this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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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.)

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 19 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (16 children)

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/

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10^25^ or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

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.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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)

[–] FredFig@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago

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.

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