These days, 48 hours of stubble makes me feel unkempt; when I was a teenager I wore my hair almost to my shoulders.

I prefer my new simple life

Started shaving my head several months ago, and since then I've started saying shit like this too.

I'm glad that it's something natural and not just me, maybe that will make my friends and girlfriend roll their eyes less often at my remarks.

Yeah but that fact isn't nearly as fun.

This source says 6600 error-corrected qubits and the source article OP posted appears (though it's not completely clear to me) to not be utilizing error correction. I suspect this dampens the usefulness of IBM's new machine in implementing Grover's.

All completely true, but the last paragraph should probably be taken with a grain of salt. For non-PQ threat models, AES-128 is totally fine. In fact key schedule attacks against AES-256 that could bring attacks down to 2^70 time (!!) do not affect AES-128.

None of that is to say that AES-256 is broken -- it's still quite safe. But unless you have strong and imminent concerns about quantum attacks on your cryptosystem, AES-128 is almost definitely not vulnerable. Most experts agree that your time is better spent worrying about everything around the primitive than the choice of primitive itself.

I just don't want anyone alarmed by the idea that there is a nearly-practical attack on AES or something. That's a long, long way off.

Totally. Just to be clear for the thread, a useful quantum computer will break ECC way, way before AES or SHA2.