Last week, Iran’s military unveiled what it called “the first product of the quantum processing algorithm” of the Imam Khomeini Naval University of Nowshahr. During a ceremony at the university, the Islamic Republic’s military revealed a bit of electronics sealed under glass. It appeared to be a common development board, available widely online for around $600.
According to multiple state-linked news agencies in Iran, the computer will help Iran detect disturbances on the surface of water using algorithms. Iranian Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari showed off the board during the ceremony and spoke of Iran’s recent breakthroughs in the world of quantum technology.
The touted quantum device appears to be a development board manufactured by a company called Diligent. The brand “ZedBoard” appears clearly in pictures. According to the company’s website, the ZedBoard has everything the beginning developer needs to get started working in Android, Linux, and Windows. It does not appear to come with any of the advanced qubits that make up a quantum computer, and suggested uses include "video processing, reconfigurable computing, motor control, software acceleration," among others.
It’s impossible to know if Iran has figured out how to use off-the-shelf dev boards to make quantum algorithms, but it’s not likely. True quantum devices are experimental pieces of equipment that don't typically resemble circuit boards of the kind you'd find in a home desktop, although researchers have reported being able to simulate some quantum processes on classical computers. Even if Iran is merely claiming that the device was manufactured with the help of quantum algorithms, they may not have been needed—the device is still a ZedBoard that anyone can buy, without any visible modifications.
This isn’t the first time Iran has shown off tech with a less than credible pedigree. In 2020, the Iranian Army revealed a device it claimed could detect COVID and AIDS. It appeared to be similar to another device that was previously sold as a bomb detector.
Most likely yes, I'll be sticking around. Something I very much appreciate about lemmy as an advantage over the big social media sites is that lemmy is set up such that you can be reasonably sure that there are many more human users than bots. On reddit you can mostly avoid the bots by sticking to the smaller subs, but I think lemmy may be able to grow larger than that and still avoid being overrun by propaganda and marketing bots due to the prevalence of manual approval for newly registered users.
I'm definitely hoping to see even more features that emphasize this advantage of lemmy. I'd like to try contributing some code for this myself, at a time when things feel more stable (i.e. no huge sweeping changes in the pipeline, like the HTTP client is now) and I can find some time for it.
For example...
One obvious improvement would be to add an invite system, where new user registration occurs via reputable users sending invite links to people they know.
And I envision a feature where one instance may mark some of the instances it federates with as low trust. Users on the instance would have the option not to see content posted by the low-trust instance's users, or the option to have their content explicitly marked in the UI. This could be used, for one thing, to still federate with larger instances that are less stringent about disallowing bot accounts, but provide a means to view only content where there is a higher degree of confidence that it was posted by a human, or to at least clearly mark low-confidence content.