At the time people thought that you might build new supercomputers with an on-site cryostat (or something like that) housing a bunch of QPUs.

The UK govt announced £162m in cuts to research council funding last month, then this month they announced £2bn for a massive quantum computing project. I’m all for blue sky research but the field is basically a giant money pit. £2bn would have bought multiple general purpose supercomputers that could have been used for biology, materials science, astrophysics etc. The quantum computing research is inevitably going to yield a quantum processor with less than 1kb of memory that can only run for a few nanoseconds. The government is disproportionately funding this stuff because of the siren song promise that quantum computing will help them break encryption, but the field has taken so long to materialise anything useful that we now have quantum-resistant classical encryption algorithms. Also, plenty of physicists are now skeptical of the idea that quantum computers will be intrinsically faster than classical computers for most tasks.

The matrix sequels definitely muddle the pacing and characters, and they struggle to fill the void left by the central mystery of the first film, but the philosophising and action are both as good or better than the first film.

Speed racer has already been critically reevaluated so I guess my wachowski hot take is that Jupiter Ascending is due. It’s idiotic but it’s a sweaty blast of pure cinema.

• machine learning models will continue to improve their output somewhat but gains will be incremental and the intrinsic problems with ml-derived content (e.g hallucinations, context window limitations, long-term coherency) will remain
• open source models will catch up with commercial ones
• the smaller ml companies (like openai and anthropic) will be absorbed, probably by Microsoft and Amazon
• The increasing cost of hardware and energy will force companies to raise prices for ml subscriptions and eventually lock ml features behind paywalls
• Computer parts will remain expensive for a long time
• Programmers will collectively spend the next decade wrestling with the consequences of filling their codebases with millions of lines of ai generated code
• Google images will never fully recover

The article mentions it briefly but sheep farming really has devastated the ecology of the Yorkshire dales.

my mum bought a fairphone 3 about 5 years ago and is extremely happy with it, so far she’s gone through one usb-c port and one battery. it looks and feels exactly like a normal phone but it pops open with just 4 screws. helping her fix it has taught me that phone manufacturers could make repairable phones easily and they all just choose not to

people were saying this about millennials as well. in fact, James Flynn (for whom the Flynn effect is named) literally said that teenagers in 2009 were dumber than teenagers 30 years ago. call me when there’s a consensus from neuroscientists about this. for that matter, call me when standardised testing is a useful measure of intelligence

I looked in stoat’s issue tracker and there is an issue asking for video chat which is 5 years old and still open. Safe to say it’s a dead project.

tailwind is a product born out of complete ignorance for the fundamental technologies that underlay the web and why they exist the way they do. I hope tailwind’s decline encourages people to learn the fundamentals

when capcom were working with inti creates, they were reliably putting out good games at a time when indie developers weren’t - at least in that genre. now they put out one mediocre game every ten years.

I hope souja boy plays it

the problem isn’t electron, the problem is that A) html is the only truly cross platform UI framework and B) that html (and the web stack in general) has way too many features and is way too complex, because Google’s been bolting features onto it for decades.

the books did have a plot, but each one was spilt into short stories/novellas that focused on different characters, separated by timeskips. in fact the first book is made of five short stories which would’ve each made for 45-60 minutes of TV.

foundation might be a worse Asimov adaption than i robot

I swapped to jellyfin and it was worth it but it was a lot of work. I had to pay for a static ip, set up my home network properly, and redo all my metadata. and months later I’m still finding missing or incorrectly tagged media. plus it doesn’t auto update. also I had to tell my friends and family to download a new app and make logins for them.

I’ve been using windows 11 for six months. when I hover over the taskbar, a phantom windows explorer window appears, but it’s not clickable and it disappears when I move the mouse away. my right hand monitor has a white box with a small ‘no’ symbol in it stuck in the middle of the screen. it doesn’t seem to derive from any running application and I cannot get rid of it. on the windows 10 install I ran before, the task manager totally stopped working, it just froze every time I opened it. I run Linux on all my other machines and stuff does go wrong, but it goes wrong in ways that make sense to me and which I can fix. on windows people just tell you to run sfc scannow and reinstall if it doesn’t work. that’s no way to live your life.

and also because he abandoned most of the pledges he made during the leadership competition, has done almost nothing about key political issues (cost of living, crumbling public services) and seems to have spent most of his time as pm attacking disabled people, trans people and refugees.

every programmer I’ve seen who says their code is self documenting writes dogshit code

disaster: day of crisis is spiritually a Dreamcast game. it’s dogshit. it has a special place in my heart

I’m confused at all these comments saying podman is hard to use, I used it a bunch last year and found it a drop in replacement for docker (though I didn’t set it up).