5 ms·
As with any quantum computing news, I will wait for Scott Aaronson to tell me what to think about this.
by Imnimo 1y ago
As with any quantum computing news, I will wait for Scott Aaronson to tell me what to think about this.
- artemonster 1y ago[flagged]
- stuartjohnson12 1y ago[flagged]
- bheadmaster 1y ago[flagged]
- lisper 1y agoWhy wait? Just go read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6 In the last sentence of the abstract you will find: "These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage." And in the conclusions: "Although the random circuits used in the dynamic learning demonstration remain a toy model for Hamiltonians that are of practical relevance, the scheme is readily applicable to real physical systems." So the press release is a little over-hyped. But this is real progress nonetheless (assuming the results actually hold up). [UPDATE] It should be noted that this is still a very long way away from cracking RSA. That requires quantum error correction, which this work doesn't address at all. This work is in a completely different regime of quantum computing, looking for practical applications that use a quantum computer to simulate a physical quantum system faster than a classical computer can. The hardware improvements that produced progress in this area might be applicable to QEC some day, this is not direct progress towards implementing Shor's algorithm at all. So your crypto is still safe for the time being.
- ransom1538 1y agoSO... BTC goes to zero?
- deliriumchn 1y agono, not really, PQC is already being discussed in pretty much every relevant crypto thing for couple years alearady and there are multiple PQC algos ready to protect important data in banking etc as well
- cyberpunk 1y agoI don’t really understand the threat to banking. Let’s say you crack the encryption key used in my bank between a java payment processing system and a database server. You can’t just inject transactions or something. Is the threat that internal network traffic could be read? Transactions all go to clearing houses anyway. Is it to protect browser->webapp style banking? those all use ec by now anyway, and even if they don’t how do you mitm this traffic? Where is the exact threat?
- conradev 1y agoThe big threat is passively breaking TLS, so it’s browser traffic. Or, any internet traffic?
- cyberpunk 1y agoOkay, but breaking that TLS (device->bank) would allow you to intercept the session keys and then decrypt the conversation. Alright, so now you can read I logged in and booked a transaction to my landlord or whatever. What else can you do? OTP/2FA code prevents you from re-using my credentials. Has it been demonstrated at all that someone who intercepts a session key is able to somehow inject into a conversation? It seems highly unlikely to me with TCP over the internet. So we are all in a collective flap that someone can see my bank transactions? These are pretty much public knowledge to governments/central banks/clearing houses anyway -- doesn't seem like all that big a deal to me. (I work on payment processing systems for a large bank)
- wnevets 1y agoI'm waiting for Peter Gutmann[1] to tell me what to think about this. [1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237 https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237
- getnormality 1y agoI will wait for a HN commenter to tell me what Scott Aaronson thinks about this.
- thedrexster 1y agothis is my approach, as well, lol
- guywithahat 1y agoAs with most news, I'll be waiting for Scott Adams to tell me what to think about this
- amiga386 1y agoThe text adventure guy, or the cartoonist who went batshit?
- cma 1y agoAaronson isn't a cartoonist, it was an AI cartoon from ChatGPT that an antisemite sent Aaronson in the mail which he then seemingly maliciously misattributed to Woit making people assume Aaronson went batshit. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9098 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9098 Aaronson did work at OpenAI but not on image generation, maybe you could argue the OpenAI safety team he worked on should be involved here but I'm pretty sure image generation was after his time, and even if he did work directly on image generation under NDA or something, attributing that cartoon to Aaronson would be like attributing a cartoon made in Photoshop by an antisemite to a random Photoshop programmer, unless he maliciously added antisemitic images to the training data or something. The most charitable interpretation that I think Aaronson also has offered is that Aaronson believed Woit was an antisemite because of a genocidal chain of events that in Aaronson's belief would necessarily happen with a democratic solution and that even if Woit didn't believe that that would be the consequence, or believed in democracy deontologically and thought the UN could step in under the genocide convention if any genocide began to be at risk of unfolding, the intent of Woit could be dismissed, and Woit could therefore be somehow be lumped in with the antisemite who sent Aaronson the image. Aaronson's stated belief also is that any claim that Isreal was commiting a genocide in the last few years is a blood-libel because he believes the population of Gaza is increasing and it can't be a genocide unless there is a population decrease during the course of it. This view of Aaronsno would imply things like if every male in Gaza was sterilized, and the UN stepped in and stopped it as a genocide, it would be a blood libel to call that genocide so long as the population didn't decrease during the course of it, even if it did decrease afterwards. But maybe he would clarify that it could include decreases that happen with a delayed effect of the actions. But these kind of strong beliefs of blood-libel I think are part of why he felt ok labeling the comic with Woit's name. I also don't think if the population does go down or has been going down he will say it was from a genocide, but rather that populations can go down from war. He's only proposing that a population must go down as a necessary criteria of genocide, not a sufficient one. I definitely don't agree with him, to me if Hamas carried out half of an Oct 7 every day it would clearly be a genocide even if that brought the replacement rate to 1.001 and it wouldn't change anything if it brought it to 0.999.
- supernetworks_ 1y agohttps://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07255 https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07255 This paper on verifiable advantage is a lot more compelling. With Scott Aaronson and Quantinuum among other great researchers