Sure, but what’s the end game supposed to be, then? Just making the same request over and over again indefinitely?

The Year of the Lemmy Desktop

In the sci-fi book Hyperion (which takes place hundreds of years in the future) they use this convention throughout and it works really well, so I’ve also wished that it were widely adopted in our society. (Except for androids, where the title is A. rather than M.)

OP, if you take nothing else away from this conversation, it is that different people have different notions of what exactly the word “socialism” refers to, which in practice makes it a useless word to use in the context of discussing public policy because you just end up with groups talking past each other. In the most extreme case, if someone thinks you are proposing “socialism”, then they might abruptly stop listening to what you are actually saying and assume that what you are actually proposing is to turn over the entire country to a corrupt authoritarian government because that is what the word “socialism” means to them. For this reason, should you find yourself in a discussion about public policy, it is generally better to be very specific about exactly what policies you are saying are good or bad and why you think they are good or bad without resorting to using what are in practice ambiguous and loaded terms like these. (Just to be clear, I am not saying that this state of affairs is reasonable, just that this is how it is at the moment.)

You make an excellent point, sir! It’s not like this is a community geared towards answering stupid… umm… nevermind.

In a way this naming makes more sense, because an important aspect of the virtual worlds in science fiction that many people seem to idolize is that they were as appealing as they were due to a large part because the real world was such a dystopia that they were desperate for an escape from it, even if it meant living inside a world that existed only inside a computer.

It is hard to see how the explicit goal of not receiving updates too early is reconciled with the goal of not sacrificing security. Shouldn’t there be no such thing as “too early” when it comes to security updates?

this is the modern version of Scientology’s free e-meter reading

I actually have a fun story about that. They once had a booth on my college campus so just for fun I let them hook up their e-meter to me. I was extremely dubious that this device did what it claimed, but just for fun to mess with it I tried as hard as I can to think calm and relaxing thoughts. To my amazement, the needle actually went down to the “not stressed” end, so I’ve gone from thinking that the e-meter is almost certainly bunk to thinking that it is merely very probably bunk.

That isn’t the funny part, though. The funny part was that the person administering the test got really concerned and said that the device wasn’t working properly and had me take the test again. I did so, and once again the needle went down to the “not stressed” end. The person administering the test then apologized profusely that the device was clearly not working and said that they nonetheless recommended that I take their classes to deal with the stress in my life. So the whole experience was absolutely hilarious, although at the same time incredibly sad because I strongly suspect that the people at the booth weren’t saying these things in order to deceive me but because they were genuinely true believers who were incapable of seeing the plain truth even when it stared them in the face.

There are lots of possible choices of universal gate sets. However, if you are starting with Clifford gates, then it turns out to be sufficient for you to add support for a T=sqrt(S) gate; essentially T and H have the property that these two gates by themselves are sufficient to efficiently approximate any 1-qubit gate arbitrarily well (by combining these discrete rotations about the two different angles in the Bloch sphere in specific ways via the Solovay-Kitaev Theorem), and being able to perform an arbitrary 1-qubit gate and having access to an entangling 2-qubit gate (CNOT) lets you extend this to an efficient arbitrarily good approximation of any gate on an any number of qubits.

The home page for it is here. It’s based on a result known as the Gottesman-Knill Theorem which shows (constructively, i.e. providing a concrete algorithm) that quantum circuits consisting solely of Clifford gates (that is, CNOT + Hadamard + Phase, hence CHP) can be simulated efficiently classically.

Or, alternatively, since they are already making the (reasonable) compromise of working with a restricted gate set, they could expand their gate set to the Clifford group and then use the CHP algorithm to scale to much larger systems.

Cute, but the set of quantum gates is so limited that simulating them is trivial, and in particular you don’t need to sample multiple iterations to estimate the probability distribution because you already know it exactly.

Huh, interesting, that page says that vegan diets “reduced food costs by up to one third [emphasis mine]”, which I guess is nothing to scoff at but on the other hand doesn’t seem that large; I would have expected the relative cost of including meat in your diet to increase food costs by much more given how resource-intensive it is to produce meat compared to producing vegetables.