blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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"Quantum computation happens in parallel worlds simultaneously" is a lazy take trotted out by people who want to believe in parallel worlds. It is a bad mental image, because it gives the misleading impression that a quantum computer could speed up anything. But all the indications from the actual math are that quantum computers would be better at some tasks than at others. (If you want to use the names that CS people have invented for complexity classes, this imagery would lead you to think that quantum computers could whack any problem in EXPSPACE. But the actual complexity class for "problems efficiently solvable on a quantum computer", BQP, is known to be contained in PSPACE, which is strictly smaller than EXPSPACE.) It also completely obscures the very important point that some tasks look like they'd need a quantum computer — the program is written in quantum circuit language and all that — but a classical computer can actually do the job efficiently. Accepting the goofy pop-science/science-fiction imagery as truth would mean you'd never imagine the Gottesman–Knill theorem could be true.

To quote a paper by Andy Steane, one of the early contributors to quantum error correction:

The answer to the question ‘where does a quantum computer manage to perform its amazing computations?’ is, we conclude, ‘in the region of spacetime occupied by the quantum computer’.

Thobama.

This reminded me that TWG has a Twitter account. I could have done without that reminder.

A few years ago, I would have pointed to Elon Musk as someone approximately where I was in the political spectrum. The left pushed him away, the right welcomed him, and he spent hundreds of millions of dollars and put in immense effort to elect Trump.

No, you embossed carbuncle. Apartheid boy was evil all along; you were just too media-illiterate to see through the propaganda.

🌏💧✋🕋🗡🚀🏜☀️🌡🌶💯🚱⏳🌅🌑😡💉😱😈💀💥🌛🌙🐭💥🚶🏻〰🐛️⌛️👳🙏💥😴🛌😳💥🐛💥👊⚔👑

TBH, I ignore her physics takes too. Her background is in the cosmology/quantum gravity corner of the subject. That's a different specialization from the experimental implementation of quantum computers. And when she wandered into quantum foundations, a subject I've put a lot of work into understanding, her thinking came across as in part shallow, in part deliberately contrarian. So, yeah, Google is hyping their work — that's a safe bet — and further progress is going to be harder than the sales talk makes it sound. But on the other hand, it's possible to have "physicist disease" about other subfields of physics than one's own.

(I have not had the time and energy to read the underlying paper in detail myself yet.)

Since I don't think that one professor's uploads can furnish hundreds of billions of tokens... yeah, that sounds exceedingly implausible.

tomatopaste43:

If this isn't a troll, then it's someone in dire need of psychological help.

redhatfilm:

leaning toward the latter.

Hopefully it elaborates on whatever the fuck this is:

Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal.

The solution to falling birthdates isn’t immigration. It’s cultural.

Encourage natural human interaction, sex, physical fitness and spirituality:

• ban Tenga fleshlights and “Japan Real Hole” custom pornstar pocket pussies being sold in Don Quixote grocery stores
• replace conveyor belt sushi and restaurant vending machine ordering, with actual human interaction with a waiter
• replace 24/7 eSports cafes where young males earn false fitness signals via Tekken fighting and Overwatch shooting games, with athletics in school
• heavily stigmatize maid cafes where lonely salarymen pay young girls to dress as anime characters and perform anime dances for them
• revitalize traditional Japanese culture (Shintoism, Okinawan karate, onsen, etc)

If we couldn't react with "wake up babe, new copypasta just dropped" or "tag yourself, I'm the false fitness signal in the maid café", we couldn't react to a lot of life.

We should expect more of this to come. The ascendant right wing is pushing policies that only deliver for people who are already stinking rich. Even if 99% of those who vote that way go along with the propaganda line in the face of their own disappointment, that's still a lot of unhappy people, who are not known for intellectual consistency or calm self-reflection, in a country overflowing with guns. All it takes is one ammosexual who decides that his local Congressman has been co-opted by the (((globalists))), you know?

From the replies:

I see the interest in AI, Peter Thiel, and the far future, but it's a lot more rationality adjacent than EA.

"It's a lot more country than western"

Ah yes, the FRAMΞN, desert warriors of the planet DUNC·.

With significant human input and thorough human review of the material

Yeah, there's no way I can make that any funnier than it already is. Except maybe by calling up a fond memory of rat dck pcks.

Fun Blake fact: I was one bureaucratic technicality away from getting a literature minor to go along with my physics major. I didn't plan for that; we had a Byzantine set of course requirements that we had to meet by mixing and matching whatever electives were available, and somehow, the electives I took piled up to be almost enough for a lit minor. I would have had to take one more course on material written before some cutoff year — I think it was 1900 — but other than that, I had all the checkmarks. I probably could have argued my way to an exemption, since my professors liked me and the department would have gotten their numbers that little bit higher, but I didn't discover this until spring semester of my senior year, when I was already both incredibly busy and incredibly tired.

Not that I have a leg to stand on

Mal Reynolds yeah um hmm wait err hmm.gif

Sounds kind of like a boozy, fizzy Orange Julius...so, yeah, it could work.

First reaction: "Wait, that was in Nature?"

Second reaction: "Oh, Nature Scientific Reports. The 'we have Nature at home' of science journals."

Among many insights, Davis (politely) points out that one of the AI-generated Chaucer poems is just "the opening of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales."

Whan that Aprille with the fuck?

Throwback Thursday: Atlas Shrugged: The Cobra Commander Dialogues

(Based on blog posts now available here.)

From page 17:

Rather than encouraging critical thinking, in core EA the injunction to take unusual ideas seriously means taking one very specific set of unusual ideas seriously, and then providing increasingly convoluted philosophical justifications for why those particular ideas matter most.

ding ding ding

Abstract: This paper presents some of the initial empirical findings from a larger forth-coming study about Effective Altruism (EA). The purpose of presenting these findings disarticulated from the main study is to address a common misunderstanding in the public and academic consciousness about EA, recently pushed to the fore with the publication of EA movement co-founder Will MacAskill’s latest book, What We Owe the Future (WWOTF). Most people in the general public, media, and academia believe EA focuses on reducing global poverty through effective giving, and are struggling to understand EA’s seemingly sudden embrace of ‘longtermism’, futurism, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, and ‘x-risk’ reduction. However, this agenda has been present in EA since its inception, where it was hidden in plain sight. From the very beginning, EA discourse operated on two levels, one for the general public and new recruits (focused on global poverty) and one for the core EA community (focused on the transhumanist agenda articulated by Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others, centered on AI-safety/x-risk, now lumped under the banner of ‘longtermism’). The article’s aim is narrowly focused onpresenting rich qualitative data to make legible the distinction between public-facing EA and core EA.

From the linked Andrew Molitor item:

Why Extropic insists on talking about thermodynamics at all is a mystery, especially since “thermodynamic computing” is an established term that means something quite different from what Extropic is trying to do. This is one of several red flags.

I have a feeling this is related to wanking about physics in the e/acc holy gospels. They invoke thermodynamics the way that people trying to sell you healing crystals for your chakras invoke quantum mechanics.