Given the level of detail in the rebuttal, I think there's a good chance he was a reviewer for the original paper, and the editor published it against his objections.

Figure 1 of this review clearly shows exponential improvement in superconducting qubit coherence times, all backed up by citations. There are similar more recent plots, but this is the one I found first. If I am hallucinating or delusional, please disprove this figure.

Please provide a citation to demonstrate this claim in even a single metric.

Please, *please* do not use words like "hallucination" here. It's already a somewhat ill-defined term, but it does have a generally understood context that absolutely does not apply in this space. There's already a bizarre conflation of AI and quantum computing that makes no damn sense, and I'd really like it to stop getting worse.

As for the rest of your post, topological or Majorana qubits that Microsoft favors have never been reliably proven to exist at all, much less be useful for quantum computing. But for the mainstream technologies, namely superconducting and spin qubits, every single performance metric has been improving exponentially for most of the last two decades. There isn't some fundamental blocker that will require some unknown innovation to overcome, just the continuation of steadily accumulating progress. Your "factoring 21" anecdote is also extremely out of date. D-Wave has calculated magnetic spins (oh, and they are actively doing things like solving the traveling salesman problem for UPS regularly). IBM has modeled fermionic interactions. Google has demonstrated distance-7+ error correction (not in an of itself useful, but a hell of a lot more complicated than Shor's algorithm).

My Ubuntu PC use is 90% games, 8% web browser, and 2% else. Most PC users never need anything but a browser. I was hoping to install SteamOS on it when I built it, but that wasn't an option. Instead ubuntu tried to install steam as a snap for some stupid reason, which screwed up my disk layout (apparently snaps are all sandboxed, cool, but those sandboxes must go into your home directory? Because obviously nobody would ever have multiple users with small homes and a large shared partition for big things like, let's see, games??)

It's not uncommon to find fixes for various "Linux" issues that really mean "ubuntu". If Steamboxes really take off, those forums will quickly become the most useful place to find fixes for Linux gaming, not just steam but also Heroic and Lutris and whatever comes next. I would much rather be able to follow directly than constantly go through translating arch to debian.

This is true only if "can be done" includes the fine print "maybe within the lifetime of the universe" and "a lot of RAM" means "more bytes than there are atoms in the universe".

Why can't we be allowed to keep nice things? I've been using bitwarden for years now, and I will never use anything else (other than a similar 3rd party password manager) again. Yes, there are plenty of competitors with similar features, but bitwarden is consistently top-ranked by actual security experts, and the interface is great, especially now that it can do passkeys. But that ranking comes 100% from *transparency*. The instant that goes away, nobody sane is going to keep them around.

"Always free" is nice, but not a deal-breaker. I only have free now because I don't really need anything at the premium level. I refuse to pay subscriptions for things that I should be able to buy once, but they do provide an actual service (keyring syncing), so I will grumble, but it's a valid reason.

Everyone will now chime in with how awesome their setup is with custom rsync scripts running on their home server, and that's fine. I have plenty of stuff like that. But I don't want to *have* to just to replace an already-working solution because some dipshit CEO thinks he can squeeze an extra profit this quarter. And when they hemorrhage customers instead, dipshit will still get an awesome golden parachute.

I completely agree. But fun fact, the mechanism by which bacteria move is akin to a freely rotating "motor." Spinning one direction, the flagella wrap together into a corkscrew and it moves forward. Briefly reverse the spin and the flagella fly apart and reorient the bacterium in a different direction.

Yes, and ask Vietnam pilots how useful that is when your adversary is in the jungle, especially now that napalm and Agent Orange are rather frowned on.

No wonder we only get endless political crap on here nowadays. We actually get some "news for nerds" for once, and the main reaction is "well that's just dumb." It's an impressive feat of engineering even if it has little to no practical application. Not much practical in getting Doom to run on a toaster either.

If you absolutely insist on practical applications, how about better prosthetics? Powered "exoskeletons" for paralyzed people or those with severe neuromuscular disorders? Or (and sadly much more likely) combat robots for terrain like dense jungle where neither wheels nor flying works?

The inventor of the transistor was convinced that it had no practical purpose whatsoever.

Apologies for grammar policing, but in case it is educational: you emigrate from a place, and immigrate to a place.

Can someone please explain to me why "la Presidenta" is supposed to be such a scathing moniker? "El Presidente" indicates dictatorship, great. And then...making it feminine somehow becomes more of an insult? No wonder Kamala had no chance.

Before MAGA, the two parties were indistinguishable if you take two steps back. But they at least had the decency to try to keep their corruption behind closed doors; now it is naked and blatant. Never before has a party amassed power, not just in spite of, but because they repeatedly tell blatant and repeatedly disproven lies. Anti-intellectualism is nothing new, but this is the first time in history the federal government has actually enacted anti-science policies. No prior president has refused to accept the legitimacy of an election, tried to coerce states to illegally alter their results, incited a violent riot that was almost certainly intended to be an insurrection, and then pardoned all of those violent offenders, including people who murdered police officers.

I fully agree that the average republocrat is no better than the average demoblican, but anyone who tries to argue that this administration is no different is either a deluded moron or part of the cancer.

Do you also just hang up the phone without saying goodbye like you're in a movie? In many transactions, "thank you" is the natural way to communicate in English "this interaction and conversation is now concluded."

obligatory smbc https://www.smbc-comics.com/co...

Not to mention this is almost certainly single-crystal fused silica wafers, not window glass.