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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • over_clox@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldSmash Capitalism
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    2 hours ago

    I once built a fully functional iPad 2 from totally scrap parts meant to be thrown away at the repair shop I used to work for. Then sold it for $100, as if I’d ever use anything from Apple!

    Yes, that’s how wasteful our current system is. There were enough spare parts to literally build an entire functional device, but I was told to take those parts out to the dumpster.

    I was like fuck that, I’m keeping these particular parts at least. And no, the logic board wasn’t iCloud locked. After cleanup and assembly, it was just as good as an iPad that might have only been used for around 2 months.

    Dumpster parts or usable parts? Welp, $100 for me, from junk parts restored to perfectly working condition. WINNING!

    Edit: Screw Apple and their extravagantly overpriced shit, and especially screw the whole planned obsolescence era!



  • Ask a quantum chip how to cure a disease? Sure, let’s accept that as a possible future…

    You really think the chips actually understand diseases? We’re gonna end up with a whole new generation of people that have no clue how the shit works to begin with.

    Eventually it’ll be like “How do I trim my toenails?”, while the ‘intelligent’ system responds to cut your appendages off.

    Granted that AI and quantum computing aren’t quite the same thing. Does it matter? Future generations will have the ability to just ask a computer how to generate cure a disease…

    The machine gives no fucks about us, it’ll just as easily destroy us if someone asks the wrong question or enters the wrong formula.




  • Why do we humans even think we need to solve these extravagantly over-complicated formulas in the first place? Shit, we’re in a world today where kids are forgetting how to spell and do basic math on their own, no thanks to modern technology.

    Don’t get me wrong, human curiosity is an amazing thing. But that’s a two edged sword, especially when we’re augmenting genuine human intelligence with the processing power of modern technology and algorithms.

    Just because we can, doesn’t necessarily mean we should. We’re gonna end up with a new generation of kids growing up half dumb as a stump, expecting the computers to give us all the right answers.

    Smart technology for dumb people…


  • Your first link is paywalled, fuck that.

    Pulling a serious comment from your third link only reinforces practically everything I’ve been getting at…

    “The problem of showing a ‘hello world’ of quantum computing is that we’re basically still as far from quantum computers as Leibnitz or Babbage were from your current computer. While we know how they should operate theoretically, there is no standard way of actually building a physical quantum computer. A side-effect of that is that there is no single programming model of quantum computing. Textbooks such as Nielsen et al. will show you a ‘quantum circuit’ diagram, but those are far from formal programming languages: they get a little ‘hand-waving’ on the details such as classical control or dealing with input/output/measurement results.”


  • Well riddle me this, if a computer of any sort has to constantly keep correcting itself, whether in processing or memory, well doesn’t that seem unreliable to you?

    Hell, with quantum computers, if the temperature ain’t right and you fart in the wrong direction, the computations get corrupted. Even when you introduce error correction, if it only lasts an hour, that still doesn’t sound very reliable to me.

    On the other hand, I have ECC ChipKill RAM in my computer, I can literally destroy a memory chip while the computer is still running, and the system is literally designed to keep running with no memory corruption as if nothing happened.

    That sort of RAM ain’t exactly cheap either, but it’s way cheaper than a super expensive quantum computer with still unreliable memory.


  • Core memory is also designed to accomodate for that and almost instantly rewrite the data back to memory. That in itself might be a crude form of ‘error’ correction, but it still lasts way longer than an hour.

    Granted that quantum computers are a different beast of their own, how much digital data does a qbit actually store? And how does that stack up in price per bit comparison?

    If they already know quantum computers are more prone to memory errors, why not just use reliable conventional RAM to store the intermediate data and just let the quantum side of things just be the ‘CPU’, or QPU if you like?

    I dunno, it just makes absolutely no sense to me to utilitze any sort of memory technology that even with error correction still manages to lose information faster than a jumping spider’s memory?





  • I totally get you there, yes no one person should have over half a billion dollars while so many others plus the environment are suffering.

    As far as scientific advancement, I think humanity is already reaching the peak of that mountain. Sure there’s still more to be discovered, but at what cost?

    How much does it cost in research and design, manufacturing and programming a quantum computer? I dunno what their finances look like, but if I had to spot a wild guess, that already sounds like over half a billion dollars…