da-bacon

6 ms·

1.
by da-bacon 1mo ago
Big if true! Would break most post quantum crypto with a quantum attack. Looks like a variant of Kuoerberg sieving and not that complicated so I’d expect we will know whether it is correct or not soon.
2.
by da-bacon 5mo ago
Two books that I highly recommend to give you a visual and numbers view of the cell: “The Machinery of Life” by David Goodsell is full of illustrations like the ones show in the article and really gave me a sense of what k might imagine whe
3.
We beat Google's zero-knowledge proof of quantum cryptanalysis(blog.trailofbits.com)
4 points by da-bacon 5mo ago|0 comments
4.
by da-bacon 6mo ago
Worth reading the comments over on scirate https://scirate.com/arxiv/2603.28627 for how to interpret some the claims.
5.
by da-bacon 6mo ago
The book "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder" about the museum is a good read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Wilson%27s_Cabinet_of_Wond... Recommend reading it after visiting, don't want to spoil
6.
by da-bacon 1y ago
Agree that “Stella Maris” is amazing for this deep engagement with art. Perhaps in a similar vein I do think there are a couple of other books that do this . One is Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is similar in that foundations of math m
7.
by da-bacon 1y ago
For 2, I don’t think you can break ties however you like because this would give you random left or right associativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_associativity For example 2-4-7 would be either (2-4)-7 o
8.
by da-bacon 1y ago
When I was a high school student, I read “Artificial Life” by Stephen Levy and got really into alife. The book had snapshots of a daughter of Codd’s CA, Langston’s loops, on its book sleeve. I was able to back up some of the rules and then
9.
by da-bacon 2y ago
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8525#comment-1997424 “Gil Kalai #23: So we’re perfectly clear, from my perspective your position has become like that of Saddam Hussein’s information minister, who repeatedly went on TV to expl
10.
by da-bacon 2y ago
>That's an EXTRAORDINARY claim and one that contradicts the experience of pretty much all other research and development in quantum error correction over the course of the history of quantum computing. Not sure why you would say tha
11.
by da-bacon 2y ago
Yeah me too. I wrote a post about why it hurt so much to lose this place along similar lines https://dabacon.org/pontiff/2024/08/16/requiem-for-the-livin...
12.
by da-bacon 2y ago
Maybe I’m the exception but I went maybe 30 or 40 times. There was so much joy in sharing my childhood with my child. Also the small gift shop had someone who knew their obscure technology history book, I must have bought 10 books from tha
13.
by da-bacon 2y ago
Edited Wait this is a different John Bell ( https://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/ ) than the Bell Inequalities ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_Bell ). But strangely that John Bell has also work
14.
by da-bacon 2y ago
I'm reminded of what Neal himself said when asked about building the primer: "Kids need to get answers from humans who love them" https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_s
15.
by da-bacon 2y ago
There was a world before the dot com explosion when tinkering with computers was odd, a passion that gripped few, and was looked upon as extremely odd by most. This museum was the closest thing to being able to travel back to that era. You
16.
by da-bacon 2y ago
Please be gentle on my poor digital ocean droplet :) Note that these notes were not published and were probably something he typed up while thinking about the subject. If you haven’t, I highly recommend checking out one of his “it from bi
17.
by da-bacon 2y ago
These are notes he typed up, maybe for himself and maybe to share with others. Doing this is a highly effective way to clarify your own thinking. Most of his ideas are listed are mundane, but others, like where he predicts something like
18.
by da-bacon 2y ago
Yes sub exponential which is splitting hairs. Exp(O(n log log n / log n)). Thanks for the acknowledgment that I didn’t say runtime.
19.
by da-bacon 2y ago
I didn’t say the runtime did I? The approximation ratio went from exponential to polynomial noise ratio. This just went from 2^n to n^4.5 and everyone seems to say “oh this is fine”.
20.
by da-bacon 2y ago
People seemed to be focusing on the fact that this wouldn’t break the NIST leading PQC public key cryptosystem, but I think that misses the point. This takes a problem at the core of this security, which previously only had an exponential a
21.
by da-bacon 2y ago
My favorite Serra story is when he was hired to build a sculpture by Caltech. In typical fashion he decided he wanted to build a giant wall across one of the few remaining wide open green spaces on campus, the lawn adjacent to Beckman. In
22.
by da-bacon 3y ago
"The Weil Conjectures" by Karen Olsson is an interesting read that connects Andre and Simone and the authors own experiences as a math major. I thought it did a good job capture the appeal of math, but it's definitely not ab
23.
by da-bacon 3y ago
One distinction is maybe between the way the world works and way we humans work, with our language and our unconscious. My read is that Cormac is deeply skeptical of the rational story our language tells us, and that we overlook and ignore
24.
by da-bacon 3y ago
I'm surprised you find the Kekulé Problem not supporting that he liked science. I think of it more as pointing out that the unconsciousness has been ignored scientifically, but he certainly frames it as a question of science: "Th
25.
by da-bacon 3y ago
I'm not sure this implies much about PQC. The model here is LOCAL distributed computing which is pretty far from what you're concerned about in PQC.
26.
by da-bacon 3y ago
Yes, for some definition of logical qubit. One of the first example is the experiment of Egan et al where they demonstrated a fault-tolerant QEC measurement using 13 physical qubits. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11482
27.
by da-bacon 3y ago
This chip has 0 logical qubits, for any reasonable definition of logical qubit: it’s not good enough (yet) to offer substantial error suppression by using a quantum error correcting code. (Disclosure: work for Google’s quantum effort)
28.
by da-bacon 3y ago
If you rob a bank and then win the lottery, you still robbed the bank.
29.
by da-bacon 3y ago
"but the physics of it is relatively straightforward." Amusingly Einstein both identified gravitational waves in his then new general relativity and then changed his mind about whether they existed. Indeed he had found three diffe
30.
by da-bacon 3y ago
I really hope so, does anyone know if there are any grassroots efforts to help lobby for this?

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