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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2024

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  • 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.

    lol.

    All of modern technology boils down to math. Curing diseases, building our buildings, roads, cars, even how we do farming these days is all heavily driven by science and math.

    Sure, some of modern technology has made people lazy or had other negative impacts, but it’s not a serious argument to say continuing math and science research in general is worthless.

    Specifically relating to quantum computing, the first real problems to be solved by quantum computers are likely to be chemistry simulations which can have impact in discovering new medicines or new industrial processes.


  • 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?

    Error correction is the study of the mathematical techniques that let you make something reliable out of something unreliable. Much of classical computing heavily relies on error correction. You even pointed out error correction applied in your classical computer.

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

    The reason so much money is being invested in the development of quantum computers is mathematical work that suggests a sufficiently big enough quantum computer will be able to solve useful problems in an hour that would take the worlds biggest classical computer thousands of years to solve.


  • The output of a quantum computer is read by a classical computer and can then be transferred or stored as long as you liked use traditional means.

    The lifetime of the error corrected qubit mentioned here is a limitation of how complex of a quantum calculation the quantum computer can fix. And an hour is a really, really long time by that standard.

    Breaking RSA or other exciting things still requires a bunch of these error corrected qubits connected together. But this is still a pretty significant step.











  • You may be confusing git with GitHub.

    git is a version control tool that lets you keep and manage a history of the files you are editing

    GitHub is a website (not directly affiliated with the group maintaining git) that lets you upload, backup, and share your code using the format used by the git tool.

    source control just refers to software to manage your source code in some form. git is the most popular tool of its kind, but there are others, for example mercurial.



  • You’ll feel right at home in the command line. Install Homebrew or MacPorts. These are command line package managers. Many if not most of the software tools you are used to on Linux likely have Mac versions as well and you can find them either online or via one of those package managers.

    If you are going to download software from Apple’s Apple Store, you will need to make an account. You can install software directly from the internet without needing an account. You might need to tweak some “security settings” in System Preferences to run software not from the App Store.

    Unfortunately Xcode is something you need an Apple account to install. However, the Xcode “command line tools”, which includes a lot of common tools like gcc, I believe you can install by running “xcode-select --install” from the command line even without an account. There might also be other ways to get those tools installed manually / not through Apple

    If you just want an IDE and really want to avoid making an account, just use VSCode or something. But if you will need to develop Mac apps using Apple’s APIs, it will likely be easier at the very least to work in Xcode. And if you are going to develop for any of Apple’s other operating systems (like iOS) you will need to make an account.