The things about quantum computers is they are really, really powerful at a some kinds of things, some of the time. Maybe even most of the time.

Binary computers are okay at one thing, but it does that one thing exactly every time. If it ever makes a mistake then entire thing might crash.

The problem is a quantum computer is so different from normal computers you have to start over from the beginning of the tech stack. Even if you get it working reliability (which is hard to do), how does it help you? You can do some crazy math, but it can't run an operating system. It doesn't have a bios. There are no drivers that speak some percentage of up spin vs down spin. There isn't a standard assembly language. There isn't a standard anything. It's like how computers were in the 40s.

I think quantum computers are very interesting and might help in very specific applications, and I mean like custom made math heavy applications that only run on that one machine you built it for kind of specific.

Can that change the world? Maybe. But it will take time. No one wants to talk about it because it's a hard problem that is still years away from doing much to impact peoples lives. Better to talk about ai slop, that gets clicks because you can see it and touch it right now.

Because it was always bullshit. There was never any real progress on it, so they switched their focus to AI and are now swimming in investment capital. No sense backtracking to older scams, when they're running such a lucrative new one.

There's two problems with quantum computing:

1. They are fundamentally analog machines. Digital computers have huge error bars, its basically impossible for a transistor to bit flip naturally. A small change in voltage does not change the represented value. This is untrue of quantum machines, where a small fluctuation in the qubit's underlying state actually causes a change to the represented value.

2. We have already done tons of research into what we can do with quantum computers. Theoretical quantum computer science is a well researched field. Basically the only thing we've gotten out of it is Shor's algorithm. Its honestly just not that useful even if we had high breakthroughs in the engineering.

Everyone working on quantum computers used their newfound breakthroughs to jump to better parallel timelines

They now use AI to boost stocks. But it has not gone away. Just no financial incentive to hype up the progress.

After the AI bubble pops, news will be easier to find

Microsoft is trapped in the ai bubble and wanted to control the pop so that they came out on top. So they timed their quantum news along with other “ai won’t get agi” news to try and manufacture a pop where they stayed high on the hype economy a la quantum. But it didn’t work and we’re still all trapped in the ai bubble.

Quantum computing has more or less nothing in common with regular computers. It's not a super computer, it's not a mythical upgrade or something like that, quantum computers are basically incredibly niche calculators that can only be useful on a handful of problems. They do exist and can be useful but media tech hype is media tech hype and should be disregarded.

It's still way too early for the hype to sustain itself, no one is near making an actual product. Hype is often generated out of the investment world and all the capital is flooding into AI now so their hype industry is largely focused on that for now.

Most of that news was junk, anyway. They run some useless benchmarks, because those machines are incapable to solve real problems.

In my mind, it was never a hype. It was something they wanted hyped but - and of course I can only speak for myself - I never was sitting on the edge of my seat. It's the technology version of new wonder drug could cure cancer. And then you read the story and reality dwarfs the vision quite quickly. I thought blockchain was a much bigger deal hype-wise. And that had all the oxygen drawn out by so-called AI.

Quantum computing is a threat because if it became mainstream usable today it could render the entire password based login system hackable in a flash, probably breaking the internet. There are two things to consider though. It isn't usable today. And the big companies that do a lot of the research have a vested interest in not breaking the internet. So we see passkeys today and other forms of authentication will follow before QC could become a reality - if in our lifetimes or if ever - who knows.

Gotta squeeze the shit outta AI before the imminent burst.

Multiple governments dumped billions of taxes into r&d, probably half on fomo and half on bad projections. But nobody has a solution to the decoherence increasing when you add enough q-bits to do something novel classical computers cannot do like Shor's algorithm or equivalent. They have error correction to try to limit decoherence's effect on the system, but it requires more q-bits so the fix also exacerbates the problem.

Because someone figured out the last piece of the puzzle, didn't tell anyone, and now we all live in a post quantum world without knowing it. Reality is now subjective in the deepest sense, and the first past the post is still figuring out the controls. This "time line" everybody hates will either resonate and destroy itself, or coalesce into a peaceful long tail of "just enough"

The simulation folks almost had it, but they were to soon, and looking in the wrong direction

Brought to you by Hideaki Anno

It's all bullshit. That's why.