8 ms·

Man, reading this makes me feel so small. Being a "software engineer" consuming APIs and updating database rows seems laughably childish compared to whatever th

Man, reading this makes me feel so small. Being a "software engineer" consuming APIs and updating database rows seems laughably childish compared to whatever the hell it is I just read. I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it. It's completely inaccessible. Only an elite few get to touch these machines.

arresin 2y ago
I had exactly the same thought. I read it after struggling for hours, making notes, etc, with a very hard (to me) part of my code and it made it seem pretty trivial.
gist 2y ago
Anything that someone else does that you don't understand or can't do always sounds super important, impressive, and enviable. Usually. But you have to realize that he spends his life doing and thinking about this. And will stipulate he's gifted in this area. I've never heard of him but managed to download his CV. I will also note that sometimes when I read HN links and think one thing then read the comments and people know enough to take issue with what is being said and even call it out.
brailsafe 2y ago
> I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it. Well, maybe you should just try for the hell of it and see how far you get? Becoming fit seems impossible to a morbidly obese 45 y.o, and it is if that person's expectation is unreasonable, but if they just change it to be more reasonable, break it down into manageable routines, then they can get somewhere eventually. Find some papers, fill many gaps, dedicate a few years in your spare time, in 6 months you'll be 6 months closer than you were. Whether there's a reason or not, idk, it's something to do, be curious. Don't forget that by dedicating their life to something, they're naturally not dedicating their life to other things, things that you might be able to do, like climbing mountains, making pizza, or coming up with witty banter in social situations.
- rkp8000 2y ago
  MSR has a very clear and accessible tutorial on quantum computing for anyone interested in getting up to speed with the fundamentals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM .
- guilamu 2y ago
  This is very rare, so much I can't remember when was the last time it happened, but I was inspired by your words. Thank you for writing them.
- absoluteunit1 2y ago
  Clicked on this article to learn a bit more about this newly released chip but instead got extremely motivated to pursue intellectual interests intensely
- nsxwolf 2y ago
  I have a treadmill though. Even though I don't use it. I can't get a quantum computer.
  - owlmirror 2y ago
    most experts in that field do not have access to a quantum computer. For the longest times it was a very theoretical field. Having access to a physical machine will not help you for 99% of the knowledge you can acquire in that field right now.
    - desdenova 2y ago
      Everyone forgets people have been doing quantum computing research for decades. Shor's algorithm is from 1994.
  - trhway 2y ago
    i think you can. A very simple one - an optical based one, one qubit. Several thousand dollars of equipment of a typical university photon quantum entanglement lab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLM_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLM_protocol
ojbyrne 2y ago
As with most novel hardware since the dawn of computing, there are ways to emulate it. https://www.ibm.com/quantum/qiskit https://www.ibm.com/quantum/qiskit
- bigiain 2y ago
  Damian Conway did it in Perl back in the late 90's: https://metacpan.org/pod/Quantum::Superpositions https://metacpan.org/pod/Quantum::Superpositions (Sadly, the Perl Module has to do classical calculations underneath to get the Quantum computing code/functions to execute, but it let you experiment with silly little QC toys - "Look, I factorised 15 in parallel!!!")
rhubarbtree 2y ago
The theory of quantum computation is accessible with a good understanding of linear algebra. Anyone working in machine learning or computer graphics should feel encouraged by that, and take a look at the theory. Quantum error correction is one of those “wow” moments like euler’s identity, it is worth making the effort to get there.
- acscott 2y ago
  e^(iπ) +1 = 0 e, i, π, 1, 0 Beauty
  - alanfalcon 2y ago
    e^(iτ) = 1; true beauty.
- arrowsmith 2y ago
  I feel like I have a fairly good understanding of linear algebra, or at least I did when I studied it at uni but that was a while ago. Any suggestions for where I can learn more about the theory of quantum computation?
  - rhubarbtree 2y ago
    The classic is "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" by Nielsen & Chuang.
gerdesj 2y ago
Start with the handy precis that Mr A leaves at the top in yellow. You can drop that into conversation right now with some confidence! Mr A has quite some clout hereabouts let alone elsewhere, so that seems reasonable. You can't know everything but knowing what you don't know and when to rely on someone else to know what you don't know and to confidently quote or use what they know that you don't know, is a skill too. "Critical thinking", and I suspect you do know how to do that and whilst this blog post might be somewhat impenetrable it is still might be useful to you, even as just general knowledge. Use your skills to determine - for you and you alone - whether it is truth, false or somewhere in between. Besides, a mental work out is good for you!
hellojebus 2y ago
This was me yesterday after reading the official Willow release. Spent yesterday afternoon and this morning learning what I could. I'm now superficially familiar with quantum coherence, superposition, and phase relationships. In other words, you got this. Now I gotta learn linear algebra. brb.
- billti 2y ago
  I gave a plug for this yesterday, but if you want to try the Quantum Katas from Azure Quantum, it runs in the browser and covers this stuff. See lesson 3 for linear algebra. <https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas> One thing I did forget to mention is that you can play with this stuff in a "familiar to software developers" way in our VS Code playground at <https://vscode.dev/quantum/playground/ https://vscode.dev/quantum/playground/> . This is a 'code first' approach familiar to software developers leveraging VS Code integration. The playground is pre-populated with a bunch of common quantum algorithms. You can also install the extension in VS Code directly (<https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=quantum.qsharp-lang-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=quantum....>), you don't need to run it in the browser, but even in the browser it has a fully working language service, debugger, evaluator, quantum simulator, package management, etc. It's all written in Rust and compiled to either Wasm for the browser and VS Code extension, or native code for the Python package. (I'm thinking about doing a video on how we build it, as I expect it will interesting to this type of crowd. Let me know if so). Disclaimer: I work in Azure Quantum on the product mentioned. AMA.
  - MicrosoftShill 2y ago
    Hey there - professionally I'm a sr cloud engineer focused on Azure. I have an interest in quantum as a hobbyist and maybe a career focus in coming years/decades. Katas seems like a good place to learn things, but if you were to give a 5 year outlook, what specifically should I be looking into? Is there something as an administrator/architect of these quantum products that I should focus expertise on? Or something in the Azure/O365/etc ecosystem I should be looking at that leverages these technologies? If I was to become a consultant, what would be my focus as an Azure cloud engineer in relation to quantum technologies? I'm unsure I am even asking the right questions. I'd appreciate any direction you can give me!
sleepybrett 2y ago
> Only an elite few get to touch these machines. For now, people were saying the same thing about mainframes in the 60s
simpaticoder 2y ago
We are all small in every domain in which we are not an expert, which is approximately all of them. The "computer" domain has expanded wildly over the last 50 years to include so many specialties that even within it one cannot possibly acquire expertise in everything. And of course "computers" do not include (although they do impact!) the vast majority of domains. If you want to go deeper into quantum computing, I can highly recommend Scott Aaronson's own book, "Quantum Computing since Democritus"[0]. Although I have a background in physics and math, I found his style lively and engaging with truly unique and compact recapitulations of things I already knew (two come to mind: his description of Cantor's diagnalization argument, and the assertion that QM is the natural consequence of "negative probabilities" being real. The later is a marvelous insight that I've personally gotten a lot of use out of). It's also useful to understand the boundary of what quantum computing is. At the end of the day what we'll see are "QaaS" apis that give us the ability to, for example, factor large primes. You won't need to know Shor's algorithm or the implementation details, you'll just get your answer exponentially faster than the classical method. I would not expect desktop quantum computers, languages designed for them, or general user software designed to run on them. (Of course, eventually someone will make Doom run on one, but that's decades in the future.) https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?mtype=B&keyword=quantum+computing+since+democritus https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?mtype=B&keyword=quantum+c...
bamboozled 2y ago
The machines you program today were once only accessible by "elites" too though?
nicebyte 2y ago
if it makes you feel any better, it is almost impossible to do anything practically useful at all with quantum computation at the moment. this is a field for researchers, people who are okay with not seeing the fruits of their work materialize for decades, if ever. by not understanding it, you're not missing anything more than what you're missing by not understanding e.g. string theory.
homefree 2y ago
I think the jargon makes it seem scarier/less approachable than it is. There's tons of jargon in every new branch of anything interesting that you first notice, but it's not as impenetrable as it appears (at least for a high level understanding imo).
random3 2y ago
As hard it may seem to you to tackle that, it's harder to convince others like you that tackling it can be like child play. Not just QM/QC (which btw it's beeing successfully taught to highschoolers) but any "advanced" topic. I hope we'll be able to look back and laugh at how backwards education was "back in the day" and how dumb people were to think that some were "elite few", while the reality is that the "elite few" were the "lucky few" to not be deprived of learning to think either by having the right people around them or the right context to find it by themselves.
- voidhorse 2y ago
  totally, education across the globe is currently severely suboptimized. At this point there's troves of research on what actually works when it comes to learning, yet the educational systems that implement these techniques are still incredibly scarce
  - deprecative 2y ago
    Most education systems, particularly within the US, have very little interest in educating for critical thought and reasoning. They exist as both day care and labor exploitation pipelines.
    - random3 2y ago
      this (and many other things) seem more a natural effect than something intentional. Are you suggesting something different?
ericmcer 2y ago
Some people say higher education is a privilege, but a few times during college while grinding out difficult classes it felt more like a huge burden. Being part of a highly educated elite group like that has some huge benefits, but they have also shackled themselves to an insanely specialized and highly difficult niche. I can't imagine the stress they are under and the potential for despair when dedicating years to something with so much uncertainty.
kmarc 2y ago
You captured very well my sentiment. Also same feelings for AI. I'm wondering if it's time for me to switch professions and give up compsci / software altogether.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  The complexity in AI, for common use-cases, is well encapsulated right now. Many pre-trained models and libraries that hide most of the complexity.
  - kmarc 2y ago
    Indeed. That's my understanding, too. However, my sentiment is rather this: I wouldn't pass an assembly programming interview, but I know enough about it so that I know what I don't know. Same with embedded programming, fpgas, machine learning stuff, big data, networking, etc etc. As for LLMs and quantum computing, I don't even know the basics, have no idea about the broader science behind it. Worst is that I don't feel like it interests me, I don't feel excited about it. I guess if tomorrow I had to work with them, I could learn some "libraries that hide the complexity", but it leaves me with an empty feeling about these new technologies. Hence the existential question if I'm "too old for this" career path at all.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Nah. You don't have to feel excited about every single new bit of tech that comes along. About 15 years ago I became interested in really advanced cryptography, because it was presented at a Bitcoin conference I went to. If you think AI is hard, that's kindergarten stuff compared to the maths behind zero knowledge proofs. And because nobody cared at that time outside of a handful of academics, there were no tutorials, blog posts or anything else to help. Just a giant mound of academic papers, often undated so it was hard to even figure out if what you were reading had been superseded already. But it seemed important, so I dived in and started reading papers. At first, maybe only 5% of the words made sense. So I grabbed onto those 5%. I read a paper, put it down for a while, re-read it later and found I understood more. I talked to the researchers, emailed them, asked questions. I read the older papers that initiated the field, and that helped. It was a lot of work. You know what? In the end, it was a waste of time. The knowledge ended up being useful primarily for explaining why I wasn't using those algorithms in my designs. A lot of the claims sounded useful but ended up not being so for complicated reasons, and anyway, I was mostly interested in what you could do with the tech rather than the tech itself. Turns out there's always a small number of people who are willing to dive in and make the magic happen in a nicely abstracted way for everyone else, for any kind of tech. QC is no different. There's, as far as I can tell, very little reason to learn it. If QC does ever "happen" it'll presumably 95% of the time be in the form of a cloud service where you upload problems that fit a quantum algorithm worked out by someone else, pay, and download the answer. Just like LLMs are - another topic where I was reading papers back in 2017 and that knowledge turned out to not be especially useful in regular life. Learn the details of stuff if it naturally interests you. Ignore it if it doesn't. Being a specialist in an obscure domain can occasionally be like striking the jackpot, but it's rare and not something to feel bad about if you just don't want to.
Sakurai_Quantum 2y ago
We recently launched of our self-paced, mathematically rigorous course on quantum computing! This comprehensive introduction is designed to help you grasp foundational concepts like superposition and entanglement with mathematical clarity and depth. Here’s a sneak peek from Lecture 6: https://youtu.be/6rf-hjyNl4U https://youtu.be/6rf-hjyNl4U You can sign up via: https://quantumformalism.academy/mathematical-foundations-for-quantum-computing https://quantumformalism.academy/mathematical-foundations-fo...
genewitch 2y ago
they buried the lede. google doesn't have 2 qubits to rub together 100%. 105 "qubits" make a "single" qubit after coalescing or whatever. I'm really annoyed because i've kinda followed this since the mid-90s and this is the first time i am hearing that "it'll probably take millions of physical qubits to crack 256 bit" to me the whole endeavor smells like a bait and switch or something. I remember about 10 years ago canada or someone had at least a few hundred qubits if not close to 1000 of them, but these were physical qubits, and don't represent anything, really. Google's 105 finally makes a "fast enough" single qubit or at best half of a pair.
- namaria 2y ago
  Silicon valley figured out decades ago that the trick to keep R&D dollars flowing is to balance on the verge of getting amazing results (AI/AGI; defeat cryptography) and not proving these efforts fruitless. The end result needs only be plausible and fantastic at the same time.
owenfi 2y ago
Also good starting places (but still, only understood a tiny bit of what was there). https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/208/scott-aaronson-separating-quantum-computing-hype-from-reality https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/208/scott-aarons... https://quantum.country https://quantum.country
deleted 2y ago
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benreesman 2y ago
I’d urge you to not feel small. First of all, the formalism/practice gap is real: taking API calls and updating a database correctly has a mountain of formalism around it. And it is not easy to get right! Concurrent sequential processes and distributed systems theory and a bunch of topics have a huge formalism. It is also the case that many (most?) working software engineers have internalized much of that formalism: they “play by ear” rather than read sheet music, but what matters is if it sounds good. Second, whether it’s quantum computing or frontier machine learning or any other formalism-heavy topic? It’s eminently possible to learn this stuff. There’s a certain lingering credentialism around “you need a PhD” or whatever, I call BS: this stuff is learnable. Keep hacking, keep pushing yourself on topics you’re passionate about, but don’t consign yourself to some inferior caste. You’re just as likely as the next person to be the next self-taught superstar.
29athrowaway 2y ago
AWS Bracket is on AWS Free Tier.
UltraSane 2y ago
When Corridor Digital was analyzing the really impressive time spaghetti effect in Loki season 2 they said "there are two kinds of CGI artists. The kind that use the buttons and the kind the program the buttons."
krisgenre 2y ago
Thank you. Seeing this as the top comment actually makes me feel better as I now know that I am not alone.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Same, but kind of; I'm so far removed from higher up engineering stuff like quantum stuff, nuclear fusion stuff, LHC stuff, astronomy stuff, AI stuff that I just scan it, grab a coffee, raise an eyebrow and go "Interesting", then go about my day and wonder what the fuck I'm supposed to be doing at work again. Oh right, implement a component, same thing I've been doing for the past decade or so. Thing is, I don't know how to get out without on the one side giving up my comfort zone (well paid, doable work), and on the other side gaining responsibility / being looked at as an expert in any field (that's where impostor syndrome and responsibility aversion comes in). I really need a holiday lol.
illwrks 2y ago
I know absolutely nothing about quantum, but I did watch this Bloomberg video this week which was very helpful to understand it in layman’s term. https://youtu.be/1_gJp2uAjO0?si=--XzbVlAT3w9hw2L https://youtu.be/1_gJp2uAjO0?si=--XzbVlAT3w9hw2L
- riteshpatidar 2y ago
  You can also for Veritasium's videos on quantum computing, if you are a fan of his videos.
weatherlite 2y ago
> I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it Why should you? I agree with your sentiment, super advanced quantum physics is probably out of reach for 99% of the population (I'm estimating here but I think it's reasonable to assume that's the average IQ of the physics PHDs who can actually understand this stuff to a deep level). You can probably make the effort to understand something about what's going on there, but it will be very superficial. Going advanced quantum physics takes a huge amount of effort and an incredible capacity for learning complex things. And even the advanced physics guys don't and can't understand a bunch of very elementary things about reality, so it's not as if the feeling of not understanding stuff ever goes away.
- n4r9 2y ago
  To be fair you don't need to know advanced quantum physics to understand a lot of quantum computing, including Aaronson's discussion of this paper. It's pretty accessible with undergraduate-level linear algebra and computer science concepts.
renegade-otter 2y ago
And yet it pays the bills and runs the world, doesn't it. React 19 is out and it's time to hit the docs eh to solve the same exact problem we've had for the last 30 years in a slightly better (or NOT) way.
sourcepluck 2y ago
People feel like this about domains they don't know all the time. Don't allow your ignorance of an area to trick you into thinking you can't learn that area. It's just new to you! Source: teaching beginners piano for years. Of course sheet music looks like gobbledygook, until you've spent a bit of time learning the basic rules!
vishnugupta 2y ago
A few years ago I made peace with the fact that my space of ignorance is humongous and will only get exponentially bigger. Even in the domain of my work which is software engineering. It liberated me from the pressure or burden of having to learn or know everything and enabled me to focus on things that I truly like to pursue. I’ve made a list of 4-5 things at which I want to be extremely good at in 10 years compared to where I’m today. Now I just spend time on those. I occasionally wander into something new just for the sake of diversion.
numpad0 2y ago
It's also way harder to make money doing "not laughably childish" stuffs. The more accessible and human-connected it gets, the more likely people recognize and pays you. People criticize yes-men getting rewarded but you have to be nearly clinically insane to recognize value of a no-machine like a partial prototype quantum supercomputer.
lr4444lr 2y ago
To be fair, probably everyone who "touches these things" had extensive graduate work on the topic, or put in a lot of long years toiling away at far less exciting and remunerative grunt work. They weren't just super bright CS undergrads who got entry level jobs you couldn't.
compumetrika 2y ago
I haven't tried this yet myself, but have you tried plugging it into GPT or Claude or Perplexity and asking Qs? I've made some progress on thongs this way, much faster than I would have the usual way. Apply the usual precautions about hallucinations etc (and maybe do the "ask multiple AIs the same thing" thing). We don't yet have a perfect tutor in these machines, but on balance I've gained from talking to them about deep topics.
matthewdgreen 2y ago
For what it’s worth, Scott spent the last few years working for OpenAI because he wanted to do something much more applied than quantum information theory. As an applied scientist I’m aghast: he’s one of the few people who actually gets to “touch the firmament of the Universe,” why would you ever give that up for mere applied science (even science as interesting as whatever goes on inside OpenAI) :) But as a human being I understand it. The grass is always greener somewhere else, and doing tangible things is sometimes more fun. TL;DR: whatever you’re doing, there’s probably someone who wishes they were doing it instead.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> Being a "software engineer" consuming APIs and updating database rows ... > Only an elite few get to touch these machines. But lately many can run quite a lot of AI models at home. Doesn't require too crazy of a setup. Why not build something software fun at home that doesn't involve a DB? Maybe using some free AI model? I did experiment lately: automatically "screenshot" a browser and ask an AI to find the URL and ask if the URL and site looked like a phishing attempt or not. Fun stuff (and it works). I tried installing one of these "photo gallery" in a Docker container (where you can put all your family/travel pics and let anyone on your LAN [or on the net] browse them). I saw some of these have "similarity" searches features. I also saw that SAM / SAM2 (Meta's Segment Anything Model) was plenty quick: some people are using these to analyze video frames in real-time. So I was thinking about sending all my family pictures through SAM2 (or a similar model: I saw some modified SAM2 to make it even faster) and then augmenting the "similarity search" by using the results of SAM2. For example finding all the pictures about "pool", etc. And why limit myself to pictures? I could do family vids too: "Find all the vids where that item can be seen". Possibilities at the moment seems endless: times are exciting if you ask me.
lbltavares 2y ago
Not even Einstein got it, you're fine

arresin 2y ago

I had exactly the same thought. I read it after struggling for hours, making notes, etc, with a very hard (to me) part of my code and it made it seem pretty trivial.

gist 2y ago

Anything that someone else does that you don't understand or can't do always sounds super important, impressive, and enviable. Usually. But you have to realize that he spends his life doing and thinking about this. And will stipulate he's gifted in this area. I've never heard of him but managed to download his CV. I will also note that sometimes when I read HN links and think one thing then read the comments and people know enough to take issue with what is being said and even call it out.

brailsafe 2y ago

> I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it. Well, maybe you should just try for the hell of it and see how far you get? Becoming fit seems impossible to a morbidly obese 45 y.o, and it is if that person's expectation is unreasonable, but if they just change it to be more reasonable, break it down into manageable routines, then they can get somewhere eventually. Find some papers, fill many gaps, dedicate a few years in your spare time, in 6 months you'll be 6 months closer than you were. Whether there's a reason or not, idk, it's something to do, be curious. Don't forget that by dedicating their life to something, they're naturally not dedicating their life to other things, things that you might be able to do, like climbing mountains, making pizza, or coming up with witty banter in social situations.

rkp8000 2y ago
MSR has a very clear and accessible tutorial on quantum computing for anyone interested in getting up to speed with the fundamentals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM .
guilamu 2y ago
This is very rare, so much I can't remember when was the last time it happened, but I was inspired by your words. Thank you for writing them.
absoluteunit1 2y ago
Clicked on this article to learn a bit more about this newly released chip but instead got extremely motivated to pursue intellectual interests intensely
nsxwolf 2y ago
I have a treadmill though. Even though I don't use it. I can't get a quantum computer.
- owlmirror 2y ago
  most experts in that field do not have access to a quantum computer. For the longest times it was a very theoretical field. Having access to a physical machine will not help you for 99% of the knowledge you can acquire in that field right now.
  - desdenova 2y ago
    Everyone forgets people have been doing quantum computing research for decades. Shor's algorithm is from 1994.
- trhway 2y ago
  i think you can. A very simple one - an optical based one, one qubit. Several thousand dollars of equipment of a typical university photon quantum entanglement lab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLM_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLM_protocol

ojbyrne 2y ago

As with most novel hardware since the dawn of computing, there are ways to emulate it. https://www.ibm.com/quantum/qiskit https://www.ibm.com/quantum/qiskit

bigiain 2y ago
Damian Conway did it in Perl back in the late 90's: https://metacpan.org/pod/Quantum::Superpositions https://metacpan.org/pod/Quantum::Superpositions (Sadly, the Perl Module has to do classical calculations underneath to get the Quantum computing code/functions to execute, but it let you experiment with silly little QC toys - "Look, I factorised 15 in parallel!!!")

rhubarbtree 2y ago

The theory of quantum computation is accessible with a good understanding of linear algebra. Anyone working in machine learning or computer graphics should feel encouraged by that, and take a look at the theory. Quantum error correction is one of those “wow” moments like euler’s identity, it is worth making the effort to get there.

acscott 2y ago
e^(iπ) +1 = 0 e, i, π, 1, 0 Beauty
- alanfalcon 2y ago
  e^(iτ) = 1; true beauty.
arrowsmith 2y ago
I feel like I have a fairly good understanding of linear algebra, or at least I did when I studied it at uni but that was a while ago. Any suggestions for where I can learn more about the theory of quantum computation?
- rhubarbtree 2y ago
  The classic is "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" by Nielsen & Chuang.

gerdesj 2y ago

Start with the handy precis that Mr A leaves at the top in yellow. You can drop that into conversation right now with some confidence! Mr A has quite some clout hereabouts let alone elsewhere, so that seems reasonable. You can't know everything but knowing what you don't know and when to rely on someone else to know what you don't know and to confidently quote or use what they know that you don't know, is a skill too. "Critical thinking", and I suspect you do know how to do that and whilst this blog post might be somewhat impenetrable it is still might be useful to you, even as just general knowledge. Use your skills to determine - for you and you alone - whether it is truth, false or somewhere in between. Besides, a mental work out is good for you!

hellojebus 2y ago

This was me yesterday after reading the official Willow release. Spent yesterday afternoon and this morning learning what I could. I'm now superficially familiar with quantum coherence, superposition, and phase relationships. In other words, you got this. Now I gotta learn linear algebra. brb.

billti 2y ago
I gave a plug for this yesterday, but if you want to try the Quantum Katas from Azure Quantum, it runs in the browser and covers this stuff. See lesson 3 for linear algebra. <https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas> One thing I did forget to mention is that you can play with this stuff in a "familiar to software developers" way in our VS Code playground at <https://vscode.dev/quantum/playground/ https://vscode.dev/quantum/playground/> . This is a 'code first' approach familiar to software developers leveraging VS Code integration. The playground is pre-populated with a bunch of common quantum algorithms. You can also install the extension in VS Code directly (<https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=quantum.qsharp-lang-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=quantum....>), you don't need to run it in the browser, but even in the browser it has a fully working language service, debugger, evaluator, quantum simulator, package management, etc. It's all written in Rust and compiled to either Wasm for the browser and VS Code extension, or native code for the Python package. (I'm thinking about doing a video on how we build it, as I expect it will interesting to this type of crowd. Let me know if so). Disclaimer: I work in Azure Quantum on the product mentioned. AMA.
- MicrosoftShill 2y ago
  Hey there - professionally I'm a sr cloud engineer focused on Azure. I have an interest in quantum as a hobbyist and maybe a career focus in coming years/decades. Katas seems like a good place to learn things, but if you were to give a 5 year outlook, what specifically should I be looking into? Is there something as an administrator/architect of these quantum products that I should focus expertise on? Or something in the Azure/O365/etc ecosystem I should be looking at that leverages these technologies? If I was to become a consultant, what would be my focus as an Azure cloud engineer in relation to quantum technologies? I'm unsure I am even asking the right questions. I'd appreciate any direction you can give me!

sleepybrett 2y ago

> Only an elite few get to touch these machines. For now, people were saying the same thing about mainframes in the 60s

simpaticoder 2y ago

We are all small in every domain in which we are not an expert, which is approximately all of them. The "computer" domain has expanded wildly over the last 50 years to include so many specialties that even within it one cannot possibly acquire expertise in everything. And of course "computers" do not include (although they do impact!) the vast majority of domains. If you want to go deeper into quantum computing, I can highly recommend Scott Aaronson's own book, "Quantum Computing since Democritus"[0]. Although I have a background in physics and math, I found his style lively and engaging with truly unique and compact recapitulations of things I already knew (two come to mind: his description of Cantor's diagnalization argument, and the assertion that QM is the natural consequence of "negative probabilities" being real. The later is a marvelous insight that I've personally gotten a lot of use out of). It's also useful to understand the boundary of what quantum computing is. At the end of the day what we'll see are "QaaS" apis that give us the ability to, for example, factor large primes. You won't need to know Shor's algorithm or the implementation details, you'll just get your answer exponentially faster than the classical method. I would not expect desktop quantum computers, languages designed for them, or general user software designed to run on them. (Of course, eventually someone will make Doom run on one, but that's decades in the future.) https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?mtype=B&keyword=quantum+computing+since+democritus https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?mtype=B&keyword=quantum+c...

bamboozled 2y ago

The machines you program today were once only accessible by "elites" too though?

nicebyte 2y ago

if it makes you feel any better, it is almost impossible to do anything practically useful at all with quantum computation at the moment. this is a field for researchers, people who are okay with not seeing the fruits of their work materialize for decades, if ever. by not understanding it, you're not missing anything more than what you're missing by not understanding e.g. string theory.

homefree 2y ago

I think the jargon makes it seem scarier/less approachable than it is. There's tons of jargon in every new branch of anything interesting that you first notice, but it's not as impenetrable as it appears (at least for a high level understanding imo).

random3 2y ago

As hard it may seem to you to tackle that, it's harder to convince others like you that tackling it can be like child play. Not just QM/QC (which btw it's beeing successfully taught to highschoolers) but any "advanced" topic. I hope we'll be able to look back and laugh at how backwards education was "back in the day" and how dumb people were to think that some were "elite few", while the reality is that the "elite few" were the "lucky few" to not be deprived of learning to think either by having the right people around them or the right context to find it by themselves.

voidhorse 2y ago
totally, education across the globe is currently severely suboptimized. At this point there's troves of research on what actually works when it comes to learning, yet the educational systems that implement these techniques are still incredibly scarce
- deprecative 2y ago
  Most education systems, particularly within the US, have very little interest in educating for critical thought and reasoning. They exist as both day care and labor exploitation pipelines.
  - random3 2y ago
    this (and many other things) seem more a natural effect than something intentional. Are you suggesting something different?

ericmcer 2y ago

Some people say higher education is a privilege, but a few times during college while grinding out difficult classes it felt more like a huge burden. Being part of a highly educated elite group like that has some huge benefits, but they have also shackled themselves to an insanely specialized and highly difficult niche. I can't imagine the stress they are under and the potential for despair when dedicating years to something with so much uncertainty.

kmarc 2y ago

You captured very well my sentiment. Also same feelings for AI. I'm wondering if it's time for me to switch professions and give up compsci / software altogether.

29athrowaway 2y ago
The complexity in AI, for common use-cases, is well encapsulated right now. Many pre-trained models and libraries that hide most of the complexity.
- kmarc 2y ago
  Indeed. That's my understanding, too. However, my sentiment is rather this: I wouldn't pass an assembly programming interview, but I know enough about it so that I know what I don't know. Same with embedded programming, fpgas, machine learning stuff, big data, networking, etc etc. As for LLMs and quantum computing, I don't even know the basics, have no idea about the broader science behind it. Worst is that I don't feel like it interests me, I don't feel excited about it. I guess if tomorrow I had to work with them, I could learn some "libraries that hide the complexity", but it leaves me with an empty feeling about these new technologies. Hence the existential question if I'm "too old for this" career path at all.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Nah. You don't have to feel excited about every single new bit of tech that comes along. About 15 years ago I became interested in really advanced cryptography, because it was presented at a Bitcoin conference I went to. If you think AI is hard, that's kindergarten stuff compared to the maths behind zero knowledge proofs. And because nobody cared at that time outside of a handful of academics, there were no tutorials, blog posts or anything else to help. Just a giant mound of academic papers, often undated so it was hard to even figure out if what you were reading had been superseded already. But it seemed important, so I dived in and started reading papers. At first, maybe only 5% of the words made sense. So I grabbed onto those 5%. I read a paper, put it down for a while, re-read it later and found I understood more. I talked to the researchers, emailed them, asked questions. I read the older papers that initiated the field, and that helped. It was a lot of work. You know what? In the end, it was a waste of time. The knowledge ended up being useful primarily for explaining why I wasn't using those algorithms in my designs. A lot of the claims sounded useful but ended up not being so for complicated reasons, and anyway, I was mostly interested in what you could do with the tech rather than the tech itself. Turns out there's always a small number of people who are willing to dive in and make the magic happen in a nicely abstracted way for everyone else, for any kind of tech. QC is no different. There's, as far as I can tell, very little reason to learn it. If QC does ever "happen" it'll presumably 95% of the time be in the form of a cloud service where you upload problems that fit a quantum algorithm worked out by someone else, pay, and download the answer. Just like LLMs are - another topic where I was reading papers back in 2017 and that knowledge turned out to not be especially useful in regular life. Learn the details of stuff if it naturally interests you. Ignore it if it doesn't. Being a specialist in an obscure domain can occasionally be like striking the jackpot, but it's rare and not something to feel bad about if you just don't want to.

Sakurai_Quantum 2y ago

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genewitch 2y ago

they buried the lede. google doesn't have 2 qubits to rub together 100%. 105 "qubits" make a "single" qubit after coalescing or whatever. I'm really annoyed because i've kinda followed this since the mid-90s and this is the first time i am hearing that "it'll probably take millions of physical qubits to crack 256 bit" to me the whole endeavor smells like a bait and switch or something. I remember about 10 years ago canada or someone had at least a few hundred qubits if not close to 1000 of them, but these were physical qubits, and don't represent anything, really. Google's 105 finally makes a "fast enough" single qubit or at best half of a pair.

namaria 2y ago
Silicon valley figured out decades ago that the trick to keep R&D dollars flowing is to balance on the verge of getting amazing results (AI/AGI; defeat cryptography) and not proving these efforts fruitless. The end result needs only be plausible and fantastic at the same time.

owenfi 2y ago

Also good starting places (but still, only understood a tiny bit of what was there). https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/208/scott-aaronson-separating-quantum-computing-hype-from-reality https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/208/scott-aarons... https://quantum.country https://quantum.country

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benreesman 2y ago

I’d urge you to not feel small. First of all, the formalism/practice gap is real: taking API calls and updating a database correctly has a mountain of formalism around it. And it is not easy to get right! Concurrent sequential processes and distributed systems theory and a bunch of topics have a huge formalism. It is also the case that many (most?) working software engineers have internalized much of that formalism: they “play by ear” rather than read sheet music, but what matters is if it sounds good. Second, whether it’s quantum computing or frontier machine learning or any other formalism-heavy topic? It’s eminently possible to learn this stuff. There’s a certain lingering credentialism around “you need a PhD” or whatever, I call BS: this stuff is learnable. Keep hacking, keep pushing yourself on topics you’re passionate about, but don’t consign yourself to some inferior caste. You’re just as likely as the next person to be the next self-taught superstar.

29athrowaway 2y ago

AWS Bracket is on AWS Free Tier.

UltraSane 2y ago

When Corridor Digital was analyzing the really impressive time spaghetti effect in Loki season 2 they said "there are two kinds of CGI artists. The kind that use the buttons and the kind the program the buttons."

krisgenre 2y ago

Thank you. Seeing this as the top comment actually makes me feel better as I now know that I am not alone.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

Same, but kind of; I'm so far removed from higher up engineering stuff like quantum stuff, nuclear fusion stuff, LHC stuff, astronomy stuff, AI stuff that I just scan it, grab a coffee, raise an eyebrow and go "Interesting", then go about my day and wonder what the fuck I'm supposed to be doing at work again. Oh right, implement a component, same thing I've been doing for the past decade or so. Thing is, I don't know how to get out without on the one side giving up my comfort zone (well paid, doable work), and on the other side gaining responsibility / being looked at as an expert in any field (that's where impostor syndrome and responsibility aversion comes in). I really need a holiday lol.

illwrks 2y ago

I know absolutely nothing about quantum, but I did watch this Bloomberg video this week which was very helpful to understand it in layman’s term. https://youtu.be/1_gJp2uAjO0?si=--XzbVlAT3w9hw2L https://youtu.be/1_gJp2uAjO0?si=--XzbVlAT3w9hw2L

riteshpatidar 2y ago
You can also for Veritasium's videos on quantum computing, if you are a fan of his videos.

weatherlite 2y ago

> I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it Why should you? I agree with your sentiment, super advanced quantum physics is probably out of reach for 99% of the population (I'm estimating here but I think it's reasonable to assume that's the average IQ of the physics PHDs who can actually understand this stuff to a deep level). You can probably make the effort to understand something about what's going on there, but it will be very superficial. Going advanced quantum physics takes a huge amount of effort and an incredible capacity for learning complex things. And even the advanced physics guys don't and can't understand a bunch of very elementary things about reality, so it's not as if the feeling of not understanding stuff ever goes away.

n4r9 2y ago
To be fair you don't need to know advanced quantum physics to understand a lot of quantum computing, including Aaronson's discussion of this paper. It's pretty accessible with undergraduate-level linear algebra and computer science concepts.

renegade-otter 2y ago

And yet it pays the bills and runs the world, doesn't it. React 19 is out and it's time to hit the docs eh to solve the same exact problem we've had for the last 30 years in a slightly better (or NOT) way.

sourcepluck 2y ago

People feel like this about domains they don't know all the time. Don't allow your ignorance of an area to trick you into thinking you can't learn that area. It's just new to you! Source: teaching beginners piano for years. Of course sheet music looks like gobbledygook, until you've spent a bit of time learning the basic rules!

vishnugupta 2y ago

A few years ago I made peace with the fact that my space of ignorance is humongous and will only get exponentially bigger. Even in the domain of my work which is software engineering. It liberated me from the pressure or burden of having to learn or know everything and enabled me to focus on things that I truly like to pursue. I’ve made a list of 4-5 things at which I want to be extremely good at in 10 years compared to where I’m today. Now I just spend time on those. I occasionally wander into something new just for the sake of diversion.

numpad0 2y ago

It's also way harder to make money doing "not laughably childish" stuffs. The more accessible and human-connected it gets, the more likely people recognize and pays you. People criticize yes-men getting rewarded but you have to be nearly clinically insane to recognize value of a no-machine like a partial prototype quantum supercomputer.

lr4444lr 2y ago

To be fair, probably everyone who "touches these things" had extensive graduate work on the topic, or put in a lot of long years toiling away at far less exciting and remunerative grunt work. They weren't just super bright CS undergrads who got entry level jobs you couldn't.

compumetrika 2y ago

I haven't tried this yet myself, but have you tried plugging it into GPT or Claude or Perplexity and asking Qs? I've made some progress on thongs this way, much faster than I would have the usual way. Apply the usual precautions about hallucinations etc (and maybe do the "ask multiple AIs the same thing" thing). We don't yet have a perfect tutor in these machines, but on balance I've gained from talking to them about deep topics.

matthewdgreen 2y ago

For what it’s worth, Scott spent the last few years working for OpenAI because he wanted to do something much more applied than quantum information theory. As an applied scientist I’m aghast: he’s one of the few people who actually gets to “touch the firmament of the Universe,” why would you ever give that up for mere applied science (even science as interesting as whatever goes on inside OpenAI) :) But as a human being I understand it. The grass is always greener somewhere else, and doing tangible things is sometimes more fun. TL;DR: whatever you’re doing, there’s probably someone who wishes they were doing it instead.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> Being a "software engineer" consuming APIs and updating database rows ... > Only an elite few get to touch these machines. But lately many can run quite a lot of AI models at home. Doesn't require too crazy of a setup. Why not build something software fun at home that doesn't involve a DB? Maybe using some free AI model? I did experiment lately: automatically "screenshot" a browser and ask an AI to find the URL and ask if the URL and site looked like a phishing attempt or not. Fun stuff (and it works). I tried installing one of these "photo gallery" in a Docker container (where you can put all your family/travel pics and let anyone on your LAN [or on the net] browse them). I saw some of these have "similarity" searches features. I also saw that SAM / SAM2 (Meta's Segment Anything Model) was plenty quick: some people are using these to analyze video frames in real-time. So I was thinking about sending all my family pictures through SAM2 (or a similar model: I saw some modified SAM2 to make it even faster) and then augmenting the "similarity search" by using the results of SAM2. For example finding all the pictures about "pool", etc. And why limit myself to pictures? I could do family vids too: "Find all the vids where that item can be seen". Possibilities at the moment seems endless: times are exciting if you ask me.

lbltavares 2y ago

Not even Einstein got it, you're fine