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Comment 30 million yottabytes (Score 1) 17

Willow can mutually entangle 105 qubits; this is not like IBM's Condor with 1121 qubits where it is suspected only a dozen or two qubits can be mutually entangled.

The internal state of 105 mutually entangled qubits corresponds to 2^105 * 2 (for phase & amplitude) * 3 (bits per analog value, akin to SSD TLC) = 3 * 10^31 bytes = 30,000,000 yottabytes.

Notice that I said "internal state". Reading those values out is the challenge, usually involving re-running the same program over and over to get a probability distribution. Once you measure, all the quantum states collapse.

Comment Maintenance (Score 1) 62

> Why? Absolutely no idea

This isn't surprising to anybody who's studied the psychology of political science.

Those who identify as 'conservative' value maintenance much higher than those who identify as 'progressive'. You're more likely to see them in their driveway changing their oil and measuring their tire tread depth. It's just different kinds of people with different time-preference mindsets.

Note that with a limited budget maintenance spending is money that cannot be spent on immediate benefits.

You need to allocate some of the benefits money to upgrading the IT systems so there's less to hand out. "How could you possibly cut their benefits?" is the kind of misplaced empathy that undercuts the system that they feel is valuable.

Of course there's usually a Federal bailout in the wings for people who don't plan ahead so the incentive systems are all completely misaligned for good governance. Since the Lockdowns we've seen the weaponization of the Dollar through sanctions and tariffs that have pushed world oil markets to the Yuan and cross-border settlements in sovereign currency exchanges, so the Dollar is in freefall compared to commodities which means those bailouts are going to end very soon.

As this reckoning becomes too real to ignore the populations will move strongly to vote for candidates who seem to understand the value of maintenance.

Comment Re:Wait... (Score 1) 62

Yeah, and Healthcare is 20% of GDP.

According to Keynesian economists, if we were all much healthier the economy would be worse off.

I'm not sure how much more evidence you need that the entire economic school is a bunch of self-styled money-priests making excuses for government spending.

Keynes did some really good early work but then he got caught diddling kids and after that the King's spending was all the best thing anybody could do.

An early version of "trust the experts".

Comment Software Engineering? (Score 1) 72

So the code was written by people who aren't familiar with the idea of "fail-safe"?

I might have gone to school for software engineering but I never equated it with building a bridge at 4000' over a canyon. Those are different things.

But none of my classmates would have thought about building a stack that fails into random or dangerous conditions. We always built from the ground up and verified states as new functionality was added with test evaluation of the possible error states.

And those classes were in C++89 without the advantages of proper exception handling like Java or Python provide.

I think if I were in the market for a $5000 IoT mattress I'd want to see something like a UL label on it. I guess the hardware guys put in a thermal switch so the heating elements shut off at 110*F? Thank goodness a runaway fire wasn't a failure mode.

I wouldn't personally ever spend that kind of money on something like that but if I were rich and disabled maybe there would be use cases.

Comment Re:Merz is riding a dead horse, (Score 2, Insightful) 108

sure, he can delay the inevitable

Inevitable. LOL.

The EU will break up before it truly bans ICE engines. It's not going to happen in our lifetime. Brussels may impose a penalty of some kind on member states that don't comply, but it'll be fairly cheap. Some tax or another will be imposed, everyone will claim victory, and ICE vehicles will continue to roll off production lines on the Continent.

Comment That's the rule for today. Tomorrow, however... (Score 1) 75

This is the problem with a single idiot making up the rules on the fly. You can't trust the rules won't change based on the last person he talked to, the last bribe he received, the latest opinion polls, or whether his drug regime was changed.

Another reason for having actual laws passed by Congress* is that Congress is slow to change them and doesn't like to do so willy-nilly.

* Not to imply that the GOP Congress is actually capable of passing laws or pushing back on the Executive or standing up for America in general.

Comment Re:Unions (Score 1) 136

no doubt. Which is why I only have subcontractors, not permanent employees and almost all of them are in Ukraine. Also as I said, should something like that be attempted, I would shut down parts of businesses and get rid of the people who attempt it, I wouldn't run a business where I had to deal with this.

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