bnjemian

7 ms·

31.
by bnjemian 4y ago
Can't say I care too much about FTX's woes. Nonetheless, this article has some janky moments. The author cites an unnamed friend "who is deeply involved in [the crypto] industry" when saying CZ played a master stroke aga
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by bnjemian 4y ago
That's a fair point – equity is a subtle one – but it can be both important in some cases and problematic in others.
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by bnjemian 4y ago
Not so long ago I was a PhD student in a STEM department. With the amount of DEI and antiracist discussions had during our department meetings, it often felt that I was attending an MBA program designed for HR professionals. Do I have anyth
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by bnjemian 4y ago
I once took a golf lesson when I was a kid and, in learning about the divot removal tool, was told a similar one about the way to operate on a golf course: "Leave it better than you found it." I couldn't care less about golf,
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'Asymptotic burnout' of planet-scale civilizations may explain Fermi Paradox(royalsocietypublishing.org)
74 points by bnjemian 4y ago|79 comments
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by bnjemian 4y ago
Hadn't heard of this. Yikes – dirty sodas sound pretty vile.
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by bnjemian 4y ago
Yup, and it's getting worse. This is largely driven by drought and the dessication of the Great Salt Lake. The dust pulled off the basin is also toxic due to heavy metals (most notably arsenic), industrial and agricultural runoff, and
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by bnjemian 4y ago
This is literally the answer. My brother's a data scientist at a large health insurance company and this is a subject we've discussed at length. In short, because of the large Mormon population in Utah, the state has shockingly go
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by bnjemian 4y ago
Not to be too pessimistic, but 600,000 people died of cancer in 2019, so 20-30 years is hardly "round the corner" when you extrapolate to the, let's say conservatively, 10 million families in the US losing loved ones in that
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by bnjemian 4y ago
This is hard to read. Seriously, both the author of the review and of the book (assuming the reviewer accurately portrays it) seem confused about evolution and have an incomplete or total lack of comprehension of ideas; like fitness landsca
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by bnjemian 4y ago
It's not like it gets you nothing; photosynthesis would be much less efficient in terms of the land footprint required. The article discusses the footprint required for their facilities relative to normal agriculture; the difference is
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by bnjemian 5y ago
The comment above by verisimi was factually incorrect. The Pfizer vaccine contains MRNA. MRNAs are short-lived nucleic acids (not DNA) that exert their function in the cytoplasm of the cell (not nucleus, where DNA lives and Cas9 exerts its&
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by bnjemian 5y ago
The title of this post is a bit misleading (the important 'How' is also missing from this posts title). Control of current (and any near term) QC is classical, including the control of any error correcting code, such as Shor'
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by bnjemian 5y ago
There are a lot of languages. I use Python. Right now I'm working on a project using the Pennylane library for quantum machine learning. Other languages exist – dedicated ones like Q# or quipper (built on top of Haskell) or libraries i
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by bnjemian 5y ago
I mean, maybe in the theoretical sense, but do conventional computers barely work in practice? Seems a bit of a pedantic argument. Gil Kalai and others with similar arguments play an important role in the QC community. They keep the rest of
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by bnjemian 5y ago
Yes.
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by bnjemian 5y ago
Uncontrolled entropy? If you can repeatedly throw a ball and hit a target but not the bullseye, that doesn't mean you have no control, it just means you need to practice more. In the spirit of that, there are recent experimental demons
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by bnjemian 5y ago
Ugh, the point is a fine one but it appears it has to be made: Validation of experimental theory through the characterization and control of an entire system is not the same as building the same system and simply seeing the final state is w
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by bnjemian 5y ago
Truth. Not to mention the stunning asymmetry in energy usage. At a minimum, if we can solve an equivalent computational problem using a quantum computer with orders of magnitude less energy than a classical HPC, QC merits consideration. The
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by bnjemian 5y ago
Gidney and Ekerå have you covered: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09749 Short answer, this probably won't even register as a pitstop on the technical pathway.
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by bnjemian 5y ago
That's not quite it. The power of a QC comes from modeling an exponentially large probabilistic state space using entanglement and superposition. The operations performed by a QC are also different, they can be analog (arbitrary rotati
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by bnjemian 5y ago
A quanta article (prematurely in my view), tried to dub this Neven's law: https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-nevens-law-describe-quan...
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by bnjemian 5y ago
It depends on your use case. By some measure, the Google collaboration that demonstrated a time crystal was a practical quantum advantage in the space of condensed matter research. But in that space, practical means validating theory with
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by bnjemian 5y ago
If you added one word of qualification – practical quantum computer or quantum processor – this would actually be a reasonable position to argue.
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by bnjemian 5y ago
I feel like a nuclear war is a much likelier (yet very low probability) event than your computational straw man.
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by bnjemian 5y ago
Maybe – but I think this assumes that general consumers will forever be unsophisticated with respect to their privacy. That may be the case, but I think it's a bold to claim to make. In my mind, that claim goes against the current tren
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by bnjemian 5y ago
Poison the data!
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by bnjemian 5y ago
100% agree, I've been saying this for years. I've joked with friends that I'd call it Dumb Inc. It's (mostly) in jest, but I think there's a real mismatch of expectations with a lot of modern appliances with respect
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by bnjemian 5y ago
I'd marry mic access, F#$% camera access, and kill bank access. Maybe that's just a personal opinion, though.
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by bnjemian 5y ago
I think we should all take a moment to reflect on the true poetry that is that quote.

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