The age of Quantum Bullshit is here
Tech is switching from weed to PCP.
With the election out of the way and in the bag, the not-so-benevolent despots running the tech industry have decided now is the time to fire the opening salvo for Act III of their industry racketeering: Quantum computing. First we had cryptocurrency, then there was AI, and now this. I warned of this a year and some change in advance and I’m just sorry I couldn’t have said it earlier. Then again it wouldn’t make much of a difference now because the perpetrators of these crimes have been usurping much of the information landscape anyway, suppressing everything that doesn’t move the needle their way.
While many established companies—including Apple—have had bags cooking on this shit for years, Google had the honours of breaking in the new chapter of crockery here with their ‘Willow’ chip. The tone has been set by one of the project’s SVPs, through breaking a press release reminiscent of a legacy undergrad that got a hold of some worse drugs than weed, claiming via non sequitur that the chip’s mere existence means there are parallel universes. Here’s the insane quotation from TechCrunch, a fixture of the industry:
Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
TechCrunch themselves were similarly abortive in their due diligence, albeit in the narrower band of mere journalism than the fields of informatics and physics. Their citation for the claim being “met with scepticism” is a tweet of some vulture capitalist anon saying “[he’s] being Willow-pilled” — gotta love the brainrot, right? — and the arguments in support are spergs in a Hacker News thread, the infamous Reddit clone that is controlled by the very same tech mafia running these scams since cryptocurrency first broke out.
So, this has basically been a day-one trainwreck from all sides. Dogshit journalism, eye-watering levels of social media brainrot overindexing on algorithmically topical minutiae to the exclusion of any sense-making of what’s going on, and it’s all in service of birthing the latest vehicle of predatory scaremongering on behalf of criminals that can’t make your iPhone or computer function worth a flying fuck.
Are you becoming Willow-pilled, you retarded fat fuck? Are you slurping up whatever slop is put in front of you on the timeline, you ignorant pig? Because you deserve to be fed shit and kept in the dark so superior beings like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk can dine out of your open skulls for the sheer joy of the despotism, right? Isn’t DOGE, the haphazardly thrown-together corruption vehicle, looking like such an awesome thing, especially since all dissent gets deboosted into oblivion so you literally can’t find anyone saying what’s wrong with it? I hope you are, because right now you don’t have a choice.
I think after the election the owners of this aspiring information cartel have stopped paying lip service to public opinion. They’re not bothering to feign impartiality anymore because they believe that they have a lock on things since they ‘won’ the election, or so they think. They’re getting sloppier and sloppier, forcing mind-numbing discourses that sound like the worst circle of stoners you could possibly imagine, silencing everyone who doesn’t supplicate it, and they don’t seem to be bothered by how embarrassing, unbelievable and disgusting this is because they think, at this point, they can’t be stopped. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but they certainly think it is. If my experience with online forums tells me anything, it’s probably not though. They’re just making the classic error of power-tripping mods who think ‘bad’ people simply disappear when you ban them. They never realise that they can ban themselves out of having a forum at all, and so they do. That will take a while though, so strap in.
Since the narrative around quantum computing has been fucked with so precisely for years, I’m going to do my best here to provide a somewhat more honest explanation of the core concepts at work here, since Wikipedia is needlessly cryptic and every would-be-credible source in the industry is paid entirely too much money not to lie out of their asses pantomiming new age hippies on blotter because their bosses told them it might be a good idea.
First of all: qubits are not real. What do I mean by this? I mean in the most basic and literal sense, they do not exist, at all. This is in stark contrast to actual bits, which do very much exist, in one form or another, in physical space and time. Qubits are less like bits and more like strings from the famous M-theory – they are a theoretical construct, and like any theory worth a fuck, they are supposed to have some explanatory power about the nature of the real world. While quantum computing is not a useless concept wholesale, the concept of qubits is not an honest description of what is actually going on inside these machines, because they don’t describe anything real or even seriously attempt to do so. They have become an end rather than a means, turning the scientific process on its head, because the false equivalency conveniences aforementioned criminals that want to scare you into giving them even more control for nothing. The racket is in the opening paragraph on Wikipedia: “Theoretically a large-scale quantum computer could break some widely used encryption schemes […]”. They already got loaded to erect this scam years ago, and now begins the putsch to once again shove the bill for all of this onto you, the stupid, undeserving, disgusting, contemptuous member of the honest public. They need your stupid money because that’s what makes them richer and therefore smarter.
So gee, if qubits aren’t real, then what are the core components of these so-called ‘quantum computers’? They’re induction machines. It’s more meaningful to analogise induction machines to ‘cores’ of a CPU or GPU, because these are the fundamental components that do the work. This is why they’re not fucking qubits, because they’re not units of data, they are machines. They do work. More specifically, they do guesswork, in the most generalised way.
We also already have tools for doing this same kind of work on classical computers with software, in the form of satisfiability solvers. Quantum computers are merely hardware accelerators for the work of SAT solvers. Most likely you will see these pop up in the market in the form of add-on cards for computers, because they do the induction directly instead of simulating it, thereby doing it more efficiently. That’s all.
I also want to underscore that there are no physics at work in quantum computers that are any more exotic than that which can be found in computers you use today. If anything, they are less exotic by measure of how much of quantum mechanics they have to deal with, simply because the realities of quantum noise at current lithographies is not an imposition as it is for classical computers but an object of desire for quantum ones. For example, the first CNOT gate was just a beryllium atom in an ion trap. Do you know what else uses ion traps? CRTs.
Another reason that the ‘qubit’ notion is dishonest is because the object of value in quantum computing is significant figures, something totally obfuscated by the term. There is no talk of how many significant figures the ‘qubits’ these companies have supposedly possess, even though this should be a core metric to measure their value. Isn’t that inspiring confidence in this whole thing? You have a qubit. Okay, how many more possible values can you get out of it besides zero and one? No word on that yet. I doubt there will be, since their SVPs are talking cloud nine bullshit about parallel universes to the press on day one. To call this a shitshow is a compliment really, because it’s more like a funeral pyre for informatics. Elon and friends are showing us all just how much our science matters as they light it on fire for their own profit.
All I wonder these days is how much shit all the rest of society is going to have to lose before they stop putting up with this. How much planned obsolescence is it going to take? How many Aaron Swartzes have to die before you realise what you’re losing? How many poor schmucks have to lose their life savings on shitcoins? How many creatives have to lose their relevancy to industrialised copyright theft? Do you really like the shitheaps that comprise these social media timelines today? Are you going to jack off to pornography of TempleOS and the 1990s and read Hacker News or Slashdot until the end of time? Your life fucking sucks! Want it to get better? Face up to that! Knowing is half the battle, and social media is giving so many of you dementia.
All of our computers have hardware that is capable of more than before, and we do less with computers than we have ever done since the 1990s. There’s enough of us trying to build better things and sound the alarm when we can. What the fuck is it going to take for you to start giving a shit?