Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
It reads to me like either they got lucky or encountered a measurement error somewhere, but the peer review notes from Nature donāt show any call outs of obvious BS, though I donāt have any real academic science experience, much less in the specific field of quantum computing.
Then again, this may not be too far beyond the predicted boundaries of what quantum computers are capable of and while the assumption that computation is happening in alternate dimensions seems like it would require quantum physicists to agree on a lot more about interpretation than they currently do the actual performance is probably triggering some false positives in my BS detector.
The peer reviewers didnāt say anything about it because they never saw it: Itās an unilluminating comparison thrown into the press release but not included in the actual paper.
Maybe Iām being overzealous (I can do that sometimes).
But I donāt understand why this particular experiment suggests the multiverse. The logic appears to be something like:
But I donāt understand this argument at all. The universe is quantum, not classical. So why do other worlds need to help with the compute? Why does this experiment suggest it in particular? Why does it make sense for computational costs to be amortized across different worlds if those worlds will then have to go on to do other different quantum calculations than ours? It feels like thereās no āsavingsā anyway. Would a smaller quantum problem feasible to solve classically not imply a multiverse? If so, what exactly is the threshold?
I mean, unrestricted skepticism is the appropriate response to any press release, especially coming out of silicon valley megacorps these days. But I agree that this doesnāt seem like the kind of performance theyāre talking about wouldnāt somehow require extra-dimensional communication and computation, whatever that would even mean.
Indeed, Iāve been involved in crafting a silicon valley megacorp press release before. Iāve seen how the sausage is made! (Mine was more or less factual or I wouldnāt have put my name on it, but dear heavens a lot of wordsmithing goes into any official communication at megacorps)