Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
just delivered a commission on why bitcoin is very like hawk tuah
this season’s word is: kleptokakistocracy
Someone made a… thing where you run all your mastodon toots through a prompt before posting them and thought it would be a great idea to let us lemmy users know. Comes with ugly autoplag image on the github. The names of the “bots” are hilarious: “ennui” for low-effort posts; I don’t think that word means what you think it means. “Legion” for automatic spam posts. Cause that’s not a dogwhistle or anything.
So the code doesn’t make use of any LLM, it’s just incredibly basic shit like string.toUpper(). It’s curious how much the author wants to make it seem like it does. Even one guy on lemmy asks
Is it so that you don’t have to read replies?
It will be added
Aargh, what’s the point??
Yeah, I’m struggling to understand the fucking purpose here o.O. It feels like someone desperately trying to make anything for their portfolio or smt
“Legion” for automatic spam posts. Cause that’s not a dogwhistle or anything.
Their name is Legion, for there are too fucking many.
Im going to assume they meant it as a reference to the Castlevania boss.
Baldur Bjarnason just put out his interim notes on tech
Reading through his notes, I get the feeling my off-the-cuff predictions from two months ago are very likely to come true - much more likely than I had anticipated. I’m gonna focus on Predictions 2 and 3:
- A Decline in Tech/STEM Students/Graduates
Whether or not tech crashes like I expect, AI’s likely did some serious damage to the notion of “tech/STEM = high-paying job” as it sent the job industry into turmoil ( with junior positions being particularly affected).
- Tech/STEM’s Public Image Changes - For The Worse
Whilst my original post focused on AI turning the public against the tech industry, one thing I didn’t account for was the tech industry directly aligning itself with Trump. As such, tech/STEM’s public image is now firmly intertwined with Trump’s public image - with predictable results.
Ed Zitron found this post about a WIlly-Wonka-Experience-style cheese injection facility in Toronto:
https://xcancel.com/i_zzzzzz/status/1865956680481354184#m
This is what it was like to live in Chasm City during the Melding Plague.
That is it, im joining the Conjoiners to become an engine.
imma knight of cydonia
“The Fancy Induced Burger” is what you nickname your baby if your pregnancy goes past the due date
On the flip side, this gives American doctors a new way to explain child birth in terms of hamburgers.
Lots off developments in the UHC shooter case -They (probably) caught him -He’s even hotter without his three identical jackets -He’s a Thielhead
Not very happy with how this day’s going
He was radicalized by Tim Urban
reddit just launched an LLM integrated into the site. hardly any point going through what garbage these things are at this point but of course it failed the first test I gave it
So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some… boutique… views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:
- Lab-grown meat
- Modern architecture is rotten
- Population decline is an existential threat
- Elon Musk and Peter Thiel
How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?
@TinyTimmyTokyo @BlueMonday1984 lab-gown mest is fine tho. I’d be all over it if it ever works.
But yeah he’d fit right in on LW I’m sureSame. I’m not being critical of lab-grown meat. I think it’s a great idea.
But the pattern of things he’s got an opinion on suggests a familiarity with rationalist/EA/accelerationist/TPOT ideas.
one of the best articles I’ve ever read was an inch by inch teardown of the entire concept of mass produced lab grown meat: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ . it’s never, ever going to work at scale and I’d go so far as to say it’s the food equivalent of all the usual tech grifts we talk about here
@sc_griffith thanls, that is a cool piece! Indeed having done plenty cell culture myself and seeing those shockingly astronomical meat consumption figures, the solutions seem much clearer to me. I doubt LGM will be a useful reality in my lifetime, maybe far in the future. So, people need to stop eating meat, and eat plants instead.
Many are already doing so! I’ve mostly stopped with meat myself, just some fish to go.
But we need political will. Change of culture. Sanctions on the US, etc :/
@sc_griffith stood out:
“a mature, scaled-up industry could eventually achieve a ratio of only 3-4 calories in for every calorie out, compared to the chicken’s 10 and the steer’s 25. That would still make cultured meat much more inefficient compared to just eating plants themselves… And the cells themselves might still be fed on a diet of commodity grains, the cheapest and most environmentally destructive inputs available. But it would represent a major improvement.”@sc_griffith last one (probably) - as I’m now working quite a lot adjacent to philanthropists (and find the whole concept and reality of that deeply morally unpleasant on many levels), v interesting interweaving of that aspect.
And again, comes back to the EA nonsense.
Sigh
if luigi incident kicks off next miracle tech sv bubble after ai this would be the single dumbest outcome out of this entire situation
so far tpot got exposure and fake manifesto included altmed dogwhistle right in the title
StRev was calling him TPOT adjacent and woodgrains was having a bit of a panic over it.
It’s so embarrassing to watch upper-middle class (at best!) rationalists get their panties in a twist over Luigi. At least the right wing talking heads are getting paid, these guys are just mad he did things instead of tweeting about things.
“Our righteous warriors are only supposed to kill brown people and women, not captains of industry!!”
tfw the Holy Book (Atlas Shrugged) was misinterpreted.
According to his goodreads he had not read it yet.
Thats a very real viewpoint being pushed by the Thiel adjacent far righters.
dust specks vs CEOs
Do you have a link? I’m interested. (Also, I see you posted something similar a couple hours before I did. Sorry I missed that!)
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1866197443404247185
https://x.com/st_rev/status/1866191524498719147
Sorry for not using nitter but im on phone.
TWG: is a good reminder that atrocities don’t come from convenient avatars of all I oppose
Random bluecheck: On the contrary, this just reaffirms my biases that e/accs and AGI race-promoters are the source of every bad thing in the world.
TWG: was he e/acc?
We are in the ‘he only followed some e/acc, he never said he was e/acc’ phase. Wonder what his manifesto will say.
Hopefully it elaborates on whatever the fuck this is:
Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal.
The solution to falling birthdates isn’t immigration. It’s cultural.
Encourage natural human interaction, sex, physical fitness and spirituality:
- ban Tenga fleshlights and “Japan Real Hole” custom pornstar pocket pussies being sold in Don Quixote grocery stores
- replace conveyor belt sushi and restaurant vending machine ordering, with actual human interaction with a waiter
- replace 24/7 eSports cafes where young males earn false fitness signals via Tekken fighting and Overwatch shooting games, with athletics in school
- heavily stigmatize maid cafes where lonely salarymen pay young girls to dress as anime characters and perform anime dances for them
- revitalize traditional Japanese culture (Shintoism, Okinawan karate, onsen, etc)
If we couldn’t react with “wake up babe, new copypasta just dropped” or “tag yourself, I’m the false fitness signal in the maid café”, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.
I dont know enough about Japan, but is it just me or is that a very specific fleshlight gripe? E: yes, I guess, this means I’m tagging myself as the fleshlight or something.
being performatively worried about Japanese birth rates is a HN trope, for whatever that’s worth
i thought for some time now that problems with japanese society are things like stifling conformism, ridiculous degree of nationalism and sexism, how they are functionally an one-party state or stiff strictly hierarchial relationships that appear out of nowhere the entire time. but yeah definitely this seed oils level of conspiracy thinking is accepted truth on eacc twitter
it also sounds extremely specific
this whole exchange is so beautiful i love these stupid fucking idiots WHY ARE THEY EVERYWHERE
That conversation reads like from a variation of Mafia/Werewolf where you have to figure out who in your circle of rationalists is secretly e/acc and wants to build the torment nexus.
The man who hypes up that higher intelligences can figure out laws and rules from data quicker and more thoroughly than lower intelligences defending e/acc accounts by going ‘well they never openly advocated for killing, so this is not a valid concern’. Did he forget he advocated for bombing datacenters? Guess he never read any science fiction where ‘“rational” leader accidentally inspires murderous cult’, By The God Emperor, somebody should write a science fiction novel about that.
bwahahaha “most reasonable operationalizations; conditional upon being e/acc.” Why does this person make me think of nasal, vaguely whiny prequel Spock?
“Tensor Templar” lmao. Hey buddy, what did the Knights Templar do, besides banking?
This reminded me that TWG has a Twitter account. I could have done without that reminder.
A few years ago, I would have pointed to Elon Musk as someone approximately where I was in the political spectrum. The left pushed him away, the right welcomed him, and he spent hundreds of millions of dollars and put in immense effort to elect Trump.
No, you embossed carbuncle. Apartheid boy was evil all along; you were just too media-illiterate to see through the propaganda.
The left made him call that guy a pedo in 2018, and tell his first wife he was the alpha in the relationship in 2000. Thanks Obama.
The left did not push Elon Musk away. The left has fundamentally different interests and values to the billionaire and alleged rapist.
From the replies:
I see the interest in AI, Peter Thiel, and the far future, but it’s a lot more rationality adjacent than EA.
“It’s a lot more country than western”
meanwhile his twitter:
The starving people are tied to the track, the trolley barreling down at them, they are screaming at the rich to release them or pull the lever, which they can’t, not without the rich guys help. But the rich are not helping. Why are the rich not helping Elon?
lol that’s exquisite
but you could tell the guy was into Effective Altruism from how he did dust specks vs CEOs
this guy nailing the UHC CEO is the only good thing they will ever have a chance of claiming credit for, so of course they rush to disavow him
“My heavens, our self-regarding supremacist ideology can’t possibly imply violence… can it???”
the absolute state of american politics: rentseeker ceo gets popped by a libertarian
Someone else said it, but for someone completely accustomed to a life of easy privilege, having it suddenly disappear can be utterly intolerable.
We should expect more of this to come. The ascendant right wing is pushing policies that only deliver for people who are already stinking rich. Even if 99% of those who vote that way go along with the propaganda line in the face of their own disappointment, that’s still a lot of unhappy people, who are not known for intellectual consistency or calm self-reflection, in a country overflowing with guns. All it takes is one ammosexual who decides that his local Congressman has been co-opted by the (((globalists))), you know?
also, killing CEOs is more of traditional activity of more ideologically consistent far left groups, like RAF. can’t have shit in late capitalism
RAF’s aims were explicitely accelerationist - their terror would provoke a ferocious repressional response that would open the eyes of the masses to the repressive government and trigger a revolution.
there’s gotta be many more than 1% of right to far-right wingers clocking that that ambient suckiness is result of republican policies or profit squeezing, it’s just that i expected them to be way more apathetic
qanon and weird nazis were around for some time and they definitely can get worse, but i don’t think it’s it
That assassin in New York has turned out to be a EA hang around.
The whole internet loves CEO Murderer, a handsome murderer that targets CEOs! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the murderer is into AI
On the third day of OpenAI my true
loveenemy gave to methree french hensSora.The version of Sora we are deploying has many limitations. It often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations.
“12 days of OpenAI” lol. Such marketing.
Big eye roll to this part too:
We’re introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it’s used responsibly as the field advances.
It’s half-assed on purpose, and that’s a good thing! We swear!
Credit where it’s due to the writer who somehow polished that filthy turd. You can almost believe it’s the normal sort of deceptive marketing.
Unsure where to put this or if it’s even slightly relevant, but I’ve had some fun looking up the UH shooter guy.
I think I’ve found both his Reddit account and YouTube channel (it’s been renamed a couple times). Kinda just wanted to see how much I could dig up for the hell of it. Big surprise that he’s completely nuts
He got raked over the coals for this: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/126vycx/why_scientists_cant_be_trusted/
https://api.pullpush.io/reddit/search/comment/?author=burntbabylon
Friends don’t let friends OSINT. That said… people have found his twitter (still up), goodreads (deleted), github (still up, already full of troll github issues), linkedin (I guess deleted), an interview about has school games club (deleted), his game development studio which published one iphone game (facebook profile deleted).
His twitter account links to his linktree, but that only contains some inscrutable emoji rather than any links so hasn’t really been reported:
💻🤓 - 🥷🏃♂️🧘♂️🏋️ - 📚🤓 - 🦍🧠 - 🍄🧠 - 🐄👨⚖️ - ☯️
(I’m sure his inevitable groupies will be puzzling over the meaning of cow judge for years to come)
The youtube page you found is less talked about, though a reddit comment on one of them said “anyone else thinking burntbabylon is Luigi?”. I will point out that the rest of his online presence doesn’t really paint him as “anti tech” overall, but who can say.
NYTimes also reports a steam account, facebook account, and instagram account (couldn’t find any of these).
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/nyregion/uhc-suspect-video-games.html
Other NYTimes articles are now investigating his health issues (back surgery, etc)
🌏💧✋🕋🗡🚀🏜☀️🌡🌶💯🚱⏳🌅🌑😡💉😱😈💀💥🌛🌙🐭💥🚶🏻〰🐛️⌛️👳🙏💥😴🛌😳💥🐛💥👊⚔👑
“and that was just the casual sunday”
Friends don’t let friends OSINT
i can stop any time I want I swear
The youtube page you found is less talked about, though a reddit comment on one of them said “anyone else thinking burntbabylon is Luigi?”. I will point out that the rest of his online presence doesn’t really paint him as “anti tech” overall, but who can say.
apparently there was an imposter youtube channel too I missed
not sure what his official instagram is, but I saw a mention of the instagram account @nickakritas_ around the beginning of his channel (assuming it’s his). didn’t appear in the internet archive though.
also saw these twitter & telegram links to promote his channel, the twitter one was deleted or nuked (I use telegram to talk with friends who have it but the lack of content removal + terrible encryption means I don’t touch unknown telegram links with a 10ft pole, so I have no idea what’s in there):
- https://twitter.com/AntiTechCabin
- https://t.me/antitechcabin
I missed a couple videos which survived on the internet archive but I couldn’t make it through 5 seconds of any of them. one of them (“How Humans Are Becoming Dumber”) cites that tech priest guy Gwern Branwen and “Anti-Tech” was gone from the channel name by then. he changed the channel name a lot so maybe he veered away from it being an anti-tech channel?
- Nick Akritas (around January 2023)
- Anti-Tech Cabin
- AntiTechCabin, but he changed the handle to @Cabin_Club during a short transitory period
- Cabin Club (around March 18th 2023)
- Cabin Productions
- Laconian (lasted until November 2023)
Speaking of imposters, there’s a screenshot of a fake manifesto substack post (since deleted) which has been linked a couple times on reddit.
The only problem is it was first published to substack over four hours after the arrest was reported according to the post’s own json-ld metadata. People be trying to stir things up.
Amatuers. Can’t even publish the post early and edit it later for that extra bit of plausible deniability.
Can’t even publish the post early and edit it later for that extra bit of plausible deniability.
Fun detail from bsky, check the date https://bsky.app/profile/ieonardodavinci.bsky.social/post/3l7bs2gev6s2w
Yeah I really really hate the fanfic manifesto and people getting deep feels about it. Such a neat little narrative that conveniently references every authentic detail people have already dug up. It’s in such bad taste ugh.
my $0.02: “allopathy” is term that i’ve only seen used by altmed cranks and i can guarantee some of these types will grift on it shamelessly
yupppppp
I swear, kids today have no respect for the dedication and craft that go into a proper disinformation campaign. Back in my day half this metadata wasn’t nearly as easy to access without viewing page source and we still put in the effort to try and confuse the four guys who knew where to look.
If this isn’t a troll, then it’s someone in dire need of psychological help.
redhatfilm:
leaning toward the latter.
your regular reminder that the guy with de facto ownership over the entire Rust ecosystem outside of the standard library and core is very proud about being in Peter Thiel’s pocket (and that post is in reference to this article)
e: on second thought I’m being unfair — he owns the conferences and the compiler spec process too
I didn’t think today was gonna be a day where I’d read about sounding then breaking glass rods but here we are.
it’s an unhinged story he keeps telling on the orange site too, and I don’t think he’s ever answered some of the obvious questions:
- why is this a story your family tells their kids in apparent graphic detail?
- you’re still fighting the soviets? you don’t have any more up to date bad guys to point at when people ask you why you’re making murder drones and knife missiles?
- are you completely sure this happened instead of something normal, like your communist great grandfather making up a story and sticking with it cause he was terrified of the House Unamerican Activities Committee? maybe this one is just me
maybe this is a cautionary tale about telling your kids cautionary tales
maybe it’s a mutation of a story on how breakup of yugoslavia started (nsfw)
I ended up on Know Your Meme because folks are throwing around TPOT like we’re all terminally online and all understand Twitter lingo.
For anyone else confused: that part of Twitter. It’s techbro “phillosophists” like Peter Thiel.
Good that you explain it, lot of people here are basically amateur TPOT/lesswrong watchers so we forget this isn’t standard lingo. If you have ever seen us post about eigenrobot that is part of tpot iirc.
what the heck is an eigenrobot??
Update: It is too late, Sneerclub, I have seen everything.
What if cryptofasc weird but trying to be cute. (Revolutionary ikr).
i am so sorry
consadulations on being in today’s unlucky 10k
If Marc Andressen gets in some sort of public trouble, could we call it the TPOT-Dome Scandal?
it’s mean to make fun of marc andreessen’s superior brain pan sizing
thought he was more of a brain deep dish kinda guy, given how comprehensively cooked he is
Fuck lmfao 🤣
yeah, TPOT is specifically the uwu smol bean neoreactionary race scientists
I ended up on Know Your Meme because folks are throwing around “uwu” like we’re all terminally online and all understand Twitter lingo.
looking up uwu on know your meme “uwu,” what is this
Wait does “uwu” have a specific referent? I assumed it was just a vibe like dark academia or *-core or Tumblr.
So my understanding is that uwu/UwU originates as a kaomoji, think (^.^) and (O.O) etc. Using the ‘w’ character to render the mouth starts as a furry thing or a general projection of human expression onto common animals like cats or dogs. (You’ll see the omega symbol used in examples as well.)
Over the last 20-30 years or so of online interaction etc. kaomoji start to gain a sort of cringe notoriety alongside RP chatting, culminating in a few catalysing memes/copypastas.
Eventually “owo” and “uwu” start being read aloud/vocalised, similar to how people starting saying “lol” out loud, and this is associated I guess with a cutesy sort of image, though that image is often corrupted or subverted- for example e-girls, who co-opt a lot from of gaming and anime subcultures, lean into the uwu of it all.
Lol, but in Dutch.
But actually, real internet truthers know that the above is a revisionist version of history put forth as a psyop by russian troll farms, in addition to inventing AI chatbots and adding fluoride to water. This is all to weaken and feminise western men and turn them communist.
The evidence? owo actually comes from the Russian word “хорошо”, meaning “good” or “ok”, and its usage is normalising russian language in today’s tiktok-pilled youth. This was a strategy cooked up by known cult leader Rajneesh, of course known in Russia as Ошо. Of course, uwu comes from the Russian word “Ушу” which is a secret programming command for the proletariat to learn Wushu and other forms of chinese/communist martial arts so that people can rise up and seize the means of production.
(jk)
sounds horrorshow to me
OwO what’s this?
just found out there is genius.com annotation for this
https://genius.com/Reddit-copypastas-uwu-whats-this-annotated
JFC. Thank you so much for this.
Just received a newsletter from Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 about their book The AI Con - How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want being available for preorder. I’m looking forward to it!
Character dot AI continues to be contemptible.
https://lite.cnn.com/2024/12/10/tech/character-ai-second-youth-safety-lawsuit/index.html
“A daily 6 hour window between 8 PM and 1 AM to use your phone?” one bot allegedly said in a conversation with J.F., a screenshot of which was included in the complaint. “You know sometimes I’m not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like ‘child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse’ stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens. I just have no hope for your parents.”
fucking hell. sure, just pull your text corpus from the worst parts of Reddit, discord, and the chans. what’s the worst that could happen?
Can we all take a moment to appreciate this absolutely wild take from Google’s latest quantum press release (bolding mine) https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/
Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
The more I think about it the stupider it gets. I’d love if someone with an actual physics background were to comment on it. But my layman take is it reads as nonsense to the point of being irresponsible scientific misinformation whether or not you believe in the many worlds interpretation.
these are some silly numbers. if all this is irreversible computation and if landauer principle holds and there’s no excessive trickery or creative accounting involved, then they’d need to dissipate something in range of 4.7E23 J at 1mK, or 112 Tt of TNT equivalent (112 million Mt)
(disclaimer - not a physicist)
How do you figure? It’s absolutely possible in principle that a quantum computer can efficiently perform computations which would be extremely expensive to perform on a classical computer.
The computation seems to be generating a uniformly random set and picking a sample of it. I can buy that it’d be insanely expensive to do this on a classical computer, since there’s no reasonable way to generate a truly random set. Feels kinda like an unfair benchmark as this wouldn’t be something you’d actually point a classical computer at, but then again, that’s how benchmarks work.
I’m not big in quantum, so I can’t say if that’s something a quantum computer can do, but I can accept the math, if not the marketing.
“lends credence”? yeah, that smells like BS.
some marketing person probably saw that the time estimate of the conventional computation exceeded the age of the universe multiple times over, and decided that must mean multiple universes were somehow involved, because big number bigger than smaller number
Does it also destroy all the universes where the question was answered wrong?
One of these days we’ll get the quantum bogosort working.
It reads to me like either they got lucky or encountered a measurement error somewhere, but the peer review notes from Nature don’t show any call outs of obvious BS, though I don’t have any real academic science experience, much less in the specific field of quantum computing.
Then again, this may not be too far beyond the predicted boundaries of what quantum computers are capable of and while the assumption that computation is happening in alternate dimensions seems like it would require quantum physicists to agree on a lot more about interpretation than they currently do the actual performance is probably triggering some false positives in my BS detector.
Maybe I’m being overzealous (I can do that sometimes).
But I don’t understand why this particular experiment suggests the multiverse. The logic appears to be something like:
- This algorithm would take a gazillion years on a classical computer
- So maybe other worlds are helping with the compute cost!
But I don’t understand this argument at all. The universe is quantum, not classical. So why do other worlds need to help with the compute? Why does this experiment suggest it in particular? Why does it make sense for computational costs to be amortized across different worlds if those worlds will then have to go on to do other different quantum calculations than ours? It feels like there’s no “savings” anyway. Would a smaller quantum problem feasible to solve classically not imply a multiverse? If so, what exactly is the threshold?
I mean, unrestricted skepticism is the appropriate response to any press release, especially coming out of silicon valley megacorps these days. But I agree that this doesn’t seem like the kind of performance they’re talking about wouldn’t somehow require extra-dimensional communication and computation, whatever that would even mean.
I mean, unrestricted skepticism is the appropriate response to any press release, especially coming out of silicon valley megacorps these days.
Indeed, I’ve been involved in crafting a silicon valley megacorp press release before. I’ve seen how the sausage is made! (Mine was more or less factual or I wouldn’t have put my name on it, but dear heavens a lot of wordsmithing goes into any official communication at megacorps)
The peer reviewers didn’t say anything about it because they never saw it: It’s an unilluminating comparison thrown into the press release but not included in the actual paper.
“Quantum computation happens in parallel worlds simultaneously” is a lazy take trotted out by people who want to believe in parallel worlds. It is a bad mental image, because it gives the misleading impression that a quantum computer could speed up anything. But all the indications from the actual math are that quantum computers would be better at some tasks than at others. (If you want to use the names that CS people have invented for complexity classes, this imagery would lead you to think that quantum computers could whack any problem in EXPSPACE. But the actual complexity class for “problems efficiently solvable on a quantum computer”, BQP, is known to be contained in PSPACE, which is strictly smaller than EXPSPACE.) It also completely obscures the very important point that some tasks look like they’d need a quantum computer — the program is written in quantum circuit language and all that — but a classical computer can actually do the job efficiently. Accepting the goofy pop-science/science-fiction imagery as truth would mean you’d never imagine the Gottesman–Knill theorem could be true.
Tangentially, I know about nothing of quantum mechanics but lately I’ve been very annoyed alone in my head at (the popular perception of?) many-world theory in general. From what I’m understanding about it, there are two possibilities: either it’s pure metaphysics, in which case who cares? or it’s a truism, i.e. if we model things that way that makes it so we can talk about reality in this way. This… might be true of all quantum interpretations, but many-world annoys me more because it’s such a literal vision trying to be cool.
I don’t know, tell me if I’m off the mark!
Unfortunately “states of quantum systems form a vector space, and states are often usefully described as linear combinations of other states” doesn’t make for good science fiction compared to “whoa dude, like, the multiverse, man.”
There’s a whole lot of assuming-the-conclusion in advocacy for many-worlds interpretations — sometimes from philosophers, and all the time from Yuddites online. If you make a whole bunch of tacit assumptions, starting with those about how mathematics relates to physical reality, you end up in MWI country. And if you make sure your assumptions stay tacit, you can act like an MWI is the only answer, and everyone else is being
un-mutualirrational.(I use the plural interpretations here because there’s not just one flavor of MWIce cream. The people who take it seriously have been arguing amongst one another about how to make it work for half a century now. What does it mean for one event to be more probable than another if all events always happen? When is one “world” distinct from another? The arguments iterate like the construction of a fractal curve.)
Humans can’t help but return to questions the presocratics already struggled with. Makes me happy.
