"Extremely poor quality". If that was remotely true why would they be successful? Millions of people are just dumb and just enjoy having shitty furniture and go back for more? Have you been to a real IKEA beyond the imagination of your anti-corporate dream?
Basically, Pranay needed to boast his CV to the world and wrote a clickbaity article where half the paragraphs are mentions of his accomplishments and the rest is common sense which can be described as "learn enough to ask good questions and practice."
The first paragraph in which he boasts his achievements is what made me very interested in the article and led to focus reading carefully. I see the boasting is a by product of providing evidence, i don't see boasting alone in the post. It doesn't matter it's useful stuff.
If you clicked on any of the project links you’d see that most of them are exaggerated or misrepresented in the intro. A lot of team efforts for which he gave no credit to the others involved. I can understand the desire to establish authority from a writing perspective, but the author is embellishing his achievements here in a disingenuous way.
It is plausible, but how much money is actually saved if you need to build panels that can stand wear and tear of vehicles above them? Surely the engineering is different and more costly than regular panels that don't need to be built to withstand cars rolling over, plus their maintenance, no?
There is some cognitive dissonance in associating what after more than 30 years is currently, for all purposes still a Sci-Fi concept and Cryptography.
After billions spent and decades of no progress, this is the same repeated article that has been rewritten every other year hyping about the promisses of what, for all purposes, is currently expensive vaporware.
You are judging an endeavor by how the media reports on it and not how the actual community's estimate of the progress. You are certainly right that a quantum computer big enough to solve a practical computational problem has not been built [1]. The quantum computing community certainly thought a 20 year timeline to QC was viable in the late 90s and early 2000s. However, after the failures of early experimental efforts, the consensus stance at conferences and such is always that QCs will come when they will come. The challenges are big but the path through them is straightforward - keep improving manufacturing capabilities till we can scale [2].
If you follow the literature, you will realize everyone is busy optimizing their manufacturing capabilities instead of going for short term goals of factoring ever larger numbers. We have to go from a regime where grad students spend months/years carefully crafting a handful of small parts to mini-industrial processes which can be used to manufacture thousands or millions of identical parts. It takes time and effort to do build such setups, but progress has been consistent over the last decade or so, and will only get better in the next decade.
I think many are seriously underestimating the engineering breakthroughs needed for a computer that can break 2048 bit RSA. Hopefully I'm proven wrong.
Successfully developing functional fusion power is considerably more plausible than practical quantum computers in the near term. The problem with fusion research is that it is and has been massively, chronically underfunded.
I've heard a similar sentiment from a researcher that's specialized in fusion. How do you know that money is the main hindrance? Could we say the same thing for other areas of research, like room temperature super conductors or the unification of quantum theory with gravity? In any area more money may or may not lead to a significant progress, but how do you know that's definitely the case for fusion?
It's likely the case for fusion, in that fusion is an extremely high energy research area. Room temp superconductor research is several orders of magnitude lower in energy usage. Energy has a intrinsic cost, and the more energy involved, the more infrastructure required to manage it. There is no data here, but I imagine the total cost is logarithmic, with several hockey stick bends where certain materials are no longer viable in those energy levels.
An example: casting
You can cast wax nearly for free, given that you salvage the mold materials and carve them by hand, sunlight can be used to melt the wax (~70C), and almost no materials are needed to control heat. Casting pewter is a bit more difficult, as a wooden mold will burn a bit, and you'll need some type of heat control tech, such as an oven or microwave or solar forge (~200C). The temperature has only tripled, but already materials no longer work and costs are significantly higher. I've worked in a titanium foundry and the cost is enormous compared to low energy areas.
What's the guarantee of payoff for that level of investment? LFTR always seemed much more likely to produce such a payoff if given sufficient investment.
But I doubt either can beat what solar and wind are poised to produce. They are cheaper than installed coal now, and are targeting installed natural gas.
Battery will handle the rest of storage/load needs.
Quantum computers that can do fast factorisation have been demonstrated, they just haven't yet been able to factor large enough numbers to be dangerous.
> they just haven't yet been able to factor large enough numbers to be dangerous.
According to [1], the current highest factorization using Schor's algorithm is 21=3 * 7 published in 2012, up from the 15=3 * 5 that was demonstrated in 2001. This pace is not all that promising.
Sure, there are other quantum factorizations, but they are either stunts (work only for very narrow classes), or are based on a different algorithm than Schor, which does not show hope to scale up.
Your 3 * 7 and 3 * 5 got interpreted as a highlighting of the text surrounded by the asterisks. You can edit your comment to fix it. Here are the complete HN markup rules:
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Factoring by Quantum computers able to implement Shor's algorithm (which is the proposed apocalypse for the family of public key algorithms used today) so far isn't just short of "dangerous" it's short of what you'd expect school children to achieve. 21 is 7 times 3. Really, I'm not exagerrating, that's what they've achieved.
As with the work done to try to figure out how we should handle a big rock coming our way, work on post-quantum cryptography is justifiable because it's something we would really regret not working on if it suddenly becomes necessary and it's not _that_ expensive. But just because the threat justifies relatively modest research expenditure doesn't make it worth a newspaper article that will invariably distort the facts and confuse more than it illuminates.
Agreed. Consider that we don't even know if one-way functions exist, and all public-key cryptography depends on the assumption that they do. Maybe some classical attack will break all the commonly used systems before a big enough quantum computer is built.
You've built an entire online presence by copying everything from other people's work - from your blog theme to your content "without knowing"?
Adorable.
Also, by briefly reading the docs on the "platform" you are trying to peddle, I'm getting fairly certain you also copied that as well, as it is too well written in comparison to the drivel on your blog.
In all fairness on that last point, if you're referring to his "Gitote" project, the author has stated here [0] that it was a fork of Gogs, and seems to have retained the proper copyright notices in the source files:
"// Copyright 2015 - Present, The Gogs Authors. All rights reserved.
// Copyright 2018 - Present, Gitote. All rights reserved." [1]
I agree it should probably have been given more prominent mention, but given the number of commits doesn't seem (at quick glance) to be a hasty "fork and rename".
I think the real problem these days is more of a "she-said/its over for him" regardless of actual facts. So it is hard to blame someone to now be in "cover-your-arse-mode". And yes, this climate is the fault of the edge cases of both genders, equally the creeps who overstep boundaries and and the liars who smear innocent people for personal gain.
