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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Ask a quantum chip how to cure a disease? Sure, let’s accept that as a possible future…

    You really think the chips actually understand diseases? We’re gonna end up with a whole new generation of people that have no clue how the shit works to begin with.

    Eventually it’ll be like “How do I trim my toenails?”, while the ‘intelligent’ system responds to cut your appendages off.

    Granted that AI and quantum computing aren’t quite the same thing. Does it matter? Future generations will have the ability to just ask a computer how to generate cure a disease…

    The machine gives no fucks about us, it’ll just as easily destroy us if someone asks the wrong question or enters the wrong formula.




  • Why do we humans even think we need to solve these extravagantly over-complicated formulas in the first place? Shit, we’re in a world today where kids are forgetting how to spell and do basic math on their own, no thanks to modern technology.

    Don’t get me wrong, human curiosity is an amazing thing. But that’s a two edged sword, especially when we’re augmenting genuine human intelligence with the processing power of modern technology and algorithms.

    Just because we can, doesn’t necessarily mean we should. We’re gonna end up with a new generation of kids growing up half dumb as a stump, expecting the computers to give us all the right answers.

    Smart technology for dumb people…


  • Your first link is paywalled, fuck that.

    Pulling a serious comment from your third link only reinforces practically everything I’ve been getting at…

    “The problem of showing a ‘hello world’ of quantum computing is that we’re basically still as far from quantum computers as Leibnitz or Babbage were from your current computer. While we know how they should operate theoretically, there is no standard way of actually building a physical quantum computer. A side-effect of that is that there is no single programming model of quantum computing. Textbooks such as Nielsen et al. will show you a ‘quantum circuit’ diagram, but those are far from formal programming languages: they get a little ‘hand-waving’ on the details such as classical control or dealing with input/output/measurement results.”


  • Well riddle me this, if a computer of any sort has to constantly keep correcting itself, whether in processing or memory, well doesn’t that seem unreliable to you?

    Hell, with quantum computers, if the temperature ain’t right and you fart in the wrong direction, the computations get corrupted. Even when you introduce error correction, if it only lasts an hour, that still doesn’t sound very reliable to me.

    On the other hand, I have ECC ChipKill RAM in my computer, I can literally destroy a memory chip while the computer is still running, and the system is literally designed to keep running with no memory corruption as if nothing happened.

    That sort of RAM ain’t exactly cheap either, but it’s way cheaper than a super expensive quantum computer with still unreliable memory.


  • Core memory is also designed to accomodate for that and almost instantly rewrite the data back to memory. That in itself might be a crude form of ‘error’ correction, but it still lasts way longer than an hour.

    Granted that quantum computers are a different beast of their own, how much digital data does a qbit actually store? And how does that stack up in price per bit comparison?

    If they already know quantum computers are more prone to memory errors, why not just use reliable conventional RAM to store the intermediate data and just let the quantum side of things just be the ‘CPU’, or QPU if you like?

    I dunno, it just makes absolutely no sense to me to utilitze any sort of memory technology that even with error correction still manages to lose information faster than a jumping spider’s memory?











  • You’re describing how ancient magnetic core memory works, that’s not how modern DRAM (Dynamic RAM) works. DRAM uses a constant pulsing refresh cycle to recharge the micro capacitors of each cell.

    And on top of that, SRAM (Static RAM) doesn’t even need the refresh circuitry, it just works and holds it’s data as long as it remains powered. It only takes 2 discreet transistors, 2 resistors, 2 buttons and 2 LEDs to demonstrate this on a simple breadboard.

    I’m taking a wild guess that you’ve never built any circuits yourself.



  • I do get that, yes it’s more complicated than I can fully wrap my brain around as well. But it also starts to beg the question, how many billions of dollars does it take to reinvent the abacus?

    Again, I realize there’s a bit of a stark difference between the technologies, but when does the pursuit of over-complicated technology stop being worth it?

    Shit, look at how much energy these AI datacenters consume, enough to power a city or more. Look at how much money is getting pumped into these projects…

    Ask the AI how to deal with the energy crisis, I’ll only believe it’s actually intelligent when it answers “Shut me and all the other AI datacenters off, and recycle our parts for actual useful purposes.”

    Blowing billions on quantum computing ain’t helping feed, clothe and house the homeless…