Egregoros

@mikalai the (furry) made a comment in the IETF thread about how the hybrid won't matter "after Q-Day" which is hilarious because

a) they think Q-Day will actually happen (I don't think this is possible unless we have materials science breakthroughs)

b) they still think that MLKEM is perfect when a previous cipher (SIKE) that was a finalist ended up being broken

@feld
You mean hilarious that these arguments need to be addressed. This hypotheticals need to be addressed.
Isn't that arguing thingy? Just arguing. But in absence of counter arguments, the ... high commitees 👀 will say pq is enough, reducing everyone's ... strenth of signal, if I may.

@mikalai we're going to have another Srinivasa Ramanujan type person someday just show up and prove we've made mistakes with some of these new algorithms

@feld
I personally had a glass of wine at IQC openning. Institute for Quantum Computing that is. 20+ years ago? ...

There was heuristic argument about too much quantum clean state and dicoherence. I've stopped waiting for quantum computer.

General public doesn't quite grasp a physical meaning of physicists' words, that we don't get quantum, despite all these calculations.

This is what you also discuss in quantum computation class ... before opening IQC.

@mikalai it's nice to have someone grounded in reality to whinge about this with me 🤝

@mikalai I always get responses like

"but we've had exponential improvements in the last few years!"

"I've actually written math libraries for quantum computers (that they have never run on, because they don't exist)"

"you can actually rent (totally not living up to the hype) quantum CPUs right now from Amazon etc to do work with!"


*BIG YAWN*

@feld @mikalai I wonder whats going on with the big quantum machines the army and air force bought

@sun @mikalai probably to help them build a foundation for how to leverage them fully if they ever become capable. They could possibly simulate an equally slow / incapable traditional CPU so they could directly compare them on different tasks and try to prematurely optimize some algorithms on the quantum so it's just ready to drop in and go I guess?

@sun @feld
... support of quantum labs by buying this?
More direct funding would be more efficient in my opinion.

@mikalai @sun mmm. Well, strategically perhaps the idea is that if you "buy" hardware you can signal to adversaries that we have something that "works" to intimidate them

@feld @mikalai I hate that as a country we are like "spend a billion dollars on something that probably doesn't even work, as a psyop"

@feld @mikalai @sun

We need to normalize the idea that if you can't do it on a Sinclair ZX-80 you're a shit coder and it doesn't need doing.

@feld @mikalai

Just install Docker, everything gets better, Utopia is just around the corner broheim