Gil Kalai gives a primer on his argument against the existence of quantum computers. My understanding is that a couple of decades ago, he got the sense that the role of “QC skeptic” was under-inhabited, and decided he’d take up the cause. I’m not really qualified to comment on the question of whether HQCA is possible with near-term devices, but I certainly agree that the role of “QC skeptic” is underplayed nowadays. Relative to the number of advocates, the problem is worse today, not better.

In a society with falling levels of trust, policies should do what they say on the tin. More generally, legibility trumps transparency. If you make all decisions in public meetings, that’s transparent. But if the meetings are held in Klingon, it’s not legible.

Differential dataflow is a Rust library for performing computations that automatically update when the input data updates.

Relatedly, here’s a wonderful Rust tutorial. This is my prefered format for a programming tutorial: rapid-fire examples. When reading most tutorials, I skim through (often skipping chapters) to get to the meat quickly.

More on the great stagnation and prospects for the next decade of advancement.

Oh, and someone named Scott Something has returned to blogging.