hetscop

I think that the main thing this reveals about the bluesky admins is that they haven’t thought that hard about harrasment, which is weird to not do if you’re trying to launch a new social media platform.

I wonder what it’s like to sudendly be able to see a new color, that must be an interesting experience

While I think that the article is correct in stating that mastodon isn’t currently a serious competitor to facebook, it’s possible that it (or something else based of activitypub) might become that one day. I think that there’s a decent chance that facebook might want to prevent fediverse spaces from potentially becoming serious competitors, and even if that’s not the main reason why their implementing activitypub, if e.g. mastodon ever does get to a point where it can challange meta (which I think most of us are hoping!) then facebook will use the position of power they will have over activitypub to try to prevent that. I think it’s a misstake to give facebook any power of our spaces because that means essentially giving up on the idea of an internet not controlled by large corporations like facebook.

It’s honestly amazing that perhaps the aspect of technology that has most profoundly shaped peoples lives during the 2010s has turned out to be almost completely financially unsustainable

Having a single player control most of the market - like meta - means that they will have a lot of sway over how the protocol is developed. This is propably a bad thing since meta har different goals than people currently using the fediverse and also have financial incentives to get people to move over to their platforms instead.

People want to be “where it’s happening” and mastodon isn’t that. Which might be fine for the people that do use it, but mastodon isn’t going to be a platform where you can potentially interact with celebrities, politicians and journalists the way that twitter was for example any time soon.

(typed this out yesterday before @ZickZack s excellent answer, but couldn’t post it at the time due to maintenance…)

No, you’ve got it wrong. This is a fairly common missunderstanding which is perpetuated by a lot of coverage about the topic being sloppy.

You could argue that there is a grain of truth to the idea of processing multiple possibilities at once, but it’s a bit more complicated than that and the way it’s usually presented leads to people building a bad intuition of how it works. If you do get in to the nitty-gritty of Shors algorithm it feels to me at least a bit like a weird hack that shouldn’t work at all or at least not be faster than the normal way to compute prime factors. It isn’t a general speedup, just in certain cases where you can exploit quantum mechanics in clever ways.

Of the top of my head the SMBC comic about it is actually pretty good. This article makes basically the same points, but a bit more elaborated (note that it was written a while ago so the part about the current state of quantum computing is outdated). I noticed that Veritasum put out a YouTube video which I haven’t watched, but he is in my experience good at explaining physics and math so I think that there’s a good chance that it’ll hold up. I remember liking this Minute Physics video about Shor’s algorithm too, if you wanna get a better understanding of it.

I should clarify that I’m not a quantum phycisist, I’ve just done a couple of internet deep dives on the topic but I can’t say that I fully understand quantum computing at all. I do think my understanding of it is better than the one in this article and others like it.

Been gone for a couple of days

This is article is missleading about how quantum computing works.

Superposition increases the computing power of a quantum computer exponentially. For example, two qubits can exist in four states simultaneously (00, 01, 10, 11), three qubits in eight states, and so on. This allows quantum computers to process a massive number of possibilities at once.

Quantum computers aren’t faster because they “process” multiple “possibilities” at once. Quantum computers aren’t any faster than regular computers when it comes to general purpose computing. You can exploit some interesting properties about quantum computing to solve certain problems asymptotically faster, like with Shor’s algorithm.

This means that the time to solve a problem as the size of the problem grows scales better. Using Shor’s algorithm, the time to factor a polynomial is proprtional to (log N)^2 log log N, where N is the size of the input data, instead of the fastest known non-quantum algorithm which takes time proportional to e^(1.9(log N)^(1/3)(log log N)^(2/3)). Note that the majority of problems that we would maybe like to solve using a computer don’t have any fancy quantum algorithms asociated with them and as such are no faster than a normal computer,

Given a large enough problem that can be solved with a quantum algorithm, a quantum computer will eventually outperform a non-quantum computer. This does not mean that quantum computers can solve arbitrary problems quickly.