To anyone reading this now and thinking, “299,792,458 m/s is the speed of light!”: stairlane’s comment originally gave 299,456,352 m/s as the speed of light. Unfortunately they’ve since edited it to the correct value, thus ruining a very good exchange
Right, and that's a definition. Modern SI works by defining constants, so then when scientists figure out a way to measure more exactly they're actually refining our understanding of the SI units, the numbers (such as the speed of light in metres per second) never change any more, so that's convenient.
The main argument it makes is based on counting amplitudes, and noting there are far too many to ever control:
> The hypothetical quantum computer is a system with an unimaginable number of
continuous degrees of freedom - the values of the 2^N quantum amplitudes with N ~ 10^3–10^5 . [...] Now, imagine a bike having 1000 (or 2^1000 !) joints that allow free rotations of their parts with respect to each other. Will anybody be capable of riding this machine? [...] Thus, the answer to the question in title is: As soon as the physicists and the engineers will learn to control this number of degrees of freedom, which means - NEVER.
The reason this is a joke is because it fundamentally misunderstands what is required for a quantum computation to succeed. Yes, if you needed fine control over every individual amplitude, you would be hosed. But you don't need that.
For example, consider a quantum state that appears while factoring a 2048 bit number. This state has 2^2048 amplitudes with sorta-kinda-uniform magnitudes. Suppose I let you pick a million billion trillion of those amplitudes, and give you complete control over them. You can apply any arbitrary operation you want to those amplitudes, as long it's allowed by the postulates of quantum mechanics. You can negate them, merge them, couple them to an external system, whatever. If you do your absolute worst... it will be completely irrelevant.
Errors in quantum mechanics are linear, so changing X% of the state can only perturb the output by X%. The million billion trillion amplitudes you picked will amount to at most 10^-580 % of the state, so you can reduce the success of the algorithm by at most 10^-580 %. You are damaging the state, but it's such an irrelevantly negligible damage that it doesn't matter. (In fact, it's very strange to even talk about affecting 1 amplitude, or a fraction of the amplitudes, because rotating any one qubit affects all the amplitudes.)
To consistently stop me from factoring, you'd need to change well more than 10% of the amplitudes by rotations of well more than 10 degrees. That's a completely expected amount of error to accumulate over a billion operations if I'm not using error correction. That's why I need error correction. But Dyakonov argues like you'd only need to change 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the amplitudes to stop me from factoring. He's simply wrong.
And your rebuttal amounts to "if I let you mess with a trivial number of amplitudes then the error will be trivial". Well duh. Another way of phrasing what you said is that you need to control 90% of 2^2048 amplitudes. Which is Dyakanov's point, that nobody knows how to do this.
I maintain that Dyakonov's arguments are completely missing the mark. I predict this will be experimentally obvious, instead of just theoretically obvious from linearity, within 5 years (due to the realization of logical qubits with lifetimes thousands of times better than their parts).
Two of the "lolcows" prominently featured on the front page are Ethan Ralph and Nick Fuentes. They're not nazis (they're antisocial morons), but anybody who would call the KiwiFarms a nazi site would call them nazis. The News's approach to Fuentes has been to pearlclutch and basically make him look cool to the young guys he recruits for his political cult. If anyone remembers all the embarrassing stuff that came out about him recently, guess where that information came from. Genuinely the KiwiFarms does a better job of keeping people from falling for fringe politics than the people who set out to do that. Sometimes laughter is the best medicine.
Nick Fuentes is definitely a nazi, which is in no way incompatible with him being an antisocial moron. Just because KF mocks Fuentes doesn't mean they're the only or even a canonical source of embarrassing info about him. Also, anyone who studies extremism can tell you that every extremist movement is rife with infighting and petty interpersonal rivalries.
You people have built up a whole fantasy about the KiwiFarms... And its obvious when someone SWATs a person like Marjorie Taylor Greene claiming theyre from the KiwiFarms, that it's a false flag. The events CloudFlare refernces that show the site was a danger were a post from 4chan pretending to be a KiwiFarms user, and a post made a user that had previously only posted once in 2020, and then got banned 14 minutes (with 7 reports) after making threatening posts in the keffals thread, plainly another false flag trying to make the site look bad while there is a smear campaign against it. People attack and lie about the KiwiFarms because it hosts embarrassing information about them.
>The evidence CloudFlare gave that the site was a danger were a post from 4chan pretending to be a KiwiFarms user, and a post made a user that had previously only posted once in 2022
Where did Cloudflare give this evidence? Are you the administrator of Kiwifarms? They certainly haven't shared this in public.
You're right, they actually gave no evidence, but if these are not the events they are referencing in their blog post (the things that the #DropKiwiFarms has been hyping up), then what is?
You're right, but people don't care about the truth. Personally I doubt that keffals is behind the attacks, since the site has been facing them for ages. A site like the KiwiFarms that compiles unsavory deeds is going to attract the ire of those same people who will do unsavory things to get that information hidden.
It's worth noting, for people unaware, that there are no suicides associate with the KiwifFarms. There have been people with threads who kave killed themselves, unrelated to them having threads, and one person who poorly faked a suicide after failing to extort the KiwiFarms into removing his thread. The site is a gossip site, not some boogeyman Law&Order-esque cyberhateden dedicated to cyberbullying gay people to death. It's absurd seeing the caterwauling the site has generated--they don't even reach the level of paparazzi who really do stalk people. All the KiwiFarms does is collect information that was already publicly available.
What law? She's not giving anyone hormones, you know. She shares information about informed consent clinics, the effects of hormones, and places to buy safe supplies.
Yeah, but not all parents have the best interests of their children at heart. This is generally recognized, and the reason why there is increasing clarification of the boundaries between the rights of parents and the rights of children. It's the reason that forced marriage and child brides have been outlawed in many countries. It's also the reason why child labour and child welfare, and protective services for children exist.
Should someone be providing HRT to children? Generally no. Has the child been prescribed that medication, and the parents are refusing, unable to, or actively preventing the child from getting that medication? Absolutely!
If this was in relation to insulin, antibiotics, or any other generally accepted medical prescription, the individual would be lauded. Because of transphobia and ignorance, sites like kiwifarms are being targetted by a bunch of relentless shitweasels who are hiding behind Freedom of Speech or Freedom of Expression, something which Cloudflare is under absolutely no legal requirement to provide.
I don't want tech companies to become the arbiters of free speech, but I also don't think companies are obligated to provide services to a website owned by a person who gleefully celebrated the suicide of a victim of harassment.
Now that I am not an employee there anymore, one thing I am absolutely thrilled to say is that the Fastly approach with a Good Neighbour policy is awesome, and that alone (among many awesome things over the 5 years I was there) makes it a better company to work for than CloudFlare.
Do you actually have something to add to the conversation? Your comments haven't particularly meaningful or insightful, so that's a genuine question.
There isn't a complete picture here. In this particular case, Keffals shared that she was supporting alternate paths to get HRT, and providing support for folks who were legally blocked from receiving gender affirming care due to laws passed by a government largely captured by right wing politicians.
Given the complexity of pursuing HRT, it's not unreasonable to reach the conclusion that a child in those circumstances being denied care is largely related to a lack of parental support, or from being actively prevented from getting treatment that doctors were clearly providing (since the government had to ban medical treatment in order to stop it).
What do I have to add? I am giving the opposing opinion here which from anecdotal experience is also the opinion of almost every parent I've met (n~=40) in contrast to the opinions of some people trying to give the impression that it's normal for children to be getting drugs from people they know online because that's what they want.
If the government bans some form of medical treatment and Keffals is trying to bypass this ban then this obviously would raise questions of legality.
Academia is at the vanguard of dismissing meritocracy for politicking. If it were so great at dispassionately pursuing the truth then you wouldn't get things like decades of Alzheimer's research being based on a fraudulent study. There's nothing magical about the academy. They don't hire people of above average moral integrity and they are incentivized to publish attention grabbing findings. The result is they form cliques to protect their meal ticket theories.
You may say that but there is much more of a backlash against a fraudulent study than, say, all the people who lied the US into various financially ruinous wars. Despite one of those being objectively much worse for more people than the other.
The academy condemns people who publish fraudulent studies. The US political class is mostly at peace with the legacy of a George W. Bush or equivalent. Mild admiration for his political technique. Relatively popular president compared to the last 2. This is a difference of culture.
> There's nothing magical about the academy.
There is nothing magic about anything. Magic isn't an influence over our daily lives. :)
Things are still different from each other in observable ways.
There is no inappropriate way to use clothes you own, unless you're using it to strangle someone. The people who get upset about people wearing things from "their" culture are always deracinated diaspora with no real connection to the culture. People who are healthily embedded in a culture don't get upset about foreigners "misusing" their cultural bric-a-brac, they have real lives to attend to. And if you're getting upset at a party goer wearing a grass skirt then you're in need of psychiatric help.
What an inane comparison. Jobs are voluntary, and you're free to quit over the dress code.
And there's no way to decide what's "permitted" use of a piece of apparel anyways. Cultural significance changes within cultures, and individuals within it are not uniformly sensitive to informal use. What would you do to iconoclasts? They're culturally appropriating too. Are they allowed to introduce lighthearted use?
The "cultural appropriation" idea is the worst form of ultra-conservative hand wringing dressed up in progressive language. No actual harm is done by "misusing" clothes. This is just an excuse made up by moral busy bodies to go on yet another obnoxious crusade.
Yes that is the motte to this bailey. Of course the actual consequences can range from being fired to being expelled to being publicly defamed as a racist. You still haven't given a way to decide what is or isn't a faux pas. I'll give the answer since you won't: it's whoever complains the loudest. In practice what is and isn't allowed is totally arbitrary. The only people who ever argue for that are power tripping moral crusaders.
As a reminder, all of this is about a pretend problem that produces no damage and has no victims.
