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Comment Re:Real stuff behind the article (Score 1) 44

by fxj (#63926099) Attached to: Chinese Scientists Claim Record-Smashing Quantum Computing Breakthrough

see also the blog entry of scott aaronson (already old, but it is about the same experiment):

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=...

A group led by Jianwei Pan and Chao-Yang Lu, based mainly at USTC in Hefei, China, announced today that it achieved BosonSampling with 40-70 detected photons—up to and beyond the limit where a classical supercomputer could feasibly verify the results. (Technically, they achieved a variant called Gaussian BosonSampling: a generalization of what I called Scattershot BosonSampling in a 2013 post on this blog.)

Comment No, it lied about it. (Score 3, Insightful) 19

by fxj (#63590718) Attached to: Google's Bard AI Can Now Write and Execute Code To Answer a Question

In the ars article bard claims that it used the following python program to reverse the string:

def reverse_word(word):
        reversed_word = ""
        for i in range(len(word) - 1, -1 , -1):
                reversed_word += word[i]
        return reversed_word

print (reversed_word("Lollipop"))

do you spot the typo in the last line? Bard just showed some example from the internet and clained that it used it to compute the reverse. LLMs are notorious liars.

Comment web MIDI is so 2015 (Score 1) 112

by fxj (#59399436) Attached to: Do You Remember MIDI Music Files?

https://www.w3.org/TR/webmidi/

To some users, "MIDI" has become synonymous with Standard MIDI Files and General MIDI.

The Web MIDI API is not intended to describe music or controller inputs semantically; it is designed to expose the mechanics of MIDI input and output interfaces, and the practical aspects of sending and receiving MIDI messages, without identifying what those actions might mean semantically (e.g., in terms of "modulate the vibrato by 20Hz" or "play a G#7 chord", other than in terms of changing a controller value or sending a set of note-on messages that happen to represent a G#7 chord).

Comment Sustainability (Score 2) 166

It is all about sustainability. Humans can perfectly replicate without any help from another species. Even it all technology would break down babies still would be born. In the case of cyborgs: not so much. They need a specialized infrastructure that *at the moment* can only be run by humans. And even the most simple tasks like collecting garbage (hello roomba) are hard for them. And even if they would have solved all that what happens when a big catastropy like an asteroid hits earth and destroys their main factories. Who will rebuild all that infrastructure?

Comment Lunar orbits are unstable (Score 1) 168

by fxj (#57466114) Attached to: Moons Can Have Their Own Moons and They Could Be Called Moonmoons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Gravitational anomalies slightly distorting the orbits of some Lunar Orbiters led to the discovery of mass concentrations (dubbed mascons) beneath the lunar surface caused by large impacting bodies at some remote time in the past. These anomalies are significant enough to cause a lunar orbit to change significantly over the course of several days.
Earth

Ocean Currents Proposed As Cause of Magnetic Field 333

Posted by kdawson from the round-and-round-and-round-in-the-circle-game dept.
pjt33 notes a recently published paper proposing that ocean currents could account for Earth's magnetic field. The wrteup appears on the Institute of Physics site; the IOP is co-owner, with the German Physical Society, of the open-access journal in which the paper appears. This reader adds, "The currently predominant theory is that the cause of Earth's magnetic field is molten iron flowing in the outer core. There is at present no direct evidence for either theory." "Professor Gregory Ryskin from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, has defied the long-standing convention by applying equations from magnetohydrodynamics to our oceans' salt water (which conducts electricity) and found that the long-term changes (the secular variation) in the Earth's main magnetic field are possibly induced by our oceans' circulation."

Vinyl To Signal the End for CDs? 883

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the wtb-10-disc-changer-for-my-car dept.
PJ1216 writes to mention that vinyl seems poised to make a comeback in the music industry. Some are even predicting that this comeback coupled with the surge in digital music sales could possibly close the door on CDs. "Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs, and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs. Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound. Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."

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