Quantum computers have been a buzzword that’s lasted for 40 years. While research papers get pumped out in epic proportions, the fundamentals of quantum computing remain fundamentally broken.
The Case Against Quantum Computing was written 5 years ago now, a time when everyone’s mind was melting about quantum computing, and every major point of the article is still valid.
I recommend the whole article, but if I had to pick an excerpt sentence, it would be this:
The number of qubits used for them is below 10, usually from 3 to 5. Apparently, going from 5 qubits to 50 (the goal set by the ARDA Experts Panel for the year 2012) presents experimental difficulties that are hard to overcome. Most probably they are related to the simple fact that 25 = 32, while 250 = 1,125,899,906,842,624.
Despite much of the Quantum research community condemning the article when it came out, meaningful progress is nowhere to be seen. Per a Nature article in 2023: “Quantum computers: what are they good for? For now, absolutely nothing. But researchers and firms are optimistic about the applications.” - But there’s more fun facts:
This is where the scepticism about quantum computing begins. The world’s largest quantum computer in terms of qubits is IBM’s Osprey, which has 433. But even with 2 million qubits, some quantum chemistry calculations might take a century, according to a 2022 preprint2 by researchers at Microsoft Quantum in Redmond, Washington, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Research published in 2021 by scientists Craig Gidney at Google in Santa Barbara, California, and Martin Ekerå at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, estimates that breaking state-of-the-art cryptography in 8 hours would require 20 million qubits.
It needs more memes and less edgy teenagers screaming about politics (that they clearly don’t understand and take way too seriously).
Seriously I come to websites like this to get a mix of news and humour, not get yelled at by children who advocate for totalitarian regimes to “own the libs”, I am on the verge of changing instances because lemm.ee won’t let me block all of the two offenders at once, and I have to constantly remove every bullshit new sub they create, not to mention them infesting the comments section of anything news related to scream about “libs”.
Literally they are indistinguishable from reddits T_D crowd, they act just as hateful and use the same language, they seem more concerned with “the libs” than any other political group, and they worship mass murdering dictators while being holocaust deniers / apologists. They can call themselves leftists as much as they want, all I see from them is hatred so they might as well be Trump Qanon Cultists.
It’s alright. Doesn’t replace what I got from Reddit but I also use it less and it’s only form of social media so that’s a plus.
The political environment is rough. Lemmygrad and hexbear are toxic cesspools, which is unfortunate because I would genuinely like to engage with their political ideology more seriously but it’s inevitably drowned out by… well… them.
I’ve blocked most of the top posters over there and things are much more peaceful, if quiet.
There’s still a lack of content creators out there, which is an issue. Growth is going to be a problem because, to be blunt? Lemmy is dogshit before you block all the spam, political shitposting, and those fucking Reddit repost bots.
Until the new user experience is cleaned up I don’t expect Lemmy to gain users on average. I’ll probably spin up my own instance in AWS at some point to play with it, or self host on some inexpensive hardware.
Tl;Dr: I get what I want from it but don’t see it having healthy long term growth
Seriously though, they act just like the T_D crowd from reddit, but at least there it was easier to avoid them (and they actually started banning them eventually). I am legitimately convinced that there is a huge overlap in members, they never cared about politics just about being hateful, they wore a right wing mask on reddit and they wear a left wing mask here.
I LOVE the idea of Lemmy and the decentralized web and people coming together to forge our own way. But there’s a far too high ratio of elitism, smugness, arrogance and belittlement to people that just want to discuss the things we enjoy. It is just really unfortunate. I don’t engage very much, or at all really so I understand part of that is on me, but every discussion I find I’d like to chime in on is already polluted by assholes. It’s just disheartening.
Overall I like Lemmy, but there’s also a lot of doomers on here that do everything they can to make everyone feel miserable. I had to trim out a lot of communities that they tend to infest, so now I’m not getting as much interaction and have moved some of my traffic back to Reddit to have enough things to browse
I came for a reddit replacement and instead I found an interesting subset of what I got at Reddit. And it is not better content or engagement wise. It’s useful but niche, and therefore less useful overall than Reddit was.
Linux/FOSS Bros are ruining it for me more and more every day.
Not even with my comments, but others. I’m so sick of seeing basic comments extremely downvoted because “ThaTs NoT OpeN sOurCe”.
Like a post a was reading a few minutes ago about Microsoft Paint being updated, and someone said it was Windows 11 exclusive, and the other guy said Windows 11 isn’t half bad. The comment is super downvoted, because Linux best, Windoze BAD!
You’re going to drive away people who just want to have a conversation if you guys don’t learn how to be normal, holy shit. I’m a tech bro and you’re driving ME away.
As others have said, it doesn’t quite have the user base to reach critical mass. A lot of my old favorite subs aren’t here.
Also…the user base isn’t as diverse. I used to click through to see the comments on Reddit to find those comments that provided fresh perspective, gave more context, or explained nuance. You’d click on some thread about Trump’s latest legal troubles and get some real information about why things are moving slowly or why the defense made a particular choice. Or go into a thread about some upcoming video game being cancelled, or Google plan being changed or whatever, and get an actual analysis about how the financials don’t work, or maybe how the market changed, or how some users were abusing the system.
On Lemmy, I often find myself just skipping the comments. They seem much more uniform, all just repeating the popular line: variants of “Ha, fuck Trump!” “Lol, Russia sucks!” “Company X doing this should be against the law!” etc. I can usually predict what the comments are going to be without bothering to read them, and rarely do I come out with new information. It feels much more like an echo chamber.
Part of it is just that there’s not as many users, I think, so there’s just not as many posts and thus fewer ‘gems’. Also, I think that the users who made the effort to migrate from Reddit probably skew younger, tend to be more uniformly left-leaning, and a larger share will be students or programmers as opposed to lawyers or carpenters or auto mechanics.
The especially annoying thing is that the same thing seems to have happened on Reddit. Yeah, I still moonlight there when I run out of content on Lemmy. And the number of comments seems to have dwindled, and the viewpoint diversity seems to have narrowed there, too. Maybe the normies just gave up and left.
I love it tbh. Even when people disagree with me it doesn’t feel like I’m being attacked. On Reddit it feels like I’m being attacked even when someone agrees with me.
asklemmy
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