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US's big bet on quantum computing may not be legal
- fred_is_fred 5mo ago[flagged]
- goatlover 5mo agoUntil a court rules against the administration and they decide it's not worth appealing all the way to SCOTUS.
- stldev 5mo agoAssuming a rational decision from this regime is an absurd and amusing thought to ponder.
- jm4 5mo ago[flagged]
- warkdarrior 5mo agoThe Trump regime will just declare this tech to be a national security need.
- mrhottakes 5mo ago...and then they do it anyway.
- sebmellen 5mo agoQuantum itself is the most scummy, grift-filled industry. Every quantum company is riding the AI/semiconductor hype wave with basically zero revenue prospects or long-term application of the tech. Companies trading at 200x earnings, IONQs CEO claiming to the “next NVIDIA”/“base case is Cisco’s market cap” — just ridiculous.
- dlev_pika 5mo agoIf you have enough money, you can say whatever bullshit and the pilot fish around you will clap.
- Zigurd 5mo agoBogus research they use for image polish is to be expected from IBM. It's pure comedy the way that Watson missed the AI hype train. But quantum seems to have infected some more legit players. Whatever became of Majorana chips, for example? That got some high-level attention at Microsoft.
- josefritzishere 5mo agoI think we're all seeing a theme.
- thegrim33 5mo agoIs the theme that any direction US tech advances in results in a persistent campaign of negative hit pieces aimed at trying to halt/destroy any achievements? Written by "journalists"/publishers that have never, and will never, say a single negative thing about china? Sure seems like that's the theme.
- anon291 5mo agoThat is basically the theme. You've figured out the actual grift. The crazy thing is how these same magazines will promote actual fake industries like crypto, while demonizing industries that produce actual results like AI. The goal seems to be to get Americans to invest assets into currencies likely already controlled by foreign entities while discouraging them from developing their own potentially revolutionary technology.
- orsorna 5mo agoWhat does your tangent about feelings have to do with the fact that the money is illegally allocated? That is the theme OC is pointing out.
- itake 5mo ago
- kennywinker 5mo agoI don’t know enough about the state of quantum computing but this sounds like IBM dumping dead end research onto taxpayers
- petcat 5mo agoThen why are they also investing $1 billion in the same company as the taxpayers?
- warkdarrior 5mo agoDivestment costs
- kennywinker 5mo agoI suppose it’d be in the details. Like, are they locked into that investment, or is it something with checkpoints and milestones that let them bail out after a year and a few mil? What’s the ownership structure of any new ip? Etc. It’s easy to drop a story like this, get a win for investing in the future, and then quietly disassemble it as soon as the cameras turn away. Or, it would be easy, if this administration didn’t consider laws beneath them.
- armada651 5mo agoBecause the startup is going to buy $2 billion worth of services from IBM.
- Zigurd 5mo agoBelieve the announcement when the check clears.
- downrightmike 5mo agoIts all made up computation to fit the problem exactly. No real progress has been made in decades. "Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed using sleight-of-hand numbers that have been selected to make them very easy to factorise using a physics experiment and, by extension, a VIC-20, an abacus, and a dog." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/07/cheating-on-quantum-computing-benchmarks.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/07/cheating-on-q...
- 6DM 5mo ago> "could argue that it has been harmed by the diversion of the funds to a different field. But that argument would likely take so long to sort out in court that all the money would have been spent by then." So if I steal from someone and spend it fast enough, I wouldn't be responsible anymore and can get away with it? That's how that sounded to me.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoYes, that is basically how the justice system works. If you have enough money and lawyers you can avoid practically any consequences.
- dmbche 5mo agoSomething about it being the banks problem if I owe them a billion
- ben_w 5mo agoIf I understand legal terminology correctly*, this is what a "preliminary injunction" is for. * eh. I'm not a lawyer.
- lazide 5mo agoThe principle of ‘Standing’, however, means that you also cannot sue unless you can show actual harm to yourself. Yes, these contradict each other somewhat.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bebeal 5mo ago[dead]
- ifh-hn 5mo agoMy first reaction, without RTFA, is: hasn't stopped them before, why would not being legal stop US big tech now?
- shevy-java 5mo agoA suspicious amount of betting here - from the top of the current administration, down to semi-regular people like that US soldier who profited from his special knowledge recently: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-classified-information-profit-prediction-market-bets https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-clas... 400.000$ So if these are all the Trump-voters then I am no longer surprised. It's an ongoing cash grab on different levels - the big guns play on top.
- 123k2a 5mo agoTrump Jr. is one of the government money recipients via 1789 capital (which had already profited from the groq insider sale last year): https://www.startribune.com/donald-trump-quantum-computing-investment-ibm-d-wave-psiquantum-skywater-technology/601847464 https://www.startribune.com/donald-trump-quantum-computing-i...
- actionfromafar 5mo agoThat's Sir Mountain Dew Trump Jr to you.
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago[dead]
- bix6 5mo agoTrump Jr the guy selling drones to the Middle East after his father started a war? What a standup guy!
- vjvjvjvjghv 5mo agoThe Trump family is a fully integrated business. Start a war, sell weapons. Negotiating peace deals and looking for investors at the same time. Sue the government and be in charge of the agency you sue.
- Aboutplants 5mo ago[flagged]
- 4ashga 5mo agoDownvoting and flagging facts? Here is another one: Trump Jr just married the daughter of an Epstein banker.
- upofadown 5mo ago>That technology overlaps only partially, at best, with what’s used in quantum processors. Dunno, how can you say that for sure when we don't actually know how to make a practical quantum processor? The bigger issue is that we are scaling up manufacturing of approaches that have not been made to work. I remember a meeting where the project manager pointed out that we were due to send some test boards to a customer. I pointed out that we didn't have a design yet. The PM then asked why we couldn't send them some boards anyway. I suggested that since the boards wouldn't work that we could just cut out some green cardboard and add some component shapes with a magic marker thus saving significant time and effort. It turned out that I was not as funny as I thought I was...
- sieabahlpark 5mo ago[dead]
- prerok 5mo agoHahaha, hilarious. I could also tell a story or two like that. I have to say, though, I have no idea what the management is thinking when they hire such clueless PMs. Even worse, I have seen clueless product owners who had no idea about the domain we were in. I guess a recent example could be Ive designing the Luce. Maybe I am just envious. Maybe I just wish I could BS my way through life like these characters do.
- sublinear 5mo agoThere's nothing to envy. They're a hired punching bag to put distance between you and the management. In most cases, even the PM doesn't know this. They were specifically selected to not think too deeply. Anything you say that is brutally correct and they take the wrong way is received as mean and arrogant. Those incidents give management some ammunition if they ever want to get rid of you.
- pavon 5mo agoThe funding isn't going towards some hypothetical future practical quantum processor, it is going towards existing approaches that we know have different technology, manufacturing processes, and most importantly different applications than the Chips Act was targeting. Funding quantum computing research might be a good thing, but it doesn't make us any less dependent on foreign silicon manufacturing for the countless uses of computer chips across existing industry, which was the purpose of the Chips Act.
- itake 5mo agodisclosure: I have large (to me) investments in quantum. --- The US needs to keep leading innovations. We have permanently lost the ability to manufacture. For China (and the world) to stay dependent on us, we need to continue pumping out technologies. Ukraine / Iran / Afghanistan / Vietnam has proved having the biggest baddest military is not that valuable.
- mounceyboy 5mo agomy favorite conspiracy theory - the govt has already cracked all the RSA codes but they keep funding QM to show that we're still secure.
- ecshafer 5mo agoI read once that if we really wanted to be secure, we would have a crypto library that was open source, AND all changes needed to be signed off by more than one of NSA, Mossad, FSB, China's agency, etc. This way if there is a bug they find, any agency has to assume other agencies have also found the bug.
- dylan604 5mo agoThat's so good it'll happen the third day after never. Neat idea though
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Eric_Bulai 5mo agoThis is a novel for a book. In a race where the rules are broken by some participants, how secure are your own systems when your opponent can access invisible technology long before the others? This should make you think.
- lazide 5mo agoIt’s literally classic prisoners dilemma? Hint: it doesn’t give warm fuzzies.
- LadyCailin 5mo ago> At this point, however, it’s not obvious how to stop the deal. Impeachment, but congress has bent over so much that they can taste their shoes.
- lazide 5mo agoThey like the payment, and yelling about it while actually not doing anything about it means they get the benefits (as long as their constituents buy it!) while not having to do the actual hard work on take on real risk. When it blows up, they can even say ‘I told you so!’, often while profiting from it insider trading wise.
- stymaar 5mo agoFor the past year and a half, the US administration have plunged the country in a rule of law twilight zone: the rule of law still exists, and there are still independent jurisdictions to enforce it, but the administration decided they didn't care, and they just overcome any court dismissal of their orders with a new illegal order that courts will have to push back a few month later. Which means that, in practice, the US isn't governed by the rule of law anymore, but by the whim of the Czar's court.
- mostlysimilar 5mo agoThe future of the US depends on these people being held accountable by the next administration, and structural reforms to make their abuses harder to do again in the future.
- mrits 5mo agoBeing held accountable in the next administration is pretty much the opposite of what a democratic society needs. It's a never ending cycle. Let the court system handle this.
- adgjlsfhk1 5mo agoCourts can only handle cases that are brought.
- monooso 5mo agoNot GP, but in this context I would interpret the next administration[^1] holding the current administration to account as a willingness to use the court system to prosecute actual crimes committed while in office[^2]. That is by no means a given. [^1]: Assuming there is one. [^2]: That is, not petulantly prosecuting those deemed to have slighted you.
- dylan604 5mo agoSCOTUS has already given POTUS immunity in any form other than impeachment followed by a conviction. The problem with that is that just removes POTUS from office. It does nothing to punish for those crimes that were deemed worthy enough of being impeached/convicted. SCOTUS said that POTUS cannot be held accountable for things done as official acts of office. So Congress cannot hold POTUS criminally accountable, but removed from office to stop the criminal acts. Once POTUS becomes a citizen they are free. At this point, I can only see where the newly sworn POTUS would use their new pardon power to end the question as well. However, all of this is very far away from the legality of quantum computing
- aswegs8 5mo agoIs it legal is such a pre-2025 question
- snowwrestler 5mo agoIt may also be salient post-2028, is the thing.
- s0a 5mo agothere is not yet a single approach to quantum computing that is provably scalable. so called experts may quibble, the uninformed (or financially aligned) will bloviate, bluster, and talking point us to death. but it's sadly just true. we're closer to useful fusion power than useful QC.
- Animats 5mo agoWhat can quantum computing do right now?
- snowwrestler 5mo agoAccess billions in federal funding, obviously. Which is something!
- amelius 5mo agoThey're trying to break cryptography, so indeed those practices are illegal.
- declan_roberts 5mo agoI'm learning this week that Congress has only authorized money for a CIA agent to stash $40m in gold bars in his home but not for the United States to take an equity stake in the future of computing.
- daveguy 5mo agoI'm old enough to remember when conservatives thought the government picking winners and losers in industry was a bad thing. But that was before about 75% of them joined the dumpty cult.