ChunnyD

Maybe the annealers actually reached that goal, and the universe just sped up?? #UniverseGate

all gas, no brakes!! #QuantumComputing #RL

Overview of RL control. (a) Hierarchy of the feedback loops in control of an error-corrected quantum system. The low-level loop with analog control and readout signals (purple) occurs on a time scale of one QEC cycle; the logical algorithm’s digital feedback loop (green) occurs on a time scale of the decoding latency; the learning feedback loop (pink), presented in this work, is not synchronized with the lower levels, and occurs on a time scale determined by the relevant system drift. The indicated time scales are characteristic of superconducting circuits quantum computing platform.(b) A small space-time chunk of the QEC circuit for the repetition code, highlighting two overlapping detecting regions.(c) One iteration of the learning process. In each epoch, a batch of control policy candidates is sampled from the policy distribution. A certain number of QEC cycles is executed with each policy candidate (shades of red and blue). The acquired QEC data is used to compute rewards by estimating error detection rates for each detector. This information, indicating the relative performance of each policy candidate, is converted by the learning algorithm into a small gradient step of the policy distribution. Then, a new batch of policy candidates is sampled and the process repeats.

We taught a quantum computer to learn from its own mistakes-- without stopping.

Our RL framework repurposes QEC detection events as learning signals to stabilize the system.

Result: Improved Logical Error Rates for both Surface and Color codes on Willow!
see arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2511.08493

It's such an incredible movie! I was lucky to see it on the big screen during a film festival - definitely worth it for the cinematography!

Only question we had - we called the method from 5a "cryoscope", following Rol's 2020 paper. For the method in 3a, it seemed novel, so we just called it "Helling's method" - any advice on what you call it in your lab, @andreasateth.bsky.social ?

It's a fantastic paper - one of my labmates went through it for a journal club, and quickly applied the techniques to our #fluxonium qubits. Within three days, we saw both IIR and FIR effects, and implemented predistortion with the #QICK.

Berg's got a good thread on Watson. Dude was a human, flawed as any. Science is not the singular work of one single flawed human. We'd never make progress if that was the case. 🧪

The Mountain Goats - Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan Choose your preferred music service

did you know the Mountain Goats have a new album out today and you can buy it or stream it and dance to it in your living room or while driving or on the subway and it's a whole vibe? well now you know that 30tgrs.ffm.to/ttfafpb

(I do realize that I have also just redefined the trope "#moonshot" in a very roundabout way!)

Is it meaningful to do so? Will there actually be precious material on other planets? Will we actually find alien life out there? We're really not sure right now. But folks are enthusiastic about the prospect of it, and it's worth the effort.

But the main reason for building a rocket isn't to get to work faster, or even to go to a different continent. We are building a rocket to reach places that no kind of automobile would ever be able to get to.

There are different kinds of classical computers - you can have a sedan for every day use, but there's also supercomputers that are F1 racecars; able to go much much faster. Right now, some of those supercars are faster than our rockets, especially since our rockets tend to explode!

New potential metaphor - if classical computers are cars, then quantum computers are rockets. You could, in theory, take a rocket to get to work, but it would be kinda terrible all around. But, it would be really really hard to drive to the moon, and damn near impossible to drive to Alpha Centauri

It vibes pretty well with the phrase "double-mythological hydra-chimeras" - maybe we should just redefine genomes -> gnomes? I like the idea of tiny lil gnomes in me, building proteins!

Would you have any advice on how/what to plan for? I get the increasing sense that things are just about to crumble in an awful way, but I don't know what to do to prepare for that possibility (financially, community-wise, workwise, etc)

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020-2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper traces how the U.S. social media landscape has shifted across platforms, demographics,...

Here's the full preprint.

Feel free to write me if you want any additional analyses in the final version!

arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

AI friends too cheap to meter “Let me date my chatbot I’m almost 30 and doing well”

jasmi.news/p/ai-friends... This is very good, and close in some ways to the Fourcade and @kjhealy.co account of social media, under which it's co-constituted by users rather than being forced on them.

Dare to Be Stupid: An Interview with Jon Bois & Alex Rubenstein In their (hi)stories of successful losers as well as all the winners who fail perfectly, Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein find our most human shapes.

@jonbois.bsky.social is my favorite sports-scifi-stastician-documentarian, and this interview helps capture some of that. Thank you for teaching me how to look for stories everywhere, Jon. www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2025/10/17/d...

1997 checking in here - even though wide swaths of the Internet were developed before i logged in the very first time, I have been seeing the same trends, and classic internet communities seem to have mostly disintegrated these days. Everything is more uniform, panicked.

"You can only critically assess the output of an AI chatbot if you have the skills to do so, and you don’t develop these skills by using #AI." Thought-provoking reporting on AI in #Academia, featuring researchers from @archeougent.bsky.social

did you get a legal release form to copy it over??? Otherwise you might have just created a wormhole allowing the Musk to permeate through...

Humans of Bluesky! I want your questions, please.

Let me explain.

I like writing explainers about things like: What colors do bees see? Do bugs fart? How long can viruses survive in a dead body? What's the difference between hemp and marijuana?

But my brain is wrung dry. I need questions! 🧪🧵

a man in a suit and tie is singing into a microphone ALT: a man in a suit and tie is singing into a microphone

Played a rousing round of "do my friends hate me or do i just need to go to sleep" yesterday! Happy to report that "sleep" won, hands down. Hoping for no more rematches this week... #Mulaney

To add needed context, Isaac Newton was an obscure English scientist born on Christmas Day (Julian calendar) in 1642. He wrote a book, “Observations on Daniel and The Apocalypse of St. John” in 1733.
He wrote several more books on a couple of other subjects. He also poked himself in the eye.

The Simon-Mandelbrot dispute.

Here is how it was done in the old days when scholarly disputes were handled slowly (over 8 years!) and in peer reviewed journals (with exciting titles), rather than in snappy and rude online forums.

YouTube video by Macklemore Macklemore and Ryan Lewis - My Oh My (Official Video)

m.youtube.com/watch?v=hvNQ... #MyOhMy #Mariners #ALCSCHAMPS

Alignment chart of atomic models

This is probably the highest-effort one, from a student who also works in my group. I'm so proud

And just to provide the original @sciam.bsky.social link:

www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hu...

Heat map of travel efficiency, updated

“Now Scientific American has updated and re-released what it calls the “classic graphic” that shows that a human on a bicycle—able to coast, or freewheel, without pedaling—remains the world’s most energy effecient traveler.” @carltonreid.com on the re-release of the iconic graph in @forbes.com.

hell yeah, Toad