At the time people thought that you might build new supercomputers with an on-site cryostat (or something like that) housing a bunch of QPUs.

The UK govt announced £162m in cuts to research council funding last month, then this month they announced £2bn for a massive quantum computing project. I’m all for blue sky research but the field is basically a giant money pit. £2bn would have bought multiple general purpose supercomputers that could have been used for biology, materials science, astrophysics etc. The quantum computing research is inevitably going to yield a quantum processor with less than 1kb of memory that can only run for a few nanoseconds. The government is disproportionately funding this stuff because of the siren song promise that quantum computing will help them break encryption, but the field has taken so long to materialise anything useful that we now have quantum-resistant classical encryption algorithms. Also, plenty of physicists are now skeptical of the idea that quantum computers will be intrinsically faster than classical computers for most tasks.

The matrix sequels definitely muddle the pacing and characters, and they struggle to fill the void left by the central mystery of the first film, but the philosophising and action are both as good or better than the first film.

Speed racer has already been critically reevaluated so I guess my wachowski hot take is that Jupiter Ascending is due. It’s idiotic but it’s a sweaty blast of pure cinema.

• machine learning models will continue to improve their output somewhat but gains will be incremental and the intrinsic problems with ml-derived content (e.g hallucinations, context window limitations, long-term coherency) will remain
• open source models will catch up with commercial ones
• the smaller ml companies (like openai and anthropic) will be absorbed, probably by Microsoft and Amazon
• The increasing cost of hardware and energy will force companies to raise prices for ml subscriptions and eventually lock ml features behind paywalls
• Computer parts will remain expensive for a long time
• Programmers will collectively spend the next decade wrestling with the consequences of filling their codebases with millions of lines of ai generated code
• Google images will never fully recover

when capcom were working with inti creates, they were reliably putting out good games at a time when indie developers weren’t - at least in that genre. now they put out one mediocre game every ten years.

the problem isn’t electron, the problem is that A) html is the only truly cross platform UI framework and B) that html (and the web stack in general) has way too many features and is way too complex, because Google’s been bolting features onto it for decades.

every programmer I’ve seen who says their code is self documenting writes dogshit code

I love the lotr movies but even the extended editions can’t fit in the nuances of all the supporting characters. this gets worse the later you get in the trilogy, the biggest victims probably being the ents, faramir, denethor and pippin.

my own personal pick is probably one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, where they change McMurphy’s crime from battery and gambling to statutory rape. that did not engender sympathy

Kath & Kim is one of Australia’s finest cultural exports

the timeline in the pic is a bit off, but macos is definitely getting worse. I think mavericks was the last version that let you turn off mouse acceleration.

I’m probably not going to pay $10 a year with additional fees to have my music on a website unless a lot of people are already using it

this pretty much sums it up. I thought trump would be incoherent, but some of the stuff out of his mouth was borderline surreal. Harris had completely tuned herself to ‘beat’ trump, and while it worked, it’s painfully clear that she doesn’t have a single original thought - nothing but platitudes, the same canned phrases about working families and small businesses, same tired defence of Israel.

this is fine until you need autotools which is worse than cmake

updating packages in kde neon is like playing russian roulette, it’s worse than pop os in my experience

pointers are fine, but when you learn about the preprocessor and templates and 75% of the STL it goes negative again

c++ templates are such a busted implementation of generics that if I didn’t have context I’d assume they were bad on purpose like malbolge

I run a small personal blog/portfolio website that doesn’t get more than a hundred or so human visits per day, but it gets hammered with bot traffic, not just malicious bots but tons of different search indexers and scrapers, many of which don’t respect robots.txt

after setting up cloudflare I noticed a very significant drop in malicious traffic and in bandwidth use, which also corresponded to less bandwidth and CPU usage for my VPS.

I know cloudflare has recently had a few bad customer service stories but for small and medium sized websites their service is invaluable

my own personal criticism of cloudflare is that, as a VPS user, I get hit by cloudflare challenges more. but now that they’ve moved to hcaptcha it’s not too bad

I work in computational biophysics. The field has been slowly chipping away at the structure and function of every protein for decades (it’s a solvable problem, it’s just going to take a lot of time and energy) and recently a bunch of clueless SF tech bros have bumbled their way into the field and declared that they’ve solved everything.

when I think of other famous psychologists my mind goes to people like zimbardo or milgram, because of their attention grabbing studies. but they are not great examples because their work has big problems with ethics and replicability. after that, maybe pavlov or skinner? but their work is most famous for its less ethical uses. harlow? or a bunch of his contemporaries who got famous mostly for torturing monkeys? maybe piaget?

I only did psychology to a college level but I think a lot of 20th century psychologists are famous for the wrong reasons. Freud was full of crap but at least he didn’t torture any monkeys

the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem

modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything

in terms of disabling windows components, it’s true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft’s problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be

if I wanted access to a constant stream of confidently-stated misinformation I would simply open Reddit