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Cake day: July 7th, 2024

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  • Quantum computers will always exist as a coprocessor, like a GPU or an NPU. You cannot run an operating system on your GPU either. Your GPU is worse for a lot of general purpose tasks your CPU can do, but it excels at very specific kinds of tasks, and so your CPU delegates those specific tasks to the GPU. That is how quantum computers work in practice, they are never stand-alone computers. They are always attached to a classical computer that delegates tasks to it. They won’t ever replace regular computers. Even if in the distant future they manage to build quantum optical chips that run at room temperature at can be made consumer-affordable, they will just be sold as QPUs which you would install into your regular personal computer if you need one.


  • Quantum computers only provide a significant advantage at breaking a very specific class of asymmetric ciphers (those where the trapdoor function is either based on the discrete logarithm problem or the factorization problem) which we already have replacements for that are quantum-resistant (the trapdoor function is replaced with one based on the lattice problem). If quantum computers became a serious threat, it would not be difficult to just swap out those ciphers. The main issue would be people who have collected encrypted messages and held onto them with the hopes of cracking them in the future.


  • I’ve used LLMs quite a few times to find partial derivatives / gradient functions for me, and I know it’s correct because I plug them into a gradient descent algorithm and it works. I would never trust anything an LLM gives blindly no matter how advanced it is, but in this particular case I could actually test the output since it’s something I was implementing in an algorithm, so if it didn’t work I would know immediately.



  • A double-standard is not inherently a bad thing. It’s a double-standard that we allow trained and licensed medical doctors to do operations on people but not bozos without any medical background, but one would have to be an imbecile to say this double-standard is a bad thing. It is indeed a double-standard to not show empathy to people who support industrial scale genocide to themselves be merked while believing we should show empathy to the victims and to people who do not advocate for such things when they die, but it is a good double-standard. It’s completely ridiculous to think we should be applying a single universal standard to everyone because people are not all the same.



  • Literally right-wingers 24/7 are praising political violence, calling for the eradication of all Palestinians, glorifying the gunning down or running over of protestors, praising the murder of homeless people, praising the execution of minorities by cops, constantly glorifying the suicide rate of trans people, etc. Literally you can go on Twitter and find any of these right-wing accounts crying about how we shouldn’t glorify violence and read their post history and you will likely not even have to go back more than 1 day to find them glorifying violence.



  • bunchberry@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzobserves your slit
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    2 months ago

    The interference pattern disappears if anything becomes entangled with the which-way information at all, it doesn’t need to even be an “observer” (unless you are using “observer” broadly enough that it can include even a single particle). You can replace the entire measurement device with a single particle that interacts with the particles at the slits in such a way that it becomes perfectly correlated with the which-way information that the observer has no awareness of (such as if a moat of dust interacts with the particle because the experimenter did not isolate it well) and that is sufficient for the interference pattern to disappear.


  • bunchberry@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldToo soon?
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    2 months ago

    I have been desensitize to it because my twitter timeline has been flooded with toddlers having their skulls hollowed out by the IDF. A live-streamed holocaust has kind of made violence seem not that abnormal to me, so it comes across as strange when politicians cry about people advocating for violence, when literally most of them support industrial-scale genocide of hundreds of thousands that I see dying on a day-to-day basis. That alone has changed me from a “violence is inherently bad” type mofo to a “I would celebrate if most of these American politicians were [redacted]” type mofo. Why should I care if a person who loves mass murder of children dies? It’s called karma.


  • bunchberry@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldToo soon?
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    2 months ago

    It comes across to me as they simply lack empathy for other “kinds” of people. If you actually felt the same pain and empathy when watching the video of Kirk get merked, you should feel that a thousand times over when seeing a thousand videos of the IOF massacring children, many sniped in the same way Kirk got merked, and then you should look upon Kirk in disgust for supporting that and dehumanizing the Palestinian people. But the fact is these people don’t. They don’t see other “kinds” of people different from them as in fact “people.” Let’s be real, they don’t feel the same kind of empathy for Palestinian fathers dying as they do a white fascist dying. They constantly mock the deaths of minority groups like trans people. They suddenly have empathy and demand pacifism and valuing the sanctity of all life when a white fascist dies, but are silent in every other case.


  • bunchberry@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzobserves your slit
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    2 months ago

    They don’t even explain it in physics class. That is kind of the schtick of the Copenhagen interpretation. You just assume as a postulate that systems are in classical states when you look at them and in quantum states when you do not, and from those two assumptions you can prove using Gleason’s theorem that the only possible way the former can map onto the latter is through the Born rule. But there is no explanation given at all as to how or when or by what mechanism this transition actually takes place.

    Many Worlds isn’t much better because they posit that the classical world does not even exist, yet that clearly contradicts with what we directly observe in experiments, so if that is true it necessarily means that the classical world is an illusion, and so then you still have to explain how the illusion comes about, which they do not. Dropping the postulate that there is indeed a classical world also disallows you from deriving the Born rule through Gleason’s theorem, and so it then becomes unclear how to do it at all without some arbitrary additional postulate, and the arbitrary nature of it means there are dozens of proposals of different postulates and no way to decide between them.

    Modern physics is of the form (1) there is a quantum state, (2) you look at it, (3) a miracle happens, (4) you perceive a classical state, and then you are repeatedly gaslit into believing quantum mechanics is a complete theory of nature and it’s impossible for there to ever be anything more fundamental than it and any physicist who thinks there might be, even if they are literally Albert Einstein, is a crank crackpot. They then take on the same playbook as the Christians where when you point out their explanation seems to be logically incoherent, they say, “God has no obligation to make sense to you” as an excuse to be incoherent and making no sense, but just replace “God” with “nature” and the same argument is repeated verbatim.


  • bunchberry@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldA conundrum
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    2 months ago

    They are NOT looking to see if you are responsible with money. They are looking to see if they can make money off of you, so they want you to be a heavy credit user. Before I bought my house I made sure to take out two credit cards and just buy random shit on them for a few months because that boosts my credit score drastically which then made it easy to get the loan. Banks HATE people with limited debt because it means you are not a loyal customer that they could make money off of. Yes, it makes no sense but that’s just how the economy works. Even if you don’t have any reason to buy things on credit, you still should. Even if you are very financially responsible, you should always have “stupid debt,” by that I mean debt for the sake of debt, because banks love that shit and it’ll help you out if you ever actually do need a loan for something.






  • Bob is a scientist, they have hooked a computer to the R vs T experiment and when R occurs the screen flashes red. When the screen flashes red, red photons collide with Bob’s skin and eyes, signals enter their brain and they observe a red screen, and they remember it. So, given the state of redbob, I think it’s reasonable to say that perceived R.

    These are all classical assumptions which Many Worlds denies. Again, you keep repeating classical descriptions to explain Many Worlds. I do not know how I can explain it as I’ve already went over this several times. You do not get discrete events out of the Schrodinger equation, there is no “redbob,” there is no photons colliding with Bob’s skin and eyes. None of this happens if all you have is the Schrodinger equation.


  • If R or T never happen from an external perspective doesn’t really matter to us though.

    I am not sure what you mean by “an external perspective.” The point is that R or T never occur in physical reality, so you have to then explain how it is that we actually perceive R or T if it’s literally something that doesn’t occur in the real world.

    If we accept many worlds as true for a second, then it follows that the total quantum states describes quite a lot, your exact configuration is somewhere within the total state.

    There is no “your exact configuration” if Many Worlds is true because discrete objects like “you” don’t even exist.

    At a large scale you depend on your parents having existed. So you can only perceive the parts of the total state where your parents existed, because any parts of the state where they didn’t exist does not contain a you to perceive.

    This analogy, again, doesn’t work. My parents existing could be said to be R and my parents not existing can be said to be T, and if I have a limited perspective where I only see R (due to the anthropic principle) then it naturally follows I would see R and not T, so that explains why I see one and not both.

    But this is not applicable to Many Worlds at all because Many Worlds does not claim two events happen and that a limited perspective makes us just see one of them. Many Worlds claims no events happen. You cannot take the subset of the null set and get a non-empty set from it. The rest of your comment, again, stems from this misconception, which I did try to clearly address in my previous comment yet it still seems to not be understood.


  • What is meant by “determinism” here? If you mean nomological determinism in the sense of the “free will vs determinism” debate, quantum mechanics is still a nomologically deterministic theory, so it does not strengthen the “free will” position at all. If you mean predetermination in the sense of the “randomness vs determinism” debate, if you interpret quantum mechanics to be fundamentally random, then of course it is incompatible with predetermination. But this is still ultimately an interpretation as it is empirically impossible to distinguish between true randomness and a significantly chaotic system.

    One might justify the former position on philosophical grounds, such as, Occam’s razor: it’s simpler to believe there is no cause than to posit a cause we cannot (currently) demonstrate, but that is still ultimately a philosophical argument. Take Plato’s cave, for example. If all they could see is the shadows, they might build theories about the shadows themselves, and then someone might posit that we should believe that the shadows are all that exists and nothing causes them because of Occam’s razor. They would clearly arrive at the incorrect conclusion using Occam’s razor, so Occam’s razor itself is debatable whether or not it is a reliable rule of thumb in cases like this.