Notices by neil 🍄 (neil@social.coop), page 5

Good lord, 'quantum supremacy' is a terrible phrase.

The man who coined it 'failed to foresee' the association with white supremacy.

'In any case, the term caught on, and it has been embraced with particular zeal by the Google AI Quantum team.'

Riiiighht...

https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-preskill-explains-quantum-supremacy-20191002/

@dajbelshaw Looks amazing. I went up Swirl How last time I was there, just the other side from Hardknott Pass (next to Wrynose Pass!)

@attilakinali Specifically the development of quantum computers. The tech involved to cool to near absolute zero doesn't look cheap.

Learned a little bit about FPGAs from Alan of myStorm today. I'm a long way from clocking it all, but I think a couple of concepts sunk in... I'd like to know more about chip design and hardware, the fundamentals.

The BlackIce Mx looks super fun, an open hardware FPGA dev board. Someone was demoing the NES chips built on one, and Alan showed me an implementation of RISC-V. https://mystorm.uk/mystorm-opensource-fpga-hardware-blackice-mxusing-blackedge/

@bob Very interesting, quantum resistant algorithms. These are possible on classical computers?

(now reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography ...)

When you look at the resources required to do quantum research, or even just fabricate silicon chips for that matter, I think that along with small tech, appropriate tech, etc, there's a need to think about guerrilla technology. The creative use of small technology to counter the misuse of more 'advanced' technology by those with access to orders of magnitude more resources. Ways of tackling the asymmetry. Better understanding of the terrain. Small units of organisation with mobility.

I don't have a great grasp of what's going on with quantum computing, but I saw a talk today about how it is advancing apace. IBM now at 53 qubits.

Given the stated potential of quantum computers, seems worrying that they will be the playthings of wealthy states and corporations. Barclays recently used it for some financial application for example. The liberatory potential could be vast, but will it be used for those ends? Don't want to be a crank, but I'm not feeling particularly hopeful...

[New ebook] Turn data into customer loyalty this Black Friday

Fuck off

You know you're in Manchester when the wifi password is 'ianbrown'...

I'll be at MozFest this day but this looks pretty great:

- Topics: local food, renewable energy, technology, community education, myth, language, sustainable building, wellbeing, political action, peoples' assemblies
- Location: converted chapel near Snowdonia in Wales
- Astral Ship: Astral Ship

http://astralship.org/voyages/VsgwrsCymunedolOct19.html

@Flophouse_Sam Oh dang, that's a shame...

Well this is something I need to watch:

"Hyperland is a 50-minute-long documentary film about hypertext and surrounding technologies. [...] It stars Douglas Adams as a computer user and Tom Baker, with whom Adams had already worked on Doctor Who, as a personification of a software agent."

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

Hyper
Media

oops, correction: I present: 651 tracks I've liked over the years, in no particular order.

https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/tracks.html

I wanted to get my old history of tracks that I've liked out of last.fm and Deezer for a while. I want to own that stuff.

This service is really nice to do that - export from a bunch of different music services into txt or csv.

https://www.tunemymusic.com/

LOOPS HAUNT - Huarache

https://invidio.us/watch?v=MsKAV3VN0pk

#NowPlaying

@mattcropp Does it still work?