EpicAglet's recent activity
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Comment on What's a quantum computer? in ~tech
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Comment on What's a quantum computer? in ~tech
EpicAglet Link ParentYou're close, but not completely right. The probabilistic nature of measuring quantum states is a curse more than a blessing. The speedup comes from the fact that it is both |0> and |1> at the...You're close, but not completely right. The probabilistic nature of measuring quantum states is a curse more than a blessing.
The speedup comes from the fact that it is both |0> and |1> at the same time, before you read it out. This in and of itself is not so useful, but it becomes useful ones you have multiple of these qubits. Once you do operations where you do something to one qubit, conditional on the state of another qubit the mathematics become much richer than just probabilistic states. We call the result entanglement.
This is hard to simulate on a classical (meaning normal everyday digital) computer. And if you can make your calculation exploit this, it is sometimes possible to get a ridiculous speedup. To the point where a classical computer might take a billion years, but a sufficiently powerful quantum computer a few hours.
The probabilistic nature of the measurement however means you need to do the same calculation many times to gather statistics. But the improvement is still ridiculous despite this in some cases.
For home computing, in principle typical quantum computers can do all the same maths a classical computer can as well but without any advantage. In practice however, making a quantum computer that can rival even some of the weakest CPUs in regular computations seems ridiculous. So most will agree that they will never replace classical computers entirely.
Shrinking it to the point where it can be a co-processor to me seems unlikely as well. At least viewed through the lens of what it requires these days. The cryogenic setup alone is unfeasible to have at home, even if you shrink it somehow. That limits you to things that work at room temperature and then the options get very slim.
If people will use quantum computers in their daily life, if expect it to be via the cloud. And the actual quantum computer would be sitting in a datacenter somewhere. We are already experimenting with this a bit these days.
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Comment on What's a quantum computer? in ~tech
EpicAglet Link ParentThe chandelier is called a dilution refrigerator. The brass plates are what is being cooled and every plate below is colder than the one above it. At the very top, the fridge is room temperature....The chandelier is called a dilution refrigerator. The brass plates are what is being cooled and every plate below is colder than the one above it. At the very top, the fridge is room temperature. Hence why it is suspended from the ceiling.
The metal spaghetti for lack of a better term, are coax cables. The actual quantum processor is on the very bottom. You can't really see it in the picture, but that's where the cables go.
Normally there are still some layers of metal that go around this whole contraption and then we pump it to a vacuum. So you can never really see the chandelier unless we are changing some part of the setup.
It indeed looks like this because of the cooling. The coldest part needs to be down due to gravity, and the temperature drops in stages. Combine that with a load of wires and one ends up with this thing.
Though the one in the picture is a particularly big one, most labs have smaller chandeliers. Iirc that is one of the Google setups.
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Comment on Thieves steal crown jewels in four minutes from Louvre Museum in Paris in ~arts
EpicAglet Link ParentI think they should guard them well. The cultural value of these things imo far exceeds the monetary value, and they are irreplaceable. But we should still allow the public to view them. I would...I think they should guard them well. The cultural value of these things imo far exceeds the monetary value, and they are irreplaceable. But we should still allow the public to view them.
I would never go to a museum that only shows replicas. The way I see it then I might as well look up a picture online and save myself the trip.
I also question how much value there is in holding it for future study. At that point you're holding out for technological progress unveiling something new. This has happened a lot with paintings, sure. We are now able to analyse all the layers underneath the painting, including whole new drawings, or analyse the individual pigments. But at some point what else could you possibly want to know about a painting that you can never actually see? What is there still left to do here that they can't study on a replica themselves?
What point is there in preserving it if there's nothing to preserve it for.
That way you are taking it away from the public and keeping it for only a handful of elites to look at. The peasants get pictures.
It should be guarded and preserved very well. But in a place where the general public can come and view it. What is the point of art if not to look at it?
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Comment on What's a quantum computer? in ~tech
EpicAglet Link ParentThey do exist. I work on one every day as it is what my PhD is on. And Shor's algorithm indeed is supposed to break a lot of public key encryption schemes, but currently we are far from actually...They do exist. I work on one every day as it is what my PhD is on.
And Shor's algorithm indeed is supposed to break a lot of public key encryption schemes, but currently we are far from actually doing this. This is also one that people like to bring up since it is easy to understand the impact of it, but probably is not the most important use.
Generally there are certain computational problems that a quantum computer is much much better at than a classical computer.
For me the most interesting thing is the original idea. I'll try my best to explain even though I'm a bit drunk rn. Way back when the idea of building a quantum computers became a thing, it was Richard Feynman that showed that is was impossible for classical (normal everyday) computers to efficiently simulate quantum mechanics. Naively one may think this is only some vague fundamental research thing. But the consequences of it in reality are quite far reaching. These days quantum mechanics pop in every day technology.
We use quantum mechanics to understand chemistry, material science, semiconductors, certain branches of biology etc. A quantum computer would make things that are not simulatable for these fields right now suddenly possible. And major breakthroughs could be expected. Even applications for machine learning and AI are expected.
Currently the field is thinking more along the lines of using it similar to how researchers use supercomputing clusters. Not so much personal computers. So this would be useful for big research institutions and companies, less for individuals.
The way we build quantum computers now it is unrealistic to expect this to be in your house (though maybe via the cloud?). But who knows. Nobody really knows yet what a utility scale fault-tolerant quantum computer would look like. So ask me again in a few years.
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Comment on 2025 Physics Nobel awarded to three scientists for work on quantum computing (in the 1980s) in ~science
EpicAglet Link ParentEinstein got it for the photoelectric effect. Never for relativity.Einstein got it for the photoelectric effect. Never for relativity.
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Comment on 2025 Physics Nobel awarded to three scientists for work on quantum computing (in the 1980s) in ~science
EpicAglet Link ParentI can comment since I work in the field. Nobel prizes are awarded according to the principle "for the greatest benefit to humankind". Quantum computing, while it holds great promise, is currently...I can comment since I work in the field.
Nobel prizes are awarded according to the principle "for the greatest benefit to humankind". Quantum computing, while it holds great promise, is currently still completely and utterly useless. Awarding a Nobel prize for that would be incredibly premature and they don't like to do that so they chose something earlier.
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Comment on EA is reportedly about to be sold in a record-setting $50 billion buyout to an investor group that includes private equity and Saudi Arabia in ~games
EpicAglet LinkFinancial Times (Archive) claims that this is a big bet on AI reducing operating costs. And that since this is partly financed using a loan with EA itself as collateral, EA is on the hook for...Financial Times (Archive) claims that this is a big bet on AI reducing operating costs. And that since this is partly financed using a loan with EA itself as collateral, EA is on the hook for servicing this new debt.
My fear is that the debt will make EA even more wary of investing in new IP, and poor use of AI will kill whatever they still have.
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Comment on Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation in ~tech
EpicAglet Link ParentThe blood gets everywhere and is bad for the electronicsThe blood gets everywhere and is bad for the electronics
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Comment on Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation in ~tech
EpicAglet Link ParentI agree. There's the quote "the best network software security measures can be rendered useless if you fail to physically protect your systems" by Michael Meyers. The consensus in the computer...I agree. There's the quote "the best network software security measures can be rendered useless if you fail to physically protect your systems" by Michael Meyers.
The consensus in the computer security community seems to be that it's very hard to protect a system against an attacker that has physical access to it. Precisely because of things like this.
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Comment on Could a space traveler accelerate at 1g forever? in ~space
EpicAglet (edited )Link ParentIt's a very cool idea. Though in the real world I can't imagine it helping. Admittedly I don't know the book. But if you collect the hydrogen you still get momentum transfer from the hydrogen to...It's a very cool idea.
Though in the real world I can't imagine it helping. Admittedly I don't know the book.
But if you collect the hydrogen you still get momentum transfer from the hydrogen to the spaceship, only now you need it to stop moving in the spaceship's reference frame. This would make the problem only worse than if you'd just let it slam into the front. It would still be bombarding your spaceship, wrecking and cooking it as well as slowing it down. You end up paying the insanely large kinetic energy cost of the particles, to only gain a bit of energy from the fusion. Not worth it.
My guess is that if you make the spaceship even remotely "aerodynamic", you gain more than trying to use it as fuel.
Unless you can somehow make the particles keep its kinetic energy. But that would involve redirecting it from the front to the back in a way that is energetically efficient. So you'd need to teleport it into the engine without touching it or something like that. But that is possible, then you've already solved the problem. If you then still have the ambition to use it as fuel, you somehow have to make fusion happen between particles that are moving basically at light speed in the same direction. If that is not hard enough in and of itself, the time you have to make it happen will be a tiny fraction of a second because light speed.
This is so deep into the science fiction, I doubt such a technology could ever exist. No matter how long a civilization lasts. Or at least that is so far into the future that they may have some completely different way of solving this, beyond anything we'd think of today.
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Comment on Could a space traveler accelerate at 1g forever? in ~space
EpicAglet Link ParentI'd agree with this. And the particles and dust would get you before the CMB does. The radiation pressure of the CMB would be tiny until you are really going fantastically fast. But the energy...I'd agree with this.
And the particles and dust would get you before the CMB does. The radiation pressure of the CMB would be tiny until you are really going fantastically fast.
But the energy involved with anything slamming into the front of your spaceship would be absurd. Though I'd worry about damage and heating before drag.
So you'd need some magical way to get rid of this along with the infinite massless fuel that somehow still works.
Though it's worth noting if you solve propulsion these issues won't start hurting you until you already hit ridiculous speeds.
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Comment on Could a space traveler accelerate at 1g forever? in ~space
EpicAglet (edited )LinkIn principle you could. At least from a fundamental point of view. For an outside observer it would look like you are asymptotically approaching c, but you never reach it. It would feel like earth...In principle you could. At least from a fundamental point of view.
For an outside observer it would look like you are asymptotically approaching c, but you never reach it. It would feel like earth gravity.
The caveat is that the energy required to keep this going grows without bounds, meaning unless your fuel source is truly infinite and massless this is not possible with regular linear acceleration from engine power.
You could instead consider rotation. In this case, you only need fuel to start spinning the spaceship. From the perspective of the people onboard, this will feel like you are experiencing a force (meaning acceleration) outward. This would be the centrifugal force. If the goal would be to engineer artificial gravity, this may be your best bet.
If the goal is just to get from A to B there's nothing really stopping you other than fuel. But you'd need to keep in mind that real fuel has mass. So the more fuel you carry the heavier your spaceship becomes and the harder it is to achieve 1g.
This in turn means two things:
- Your infinite fuel source needs to have no mass. Otherwise infinite fuel means it is infinitely hard to accelerate.
- The more fuel you burn off the lighter your ship becomes, so the faster you can accelerate. This may not matter for an infinite fuel source but if by infinite you mean just very large this matters a lot. It means that you need to reduce the thrust over time in order to maintain constant acceleration. This means you will arrive at your destination slower than if you always go full thrust. Though of course beyond a certain point your passengers might not survive the acceleration anymore and you may want to be a bit careful with the throttle.
- If the fuel would not have mass, you would not be able to use it to accelerate either. So points 1 and 2 are unavoidable. Carrying the infinite fuel aboard the spaceship itself is therefore in and of itself problematic.
If instead you wish to avoid the problem of carrying infinite mass, you could for instance considering not carrying fuel at all and go sailing instead. Solar sails powered by the sun probably won't get you very far since the radiation pressure is tiny, but with a laser you may get further. Though the laser power required for anything with a significant mass is brutal. And then the redshift starts hurting you as you speed up, so you need increasingly more power to maintain the same acceleration. And that's ignoring the fact that it becomes increasingly hard to focus the laser as the distance increases.
On top of that, doing this indefinitely is not possible due to the Rindler horizon. Basically, since you are accelerating in the opposite direction and light needs time to travel, you need to send the power increasingly earlier. At some point you hit a horizon here. This means you have a finite time to send all the laser power needed to accelerate forever. So that's another way in which the laser would need to be infinitely powerful if using sails.
Ignoring that, waste heat would be another consideration. The amount of energy required quickly becomes ridiculous and all that heat needs to go somewhere. Cooling is not easy in space since in vacuum you cannot rely on convection or conduction, so you are basically stuck with only radiative cooling. This probably becomes one of the main challenges at some point.
This is also a problem again when carrying the fuel on board unless you can make the efficiency of the propulsion perfect.
So carrying the fuel with you would make it impossible to accelerate, and beaming it towards you requires infinitely powerful lasers. Neither is possible. At this point we are already talking warp drive/wormhole/teleportation level of science fiction when it comes to propulsion.
Of course you also have the issues pointed out by /u/fraughtGYRE. So you'd have to solve that somehow. This would also come with the issue of heat again.
Then there's the issue of navigation. Unless you can perfectly aim your ship ahead of time, eventually you will need to correct you course. Eventually all the light gets squeezed into a tight cone in front of your spaceship and gets increasingly blue shifted. Somehow, your systems will have to be able to deal with that. And you can't just navigate from earth either, since then you'd end up running into the Rindler horizon again. Though perhaps you can do it from your destination.
And then on top of all of that, you'd probably want to slow down at some point as well if you actually aim to arrive somewhere. This means slowing down again.
TLDR fundamentally there is nothing stopping you. But in reality you will run into all sorts of issues that you'd need to solve beyond infinite fuel. Even with hypothetical scifi technology forever is one heck of a long time.
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Comment on Disney’s boy trouble: studio seeks original IP to win back Gen-Z men amid Marvel, Lucasfilm struggles in ~movies
EpicAglet Link ParentReminds me of the Netflix adaptation of the Witcher. Rumours are the people behind the show actively hate the source material. IMO this already showed in the first season but it got progressively...The latter of those has been a frequent recurring problem. You have showrunners, movie directors, etc who enter the IP like a bull in a china shop, breaking things left and right to try to mold the IP to their image. Of course that’s going to anger people, and if the changes aren’t well executed (usually they aren’t) it’s not going to pull in very many new fans either.
Reminds me of the Netflix adaptation of the Witcher. Rumours are the people behind the show actively hate the source material. IMO this already showed in the first season but it got progressively worse
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Comment on What's a question you could ask to determine if someone is an expert in your line of work? in ~talk
EpicAglet Link ParentI like to see it as a cookie recipe. If you strictly follow the recipe, you'll make a good cookie. And it is probably a good idea to follow it a few times to understand how to make a good cookie....I like to see it as a cookie recipe. If you strictly follow the recipe, you'll make a good cookie. And it is probably a good idea to follow it a few times to understand how to make a good cookie.
But ultimately, if you want to make something unique you'd need to deviate from the recipe. That said, I'm a sucker for a good chocolate chip cookie. So you'll need to be really good if you want to beat the basic recipe.
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Comment on Question - how would you best explain how an LLM functions to someone who has never taken a statistics class? in ~tech
EpicAglet Link ParentI don't love this part. Perhaps it gets a bit philosophical, but I'd argue this is fundamentally not all that different from us. "Thinking" and "knowing things" are not that well defined and don't...An LLM isn't like a person.
An LLM doesn’t actually know things the way people do. It doesn’t have feelings, beliefs, or personal experiences. It can sound like it’s thinking, but it’s really just following patterns it learned from all that text.I don't love this part. Perhaps it gets a bit philosophical, but I'd argue this is fundamentally not all that different from us.
"Thinking" and "knowing things" are not that well defined and don't really mean much and I'd expect that the line will get blurrier as the technology progresses.
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Comment on I wrote my first Chrome extension to simplify Wikipedia articles in ~comp
EpicAglet Link ParentI just tried pressing random and then asking ChatGPT about the topic. It got 6 out of 6. Maybe you tried on an older version when LLMs weren't this good yet? I imagine if the topic is obscure...I just tried pressing random and then asking ChatGPT about the topic. It got 6 out of 6.
Maybe you tried on an older version when LLMs weren't this good yet?
I imagine if the topic is obscure enough maybe LLMs don't know about it. But for those articles I'm also more sceptical of the accuracy of the Wikipedia page, since I imagine those are subject to less scrutiny.
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Comment on I wrote my first Chrome extension to simplify Wikipedia articles in ~comp
EpicAglet Link ParentYou'd be surprised how much extremely specific knowledge LLMs have access to. I think it would be hard finding a Wikipedia page that contains information ChatGPT can't discuss.You'd be surprised how much extremely specific knowledge LLMs have access to. I think it would be hard finding a Wikipedia page that contains information ChatGPT can't discuss.
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Comment on The EU wants to decrypt your private data by 2030 in ~tech
EpicAglet Link ParentThen again, I wonder if breaking encryption is really necessary to catch the "dumb" onesThen again, I wonder if breaking encryption is really necessary to catch the "dumb" ones
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Comment on I wrote my first Chrome extension to simplify Wikipedia articles in ~comp
EpicAglet (edited )Link ParentI wonder how it compares to the LLM just explaining the topic from scratch though. Without the Wikipedia page.I wonder how it compares to the LLM just explaining the topic from scratch though. Without the Wikipedia page.
You're thinking in the right direction. The best insulating material in existence is no material. So in a way it's all insulation indeed.
There's typically a few things that can be around this chandelier, like a superconducting magnet like in MRIs, but for this the main thing is just a vacuum can.
So the chandelier is not lowered into anything, but we place a metal shell around it. This shell is only attached at the top and we make sure the can does not touch any other part, as that would ruin the insulation. Then we use a vacuum pump to get rid of all the air inside. This makes it very hard for heat to get to the lowest part of the fridge.
The actual cooling is already in there. This is one with way fewer cables, so you can actually see some of the essential parts. The thin things that loop are the coax cables. On the left you can see the parts used to cool the thing. This fridge has no quantum chip in it, but normally that would be below the lowest plate.
So if you would see one in use in a lab, all you'd see is some metal can suspended from the ceiling that makes noises that sound like it's from a sci-fi movie due to the gasses being pumped around.