this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
26 points (81.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

37641 readers
2029 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Disregarding custom OS that will probably be made first.

all 31 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Treczoks 7 points 20 hours ago

This is not how this works. One day in the future, when quantum computers have matured enough to do something actually useful instead of just quantum benchmarks, they still will not be general purpose systems.

The situation will be more like video cards at the moment: it would be a subsystem doing something very specialized and limited, being controlled by a driver handing over certain jobs from the OS of the real processor.

[–] AbouBenAdhem 68 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

Quantum circuits aren’t general-purpose computers—they’re added to conventional computers to allow them to perform a small handful of algorithms more efficiently. I don’t believe any of those algorithms would benefit the basic features of an operating system enough that it would make sense to modify an OS to require the use of one.

(Although I could totally see Microsoft doing something like only licensing their circuit’s drivers to run on Windows.)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] paperplane 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Seriously. There are a lot of parallels between GPUs (or NPUs for ML inference) and quantum processors in terms of being architected towards a more specialized form of computation and I could totally see QPUs being a thing in the future, probably mostly for number cruncing (see Grover/Shor's algorithms). Though if Grover search suddenly becomes the way of quickly searching for files or something, who knows, maybe this might be more useful for general computing than we think.

In the 80s no one thought computers would be something normal people would use at home, they were seen as a tool for mathematicians and nerds. Now look at the world today. Who knows what the future will hold.

[–] TropicalDingdong 12 points 1 day ago

Exactly. If they do ever become a thing, if thats even possible, it would be a special card like a graphics card.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

To add to what most people are saying here, i also believe that quantum computing will evolve rapidly one day, with new algorithms being developed there is no telling if quantum computing will truly stay niche or specialized and can't be expanded into general purpose computing. as tech is always evolving, i would argue that claiming that quantum processors stay akin to gpu's. gpu's are pretty much a sprecialization of the same stuff that builds a cpu, to my understanding. therefore, there is nothing truly proving that qpu's can't just evolve backwards into a parallel to cpu's. besides, i can see it being favorable to keep only a qpu for most desktop platforms and only optionally a cpu that would be plugged into the equivalent of a pcie slot. that's far fetched, but i also don't think it's too unreasonable.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

if we could build one for real, maybe King Terry will still be alive today

[–] mesamunefire 6 points 1 day ago

The real answer.

[–] Limonene 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I think quantum computers may be impossible. But if they are possible, they will be a USB/PCIe accessory that works alongside an ordinary processor running an ordinary operating system.

I expect Linux will have a driver for quantum computers before Windows.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (2 children)

They literally exist right now.

[–] Limonene 1 points 21 hours ago

The quantum computers that exist can't solve anything that can't be done better and faster by a normal computer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

I was actually surprised how "cheap" they are to rent.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

how can a thing that has existed for years be impossible?

[–] Nalivai 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What exists is a weird engineering experiment that runs some synthetic tests that are designed to return a number that you plot on a graph which you show your investors. And it costs all the money in the world and then some.
Not only there is no practical use for all that, there are debates about what the practical uses might even be in theory for something that nobody really sure is happening.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

regular computers were useless except for basic addition and multiplication for a long time, and now we have the internet. quantum computers, when they are ready, will be capable of doing calculations much faster than it's even physically possible for normal computers to. just because it isn't ready yet doesn't mean it will never be useful. your take is shortsighted and ignorant of how developing new stuff works.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Sometimes ignorance makes its origins obvious, but literally every single part of your viewpoint can be disproven by just reading any science communication website, much less the actual papers behind the quantum processors currently in commercial operation so how you came to believe what you believe is just a complete mystery.

[–] Limonene 1 points 21 hours ago

There are no useful quantum computers. If you disagree, provide a citation.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

neither, you need to have a totally new architecture

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Finally we can tell the console people we will have PC 2!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

I mean it seems more like a gpu in the sense it would be interacted with from a standard computer.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I suspect the Linux kernel would support quantum first. Somehow I don’t see a multi billion dollar multinational moving fast enough to beat some caffeine addicted teen looking for street cred.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Your quantum computer will have a device driver, that allows you to use it through your cluster. Just like your SAN.

[–] slazer2au 4 points 1 day ago

*nix for sure. No way MS will develop a quantum OS before a *nix variant is out

[–] SolidShake 1 points 1 day ago

Honestly neither since we won't have that in a PC sized containment for decades or ever.