Notices by Jason Gorman (jasongorman@mastodon.cloud)

The UK government seems to be discovering what so many other businesses have discovered: there's very few viable use cases for the technology

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/27/ai-prototypes-uk-welfare-system-dropped

@aral Unless you have $44 billion to hand, of course

MAGA? Blocked. Musk stan? Blocked. Anti-vaxxer? Blocked. "Anti-woke"? Blocked.

I've wasted a decade and half debating "the controversy". You don't want a debate. You're just keeping me busy while you burn books and fix elections.

And you can fuck off with your "But whatabout mah free speeches?"

So you're free to say what ever you like. And I'm free to ignore you.

The current state of the art in quantum computing is processors that can do amazingly fast computations addressing such tiny amounts of data as to make them practically useless - or should I say "use case-less"?

QC researchers estimate it will require about 1,000 physical qubits to model one logical qubit, because of the need for error correction.

Even if Willow significantly improves on that ratio, unless they've improved it by 10x, that means Willow implements less than one logical qubit *reliably*.

Their press release is like Intel announcing a chip with less than one transistor by talking about 3D animation and digital signal processing.

A lot of hoopla about Google's new quantum computer chip. To put it into perspective, in 2019, largest quantum ICs had ~50 physical qubits. Google's new chip has 105. Experts estimate practical applications of quantum computing when scale reaches a million+, maybe in 60-70 years' time? (If ever)

(That is to say that the applications we're reading about in the Google press releases would require 1M+ physical qubits)

"Your house is on fire!"

"I think you'll find it's a maisonette, actually"

If I've learned one thing in 32 years in software development, it's never to underestimate the capacity for engineers to completely miss the point.

This has the same vibe as those pictures of where they found the bullet holes on Spitfires returning from missions.