Dr. Pepper is actually Kurisu Makise

Pigeons’ nests aren’t made to keep stuff inside, they just need to prevent the eggs from rolling off.

The code for the peeler is stale, it stopped working three carrot seasons ago, but no one wants to rewrite the PeelerBladeRdge class.

A quantum computer doesn’t just calculate every possibility simultaneously, it’s much more limited. It “calculates more things at once” in some cases.

Generally speaking, some things that are hard for a regular computer are easy quantum computers. So if an encryption algorithm is based on the difficulty of those things (e.g. RSA is based on the difficulty of factoring a semiprime number), and the thing is easy for a quantum computer (e.g. factoring a semiprime), then you could defeat the algorithm with a quantum computer.

How do you protect yourself? You base the algorithm on something that is difficult for both a regular and quantum computer, that’s what post-quantum algorithms do.

But quantum computers have one last ace up their sleeve. There is a sure-fire algorithm (Grover’s algorithm) to speed up any situation where you need to find an unknown value of a known length (in this case the secret key). To keep it simple, if to find the key a traditional computer would need N steps (because there are N possible keys), a quantum computer would need just √N, which is much less. Now, this sounds massive, and it is, but if you consider that with M bits there are 2^M keys, then if you just need to check √(2^M) keys, it’s like using keys of M/2 bits, so to defend against this you just need to make the key twice as long.

Lastly, as a footnote: quantum computers can be faster than regular computers, but strictly speaking, regular computers are more powerful, that is to say they can do more things. We say that traditional computers are turing-complete, which means that they can compute anything that is computable, that is not the case for quantum computers, which means that some things (even easy things) that a computer can do, cannot be done on a quantum computer. For example, there is no way to implement regular expressions in quantum computers, it’s impossible. I know regex look difficult, but in computation theory they are among the easiest things a computer can do.

Edit: one quick addition to the paragraph about Grover’s algorithm. If a quantum computer really just tried all the solutions at once it would be much faster than that. It would be (may my professor forgive me for saying this) “like if it guessed the bits of the key one at a time and were right on the first try”, so if you had your M bits key, you would need just M steps instead of the 2^(M/2) steps of Grover’s algorithm (this is like the difference speed difference between “checking if a word is palindrome” and “calculating who will win a game of chess when using a perfect strategy”). A computer that works like that… doesn’t (and probably will never) exist. But in literature they are called non-deterministic Turing machines. They would be powerful like a regular computer (not more) but unreasonably faster.

mumble mumble mumble Helvetica Scenario mumble mumble

I’m gonna cause him a Helvetica Scenario

First guess is “the Nile” second guess is “denial” , third guess is Sinai. Also, what the hell is that, an AI catcher?

2+2=5

1337x and chill

The radio was part of the template

It’s like those impossible comb geometry, one side is a box, the other is the spine of a book

Tech Bros make a panopticon and call it a novel approach

I’m about to do this to this kernel driver. Certainly broken before, possibly broken after, what’s the worst that could happen

But unironically, “having faith” implies that you do not need proof but you are trusting your belief. So they are kind of correct

I feel like this argument is way too imprecise, to the point of being basically untrue. That’s probably based on the average emissions or something like that, but people are not the same and “emission responsibility” is wildly different.

Imagine killing 34k exploited African people, the world’s climate won’t even notice that. On the other hand, killing 34k middle class Americans or Europeans would probably be a little more effective, but still won’t fix anything. Now, killing 34k high-profile megacorp executives would definitely be much more effective, but would also collapse some economies, leading to various climate unfriendly events (like riots, war and shit).

But the simplest empirical evidence is: COVID killed 6 million people and the climate is still shit.

Source: I made it the fuck up, I’m talking out of my ass