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Comment Re:First rule of QA (Score 2) 79

Unfortunately most QA groups at Apple don't have real "stop release" power over the products. Program managers and upper management set the schedules and those dates must be hit for release no matter actual quality. There's inflection points before final release where truly buggy features get dropped or reduced in scope but rarely is there any time where QA has the power/time/resources to pause development for engineering to fix major issues.

The situation isn't helped by the OS being in so much flux for the first half of development that testing is possible or the results valid for more than a week.

Comment Re:The Horse is Already Gone (Score 1) 68

QCs are completely unsuitable for reversing hashes and that is what cracking passwords needs.

Translation: we don't currently have a quantum algorithm for reversing hashes. But there was a time, not that long ago, when we didn't have a quantum algo for factorization either. However, I don't expect to see a quantum algo for hash reversion any time soon, because the whole problem of reversing hashes is pretty complex.

Factorization as a classical problem is essentially trivial, in that there are very simple classical algorithms for it. They just take a lot of time to run. But coming up with an efficient quantum algorithm was not trivial, and the algorithm itself isn't so simple. So you can estimate that a quantum version of any algorithm is a lot more complex than the classical counterpart.

Comment Re: Mac OS has already started to pester me (Score 1) 68

"quantum resistant forever" is too strong.

I've only taken fairly general master's level courses in quantum information and regular cryptography, but I agree with this overall sentiment. My math professors used to say that no asymmetric encryption scheme has been proved unbreakable; we only know if they haven't been broken so far. Assuming something is unbreakable is like saying Fermat's last theorem is unprovable — until one day it's proved. So to me "post quantum cryptography" is essentially a buzzword.

Comment Re:I thought the housing crisis was about greed (Score 1, Informative) 120

That's not how it works. You can't just buy a tract of land. You have to buy the land, jump through hoops to get permits to build, defeat NIMBY lawsuits, get the local municipality to run services, defeat more NIMBY lawsuits, get new permits from a new municipality administration, then finally break ground on construction.

NIMBYs of all stripes throw up roadblocks during the permitting process and will then sue to get an injunction. If you defeat those lawsuits they'll go after the municipalities suing that permits were approved illegally (which they sometimes are).

After several rounds of legal wrangling you can finally start construction. This ends up with only huge developers being able to build because they can absorb all the pre-construction costs until they sell all the homes. They can also afford the scale to benefit from bulk orders and contracts.

The cost of expanding housing is mostly in the project development rather than labor costs of construction. Even if you had construction robots the construction companies would only offer marginal savings as their bids would just be human contractor - 1%. There would be no reason for them to leave money on the table offering a huge discount off human labor.

Comment Re:Gas guzzling V8s don't seem like a good idea (Score 1) 384

As opposed to depending on lithium produced in China.

What are you talking about? Do you have any idea what the carbon emissions of fossil fuel extraction and refining are? Do you think the sludge that comes out of the ground goes right into a gas tank?

Also, why are people comparing the ingredients of a battery — which is recharged a thousand times — against petrol, which you need to extract and process anew for every fscking "charge". I keep seeing this over and over, and I'm never sure if it's a new level of stupid, or just a very hairy troll under a very large bridge.

I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I also notice that the Hormuz Strait is being closed. Gas guzzler owners all over the world are whining over rising oil prices, while the civilized world is moving into energy sources that don't depend on access to conflict areas. The grandparent whines about China, but it's not exactly the sole source of Lithium. They even opened a mine here in Finland.

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