Dave Bacon

Yeah factoring is a crappy benchmark and its hardness is easily misrepresented. Quantum hardware is a long ways from actual demonstrations that show anything about the hardness of factoring.

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -

—Emily Dickinson

Potayto, Potahto
Tomayto, Tomahto

Oh yeah that’s brutal. Less popular than “yolo”.

News - Newly Deciphered Cuneiform Tablet Contains Unknown Sumerian Myth - Archaeology Magazine CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—A riveting lost Sumerian myth was recently rediscovered thanks to University of Chicago Sumerologist […]

It looks to me like the Sumerians knew the zx-calculus archaeology.org/news/2025/07...

I always like to be in the low percentiles, happy to see that there are less than 1% who give the obviously correct answer, retrocausality :)

I think I may have learned from Shuki that jokes and joy were a great part of teaching science and doing research. And all of you have suffered ever since.

YouTube video by caltech Teaching and Mentoring - Panel - Information Celebration Honoring Shuki Bruck

Mumble mumble years ago I took two courses taught by Shuki Bruck at Caltech. I wasn’t great at attending classes, but he was such an amazing teacher that I attended every one of his classes. Watching the clips here reminded me of the joy with which he taught youtu.be/WEVZAgNZehA?...

Applications are open for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships

If you’ve recently earned a Ph.D. in any scientific field and want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research, consider applying.

Deadline: October 1, 2025
Apply here: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Symposium | Institut für Quanteninformation | RWTH Aachen University | DE July 17-18, 2025 Ford Saal, Super C RWTH Aachen University

When I was at QCPR, there was a retirement symposium for David DiVincenzo www.quantuminfo.physik.rwth-aachen.de/cms/~bmmwed The line up looks great.

QIP2025

#Quantum #QIP2025
The team @qip2025.bsky.social has uploaded the QIPv2025 talks

www.youtube.com/@QIP2025

Enjoy rewatching your favorites!

Ozzy* ffs

YouTube video by The Mountain Goats - Topic Passaic 1975

RIP Ozzie youtu.be/NKqHLO6FM-Q?... youtu.be/8lD5bfqzr6E?... “Crazy, but that's how it goes
Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it's not too late
To learn how to love and forget how to hate”

Always one of my top recommendations if you have extra hours in the area.

Still proud of the time Minsky lit into me on the Usenet for asking a question about whether barchans are alive

Hirahara, Illango, and Loff posted on the arXiv a lovely result, showing that determining the communication complexity of a function f is NP-hard. A fundamental question first asked by Yao in '79. The proof is very clean and elegant. A fun read for the weekend!

arxiv.org/pdf/2507.104...

The Shakespeare festival is wonderful and highly recommended (I was spoiled to grow up regularly going to shows there) I saw a nighttime production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Elizabethan theater whose costumes were out of this world.

Had forgotten that it was an engineer in Hamlet who hoisted his own petard

“For 'tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard” -Hamlet

Seems like tech bros have been at this game for a long time (to be fair, this old use of enginer meant someone more like a bombmaker)

One of the things I enjoyed about your book is that your subjects just hoist themselves in their own petards. “These fucking people” is exactly right.

The point is ra-ra-ing anything AI tagged dilutes its real value: Travis claims AI is on the verge of discovering new quantum physics. I say bullshit is the right answer to this, not “yes but” speak that overhypes by not addressing the claim.

“Scant evidence” – Google’s AI chemistry claims misleading AI discovered 2.2m new "materials" said DeepMind. Chemistry professors investigated, found hallucinations, repetition, known crystals.

When these hit the real world, people who know what they are talking about are not impressed www.thestack.technology/scant-eviden... EchoNet is nowhere near the topic of discussion: using AI for discovery, it’s plain vanilla classification not discovery.

“Go to the edge of quantum physics with GPT” and start free-associating without doing the math or proposing experiments, you’re not doing physics; you’re generating science-fiction brainstorming. That can be fun, but until someone does the hard yards, it lives in the “vibe sci-fi” bucket.

The idea that he would somehow know enough even to evaluate whether ChatGPT has come up with a potentially useful insight is laughable.

Faster than humans oh my gosh. Computers have never done things faster than humans. The words you use show a lack of any deep engagement. Which is sort of the issue here. If you talk to experts who actually know shit, you’ll be less impressed with your own technobabble.

That’s a lot of words that sound like they have insight, but are actually vacuous. What is an AI build (making me think you don’t understand what a build system is)? Unstructured is exactly where AI has struggled. What does the number of functions of an organization have anything to do with this?

A sufficiently pedantic typophile is indistinguishable from AGI. Or is it the other way around?

Billionaire: "Would antimatter make a good energy drink?"

LLM Trained to Talk Like Mrs Frizzle: "What an insightful question that gets at the heart of the nature of antimatter! It would be very difficult..."

Billionaire, who stopped listening: "The genius computer thinks I'm insightful!”

Do we need to add em dash to the Crackpot Index math.ucr.edu/home/baez/cr... ?

The Tooth Fairy Is Real. She’s a Dentist in Seattle.

Turns out my son’s dentist is the tooth fairy www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/p... (she’s always been fantastic, so not surprised but also omg surprised)

I know it is probably a violation of Godwin's Law to mention this, but as far as I know the last program that tried to get millions of people to leave their homes to work on farms was the Cultural Revolution.