Interesting you get downvoted for this when I mocked someone for saying the opposite who claimed that $0.5m was some enormous amount of money we shouldn’t be wasting, and I simply pointed out that we waste literally billions around the world on endless wars killing random people for now reason, so it is silly to come after small bean quantum computing if budgeting is your actual concern. People seemed to really hate me for saying that, or maybe it was because they just actually like wasting moneys on bombs to drop on children and so they want to cut everything but that.

i use one of those trackball mice with the ball on top. first time i tried it i never went back, no need to worry about having a proper surface or desk space for a mouse ever again. if you reach the side of your desk using an optical mouse, you have to pick the mouse up and move it all the way to the other side of the desk, while is a proper ball mouse (a good one without too much resistance) when you flick the ball it can continue spinning a bit even as you release it, so you can flick it to the side and then bend your wrist slightly to then flick it again, and the mouse cursor will just continue moving without stopping, which in games you can do this to have endless turning around, when turning is always stuttery on an optical mouse due to hitting the end of the desk. it takes a little bit to get used to, but at least a good one with limited resistance and a large ball, you can easily get just as accurate as an optical mouse as well. the only downside i find is that i do have to take the trackball out and clean it like the ones on the bottom.

How do we even know that’s the killer? The person who shot was wearing a mask. For all we know it wasn’t even a man, some women are flat chested it’s possible. They should probably just call off the investigation since there’s no clues for anything.

Ah yes, crying about “privilege” while you’re here demanding that people shouldn’t speak out against a literal modern day holocaust at the only time when they have the political power to make some sort of difference. Yeah, it’s totally those people who are “privileged” and not your white pasty ass who doesn’t have to worry about their extended family being slaughtered.

In boolean algebra 1+1=0.

It’s always funny seeing arguments like this as someone with a computer science education. A lot of people act like you can’t have anything complex unless some intelligent being deterministically writes a lot of if-else statements to implement it, which requires them to know and understand in detail what they are implementing at every step.

But what people don’t realize is that this is not how it works at all, there are many problems that are just impractical to actually “know” how to solve yet we solve them all the time, such as voice recognition. Nobody in human history has ever written a bunch of if-else statements to be able to accurately translate someone’s voice to text, because it’s too complicated of a problem, no one on earth knows how it works.

Yet, of course, your phone can do voice recognition just fine. That is because you can put together a generic class of algorithms which find solutions to problems on their own, without you even understanding how to solve problem. These algorithms are known as metaheuristics. Metaheuristics fundamentally cannot be deterministic, they require random noise to work properly, because something that is deterministic will always greedily go in the direction of a more correct solution, and will never explore more incorrect solutions, whereby an even better solution may be beyond the horizon of many incorrect ones. They also do have to be somewhat deterministic as well, because you need some greed or else the random exploration would be aimless.

A simple example of a metaheuristic is that of annealing. If you want to strengthen a sword, you can heat up the metal really hot and let it slowly cool. While it’s really hot, the atoms in the sword will randomly explore different configurations, and as it cools, they will explore less and less, and the overall process leads them to finding rather optimal configurations that strengthen the crystaline structure of the metal.

This simple process can actually be applied generally to solve pretty much any problem. For example, if you are trying to figure out the optimal route to deliver packages, you can simulate this annealing process but rather than atoms searching for an optimal crystaline structure, you have different orders of stops on a graph searching for the shortest path. The “temperature” would be a variable that represents how much random exploration you are willing to accept, i.e. if you alter the configuration and it’s worse, how much worse does it have to be for you to not accept it. A higher temperature would accept worse solutions, at very low temperatures you would only accept solutions that improve upon the route.

I once implemented this algorithm to solve sudoku puzzles and it was very quick at doing so, and the funny thing is, I’ve never even played sudoku before! I do not know how to efficiently solve a sudoku puzzle, I’ve honestly never even solved one by hand, but with sudoku it is very easy to verify whether or not a solution is correct even if you have no idea how to find the solution and even if finding it is very difficult, verifying it is trivially easy. So all I had to do is right the annealing algorithm so that the greedy aspect is based on verifying how many rows/columns are correct, and the exploration part is just randomly moving numbers around.

There are tons of metaheuristic algorithms, and much of them we learn from nature, like annealing, however, there’s also genetic algorithms. The random exploration is done through random mutations through each generation, but the deterministic and greedy aspect of it is the fact that only the most optimal generations are chosen to produce the next generation. This is also a generic algorithm that can be applied to solve any problem. You can see a person here who uses a genetic algorithm to teach a computer how to fly a plane in a simulation.

Modern AI is based on neural networks, which the greedy aspect of them is something called backpropagation, although this on its own is not a metaheuristic, but modern AI tech arguably qualifies because it does not actually work until you introduce random exploration like a method known as drop out whereby you randomly remove neurons during training to encourage the neural network to not overfit. Backpropagation+dropout forms a kind of metaheuristic with both a greedy and exploratory aspect to it, and can be used to solve just about any generic problem. (Technically, ANNs are just function-approximators, so if you want to think of it as a metaheuristic, the full metaheuristic would have to include all the steps of creating, training, and then applying the ANN in practice, as a metaheuristic is a list of steps to solve any generic problem, whereas an ANN on its own is just a function-approximator.)

Indeed, that’s how we get phones to recognize speech and convert it to text. Nobody sat down and wrote a bunch of if-else statements to translate speech into text. Rather, we took a generic nature-inspired algorithm that can produce solutions for any problem, and just applied it to speech recognition, and kept increasing the amount of compute until it could solve the problem on its own. Once it solves it, the solution it spits out is kind of a black box. You can put in speech as an input, and it gives you text as an output, but nobody really even knows fully what is going on in between.

People often act like somehow computers could not solve problems unless humans could also solve them, but computers already have solved millions of problems which not only has no human ever solved but no human can even possibly understand the solution the computer spits out. All we know from studying nature is that there are clever ways to combine random exploration and deterministic greed to form processes which can solve any arbitrary problem given enough time and resources, so we just implement those processes into computers and then keep throwing more time and resources at it until it spits out an answer.

We already understand how nature can produce complex things without anyone “knowing” how it works, because we do that all the time already! You do not need a sentient being to tell the beetle how to evolve to fit into its environment. There is random exploration caused by genetic mutations, but also a deterministic greedy aspect caused by “survival of the fittest.” This causes living organisms to gradually develop over many generations to something fit for its environment. And life has had plenty of time and resources to become more suited to its environment, life has been evolving for billions of years, with the whole resources of the planet earth and the sun.

No, the point is that bacteria can produce toxins in between a company packaging a product and a person receiving it and then boiling it themselves. Companies have to kill the bacteria prior to shipping it. It’s similar to canned foods for example, they put it in the can then heat up the can to kill the bacteria, then ship it, so it shouldn’t have any harmful bacteria in there to begin with.

Good. That’s when Democrats should be criticized the most, because that is the only time you have the power to exercise any leverage over them. Why would you refuse to criticize them when you actually have a tiny bit of leverage and wait until you have no power at all and your criticism is completely irrelevant and will be ignored? That is just someone who wants to complain but doesn’t actually want anything to change.

Boiling things isn’t guaranteed to make it safe, because sometimes bacteria produce toxins as a byproduct that are heat-stable, so if you kill the bacterial you can still get food poisoning if you drink it.

I am an American and i own an electric kettle and use it frequently. I switched to an electric kettle after accidentally turning my microwave into a smoke bomb when I put instant ramen in there and forgot to add the water. Now I only make instant ramen with hot water from a kettle or on the stove.

I can’t say I’ve ever gotten ant on my finger then proceeded to smell my finger.

You can indeed make money by selling it at a higher price without ever using or modifying it, and even if you do use or modify it, profits from the sale still come directly from not using or modifying it.

In Cuba they have a law that requires you to sell your house if you buy a new one. That also means you can’t be a landlord or else you yourself would be homeless. They also have a law that guarantees that if you don’t own your own home, you at least get public housing guaranteed, which has rent capped at 10% of income so it can never exceed that. They have the lowest homelessness rate in all of the Americas.

fumo is a basic human need

Not sure I see the relevance. Yes, housing maintenance costs money, what’s the relevance? Who says housing upkeep is free? What’s the relevance to anything at all?

It always impresses me how much people worship landlords, even Canada up there is having a housing crisis but nobody dares question the sanctity of landlords. You can watch both the major parties arguing for hours and nobody ever brings up landlordism once. A lot of them choose to instead become hostile to immigrants, both parties moving further right on immigration because stopping immigration or potentially even kicking out immigrants to them is more acceptable than questioning the sanctity of landlords. You also saw a similar thing here in the USA, I remember after the Trump/Kamala debate when they revealed the plans for bringing housing prices down and Trump was “mass deportation” and Kamala was “a tax credit.” Not sure about every country definitely here in US and Canada, people here treat landlords like unquestionable deities, the idea that their right to rule should even be called into question is not even something that passes through most people’s heads.

Not surprising as much of online conservatism these days is just gooning. They’re all porn addicts who cry about the wokes taking away their softcore porn from their video games.

the closest thing i guess would be his hyperloop white paper lol

Well, what is boring and non-boring I guess is in the eye of the beholder. What I moreso was referring to is what is difficult to wrap your head around.

The nondeterminism is kind of unavoidable as long as you don’t want to change the mathematics of the theory itself, but I also don’t really consider nondeterminism to be that unintuitive or difficult to “understand.” I mean, throughout most of human history, it wasn’t that common for humans to actually believe in determinism in the Laplacian sense of being able to make absolute prediction to the future based on complete knowledge of the past, that was largely popularized with the rise of Newtonian mechanics, and even by the 19th century you had even a lot of materialist philosophers calling it into question on grounds of logical consistency. Personally, I think the strong desire to maintain Laplacian determinism is really a physicist thing. They work with Newtonian mechanics first and it becomes so intuitive some don’t want to let it go when it comes to quantum mechanics. But I doubt if you went and talked to the average person, most probably wouldn’t be that strongly adherent to Laplacian determinism.

The kinds of views I was talking about are more things like people who try to interpret the state vector as literally representing a physical wave spreading out in space that collapses like a house of cards when you perturb it, or try to envision a literal multiverse where everything is just a big “universal wave function.” A lot of these bizarre views are not only unintuitive but literally impossible to visualize, and they run into a lot of problems in logical consistency and there have been mountains papers and books published on the subject trying to work out all the conceptual issues. If you are a person just learning QM and the philosophical interpretation around it bothers you, if you listen to people who talk about these weird things, you will need to read through dozens of books and maybe even hundreds of papers just to get a general idea of what is going on, and even then most of these interpretations still have not resolved their mountain of conceptual issues.

To me this really bothered me when I got into quantum computing for the first time. I wanted to not just learn the math but have some sort of intuition of what is actually going on. I then went down a rabbit hole of reading tons and tons and tons of books and academic papers to try and find some way to make the math make sense on a philosophical level. Most of the mainstream views you see in the popular media just overcomplicate things for no reason because the person wants to make QM sound more mystical than it actually is. What I ultimately came to realize is that most of this confusion is just self-imposed in the sense that they are based on assumptions which are not actually demanded by the mathematics and entirely optional (such as interpreting a list of probability amplitudes a literal entity in a physical space) and thus most can be stripped away.

You can’t strip away every aspect of QM that makes it unique, because it clearly does differ from classical mechanics, but by dong this you do really hone down on what actually makes QM unique and what is genuinely an unavoidable consequence of the mathematics. And what you get down to is just interference effects, which arise from the fact that probability amplitudes are complex-valued, thus can cancel each other out, which can’t occur in classical probability theory. Nondeterminism and context-dependence then follow from this as a necessity for the theory to be logically consistent, but both of those are fairly easy to have an intuition for.

Yep. Technically you could in principle use Grover’s algorithm to speed up cracking a symmetrical cipher, but the size typically used for the keys is too large so even though it’d technically be faster it still not be possible in practice. Even with asymmetrical ciphers we already have replacements that are quantum safe, although most companies have not implemented them yet.