Andrea Olivo

Randomly remembered this science textbook for Christian homeschooling.

Paper in Nature 150 years ago. Beats reading any single-cell experiment…

80-90's cyberpunk literature is turning out to be incredibly foreshadowing. "Non-serious" my ass lol

I am currently looking for a PhD student who would like to work on position-based cryptography. Details can be found here: andreasbluhm.eu/wp-content/u...

Please spread the word!

Blocklets — PsiQuantum Read more here. PsiQuantum presents a new, practical approach to fault tolerant quantum computing. The new approach, one particularly suitable for the high connectivity of photonic quantum computer...

Terry Rudolph @psiquantum.bsky.social is writing about ‘blocklets’! I got a sneak preview of these from Daniel Litinski and they are very cool.

www.psiquantum.com/featured-new...

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

I recently decided to move back to Europe from California. I've got many reasons for the choice; I can share one. The dread of this kind of future makes me want to live in a place where wealth redistribution is (more of) a core societal value. I hope we can take a better approach here. (4/4)

When a company offloads customer service or advertisement to AI, when you choose self driving Waymo over Uber, when an editor fires their copywriters or a company their software engineers... There is no expectation that the product gets cheaper. But now, the same money can go up the chain. (3/4)

While AI might improve "efficiency", things are not going to cost less in the current system, despite fewer people being involved and the quality of the product lowering to the "barely acceptable" level. It's happening everywhere. (2/4)

AI depersonalizes labor in order to efficiently centralize wealth from regular people to corporations. It's not the first technology to do this, but this time it's scarily fast and extremely pervasive. We're not going to be okay in the short term. (1/4)

I feel powerful.

Wordle 1,431 2/6

⬛🟨⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Let’s play around with cosmic distances shall we? Because I don’t think the human brain can actually understand it. But I’m gonna use rice, and say 1 grain = 10,000 miles (~16,000 km).

That means the circumference of Earth is just under two and a half grains. These contain all our lives 🧪🔭 (1/n)

A table titled "Atomic Bomb Narratives," which compares the properties of three different narratives about the use of the atomic bomb during World War II. Each narrative is a column, with each row corresponding to one of 7 different narrative properties: "nature of the use decision", "motivation(s) for use of bomb", "outcome necessary for surrender?", "originators", "genre", and "message". The first narrative is labeled "orthodox/the decision to use the bomb." Nature: "moral deliberation." Motivation: "avoid invasion." Output: "ended war, saved lives." Necessary: "yes." Originators: "government officials who made/dropped bomb." Genre: "heroic." Message: "the ends justify the means." The second narrative is labeled "revisionist/atomic diplomacy." Nature: "diplomatic intrigue." Motivation: "flex on Soviets." Output: "began Cold War." Necessary: "no." Originators: "critics, Marxists." Genre: "tragic." Message: "don't trust the US government." The third narrative is labeled "consensus/bureaucratic inertia." Nature: "accumulation of assumptions." Motivation: "multiple, overdetermined." Output: "contributed to end of war (with Soviet invasion)." Necessary: "maybe, maybe not." Originators: "academic historians." Genre: "comedic (chaotic)." Message: "history is really messy."

I am fairly pleased with this table that I cobbled together for a guest lecture next week on the different narratives about the use of the atomic bomb in World War II, and creating an example of ways in which they can be compared to each other in an overarching way.

Scaling and networking a modular photonic quantum computer - Nature A proof-of-principle study reports a complete photonic quantum computer architecture that can, once appropriate component performance is achieved, deliver a universal and fault-tolerant quantum comput...

I take a little break from being on a break to congratulate Xanadu on this nice bit of progress on photonic quantum computing! 👏

I'm also really proud to see my PhD student, Carlos Lopetegui who has been consulting with Xanadu for ages, on the author list! 💪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

You're in a Quantum PhD "starter pack" maintained by @dulwichquantum.bsky.social !

I worry people are not reckoning with what AI can and can't do well. I post about it occasionally, and there are always people who insist that it's just scraping and regurgitating, or even that there's an actual human writing the responses.

Francesco Arzani, Robert I. Booth, Ulysse Chabaud
Can effective descriptions of bosonic systems be considered complete?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13857