knzhou

68 ms·

691.
by knzhou 7y ago
These pictures are always really fun, but they're not really "the computer" -- most of what you see is the cooling system.
692.
by knzhou 7y ago
No, in order to get linear time, they used an algorithm which requires exponential space. Once you add a few more qubits that breaks down too.
693.
by knzhou 7y ago
As always, thank god for Scott Aaronson's blog! There is a lot of misinformation sown in popular science. Shtetl Optimized is just about the only science-related source that is simultaneously correct, accessible, timely, and widely r
694.
by knzhou 7y ago
It is serious, but as I said, it's also vaguely defined. We can continue quibbling over details for decades to come. Suppose Google does slap on more qubits so the time estimate goes up from 2.5 days to 25000 years. Is that quantum sup
695.
by knzhou 7y ago
Following the quantum supremacy controversy is very frustrating. It gets constantly framed as a decisive step that changes everything, which is wrong. But then there's also an opposite and equally wrong reaction that any challenges t
696.
by knzhou 7y ago
I'm seeing a lot of people support or dismiss these findings for bad reasons. Hilariously, some people are dismissing papers because "the authors have a history of publishing papers about this stuff". In other words, papers o
697.
by knzhou 7y ago
"Op-ed" doesn't mean anything these days. I've seen plenty of "proper" Scientific American articles that get basic physics horribly wrong, or have a very heavy slant towards a particular point of view.
698.
by knzhou 7y ago
Yeah, this is just a ridiculous way to dismiss the papers. Most authors are "people with few publications now working in other fields". One professor trains 25+ PhDs in their career, and usually all but one or two of them will e
699.
by knzhou 7y ago
Well, OP was complaining about modernity, so I compared to what came right before modernity. Hunter-gatherers might have actually had it better, under some measures -- but the world can't support that many of them.
700.
by knzhou 7y ago
Back then you probably couldn’t afford even a horse, plus if your feet got a little scratch while walking you might have just died of infection a week later. Come on, any claim that antiquity had better living standards is absurd on its fac
701.
by knzhou 7y ago
That's a totally backwards take. Most of these things are modern labor-saving devices that replaced even worse drudgery. Sweeping takes longer than vacuuming. Washing dishes by hand takes longer than a dishwasher -- especially if you d
702.
by knzhou 7y ago
> Is there a set of neutrino masses that is minimally-illuminating of physics beyond the standard model? There are no neutrino masses at all in the Standard Model. You can put them in by hand, but then you break half the nice ideas use
703.
by knzhou 7y ago
That's a facile response, because it works for everybody. Everybody intolerant thinks of themselves as a fundamentally tolerant person, whose hand has regrettably been forced by the unforgivable actions of the enemy tribe. From the o
704.
by knzhou 7y ago
It's always worth trying out new ideas. It's not like we're going to run out of paper or something. My only complaint is that publicity is disproportionately allocated to the studies least likely to be right. While paper isn&
705.
by knzhou 7y ago
In a swing, the back-and-forth linear momentum comes from the tension in the wires, while the energy comes from your legs. No conservation laws are broken.
706.
by knzhou 7y ago
Conceptually it's because it gets much harder to speed something up, but not that much harder to change the direction of its velocity. So for a force with both radial (along velocity) and tangential (perpendicular to velocity) compon
707.
by knzhou 7y ago
The description in the article is oversimplified. Relativistic dynamics is different from Newtonian dynamics in a lot of ways. Force isn't parallel to acceleration anymore. Acceleration gets harder the faster an object moves. You can m
708.
by knzhou 7y ago
The problem with EM drive testing in general is that you're looking for a signal (thrust) which should be zero, while pumping an enormous amount of energy into a system, and declaring any nonzero reading as success. Physicists know f
709.
by knzhou 7y ago
Short segments of a massive tome can be good! Honestly all decent expositions of groups are basically equally good, though different styles can still appeal more depending on the person. The problem is when people try to use the whole boo
710.
by knzhou 7y ago
Giant, broad sets of notes like these are very satisfying for the writer -- not so much for the reader. I should know, since I have a similar 1500 page work on the foundations of physics, and nobody's ever found it comprehensible. [1]
711.
by knzhou 7y ago
I promise I've met worse racists than you have, and if you ask why they believe what they do, they talk in terms of self-defence. That they were minding their own business until group X took their jobs or killed their kin or stole th
712.
by knzhou 7y ago
That's a facile response, because it works for everybody. Everybody intolerant thinks of themselves as a fundamentally tolerant person, whose hand has regrettably been forced by the unforgivable actions of the enemy tribe.
713.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is one of those predatory conferences that accepts literally everything. Nobody working seriously in the field has ever gone to any of these -- they exist solely to allow non-serious people to pad their resumes, which is exactly what h
714.
by knzhou 7y ago
That's really neat! If you only need a little power, you might even be able to harness the 100 W of heat our bodies continually give off. You could press the warm end against you to bring it up to human body temperature rather than jus
715.
by knzhou 7y ago
You use it as a tool to compute what happens in real things, such as quark-gluon plasma or certain condensed matter systems.
716.
by knzhou 7y ago
You're completely right that there's a big difference in how much control the government has over the legal system. I'm just trying to communicate how the end result looks similarly justifiable to the people in each country
717.
by knzhou 7y ago
As they say, sounds good, doesn't work. You can tell the genuinely curious sort from true cranks at a glance, and this article is about the latter. Every academic has interacted with far too many true cranks. I always try to give rebut
718.
by knzhou 7y ago
In my experience, most of these people are over twice my age and slip into condescension the second I stop laying down logical arguments. If I don't argue against them logically, they invariably walk away triumphant, thinking they&#x27
719.
by knzhou 7y ago
The USA itself has by far the highest incarceration rates of any developed country, over 5x that of China. In certain demographics this rate is as high as 1/3. By the numbers this is more than what the Uighers experience in China, and
720.
by knzhou 7y ago
That's just not true. Look at the statistics for hiring faculty in theoretical high energy physics [1]. String theory was never more than half, and usually much less than that. (It is true, though, that for a while they had a near mono

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