

The problem, or at least my perception of the situation, is that she does not do what she claims to be doing. She forms uninformed opinions optimized to be engaging, interesting, and conspiratorial, instead of boring sound interpretations of what she has read.

The sad thing is that the only way for someone reading this to know whether I am gatekeeping or warning about an actual crank is to do all of this work from scratch yourself.

(I easily concede that there are plenty of problems with the institution of "Science" today -- I just think she exploits the existence of these problems to aggrandize herself instead of engage in fixing them in a productive way)

While I sympathize with some of your arguments, you are wrong about scholarships. Getting financial aid as a foreign student at an institution like Harvard, Yale, or MIT is the norm.