Today’s edition seems to focus a lot on skepticism and the harsh nature of reality scratching up the smooth surface of idealism and desire. The world is complex and dirty and difficult, and any time someone wants to sell you on it being simple, pay close attention to what they’re eliding over. The trick is in the misdirection, in encouraging you not to notice the action in the other hand, the string hidden behind the back, the difficult, dangerous machinery that lurks in the eaves, cloaked in shadows by the glittering lights.
Inputs
1: Spent some time reading about the current state of quantum computing and the general (reasonable) skepticism about breakthroughs or tangible real-world usage being just over the horizon. A telling tidbit:
Troyer and his colleagues compared a single Nvidia A100 GPU against a fictional future fault-tolerant quantum computer with 10,000 “logical qubits” and gates times much faster than today’s devices. Troyer says they found that a quantum algorithm with a quadratic speed up would have to run for centuries, or even millennia, before it could outperform a classical one on problems big enough to be useful.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/quantum-computing-skeptics
The technology is amazing, the pictures of it elegant and beautiful, but the applications are still a ways off. The chief concern here is that this sort of intensive R&D work has been trimmed from corporate budgets at every turn, and the thought that we could lose out on a future because of the pressure to stare at the end of the fiscal quarter is disheartening.
2: You may or may not have heard about the “AI-generated” George Carlin special that was released recently. I’m not telling you to go watch that (fuck everything about the thought of that), but I am interested in this theory, that it wasn’t actually written by AI and instead some AWESOM-O-esque farce written by a human or humans trying to pose as AI through voice generation software.
3: Hey, train robberies are back! Dutch and the gang have saddled up again and are apparently after your Amazon orders. Also, the issue is large enough that the LAPD has put together a “Train Burglary Task Force,” which, given the nature of police institutions, must have some sort of patch or logo for it, but damned if I can find it. If you do, lemme know!