Google's blog post on this paper, which gets into more technical details and also explains their development timeline. It's probably required reading and should be stickied.

With that background, from OP's article:

>he thinks that at this stage “we can confidently promise a commercial value” for quantum computers.

Really? You got that from handling one scalability problem, so now it will have commercial value. Really?

According to their timeline they still need to scale up by 4 orders of magnitude (and note this error correction solution itself requires an additional multiplier to the number of qubits), with still no way to make even preserving entanglement not scale in difficulty with each qubit. That's in addition to the inability to predict the inevitable new tiers of problems you'll run into when your viability timeline requires scaling, again, on the order of 10,000x. And when you talk commercialization beyond a fad, you still need to find a convincing use case beyond uneconomical-for-daily-use cryptography and being a physics model of... itself.

This is a huge achievement. I like QC a lot. But there's a lot of hype, fads, BS, and fraud out there, and it's only going to get worse. And at the risk of sounding haughty, other science megaprojects learned (after a couple major f-ups) how to keep disciplined and stay quiet until their claims/projections were either substantive or they needed help. (In this case the project's claim is fine, but the director's projection is not.)

The article still seems problematic though. They're really pushing it in the second section, like the wording was changed to just barely be factual or impressive. Or not. For example,

>Native Americans also posited that megafauna like giant beavers and bison had shrunk to their present sizes over time.

They picked the bison right, since that basically did just shrink directly to the modern form. The giant beaver however is unrelated to the modern beaver. Same with the other megafauna -- simply shrinking seems to be a major exception.

This article, like a lot of articles that deal with any history of science before modern science, seems to drastically exaggerate the value of any piece of information or insight given before modern science starts developing, slowly, at the end of the 18th century, and it similarly exaggerates, by giving any meaning to, any similarity to a modern science concept and anything proposed pre-science. So as a lazy example, you can read Aristotle for a few pages and feel like there's some deep insight, like he knew some greater truth, until you realize that when he's making up theories on 100 things he might get lucky with a handful of sentences, or one or two propositions, that sound like something in the textbooks once people start actually doing things methodically. This kind of stuff is valuable to history, H&PoS, and anthropology, but it's not science.

That said, the main contribution of people like Cuvier, more than any now woefully-incorrect theory or now-erroneous classification he made (I'm not familiar with paleontology, but the "father of" figures have this in common), seems to be getting the people coming after to study and build upon existing literature, learn a methodology and follow it, publish findings (not hide them), and tutor others. In that sense, if what's said in the final section of the article is representative, then as this work is bringing new people into the academic field it is arguably at least of comparable value to the science as its original foundations.

I made it more explicit that "American" was referring more generally to U.S. and Canada, but I was actually trying to be even more general to say this applies to the entire Chinese diaspora across the Anglosphere, leaning more toward those larger populations whose history goes back 100 years or more -- more so Australia and New Zealand; less so but still including the UK (just by going by the significant difference in percentage, but that's all me winging this without researching the global diaspora in significantly more depth.) Some of the unique dishes in Chinese-American cuisine are somewhat better known internationally just because American culture has spread so deeply internationally, but a lot of the same ideas that you see in Chinese-American cuisine evolved as well in Chinese-Australian and others (but I'm literally just looking this up now).

Aside from this point, which I agree required significant clarification, are there more downvotes because people disagree with the thesis? Or is it just silly? Offensive? What?

Assuming we all have at least some familiarity with the formative importance to the U.S. (and Canada etc.) of Chinese-American history and that of the diaspora (among the other Asian diasporas with which, importantly to its history, it is frequently conflated), painful as the most pivotal events have been, I think we can take a moment to reflect pleasantly on the dramatic Chinese-American contribution to both international cuisine and American dining culture. Furthermore, good food is the kind of thing that drives even the most hateful xenophobic bigots face peacefully, positively, their imagined nemesis.

There's the longstanding "Engrish" meme theme online, with the concept of laughing at e.g. Chinese-American restaurant text going back as far as those restaurants have catered outside the diaspora (ofc laughing at language mistakes is as old as humanity -- language is inherently funny). However, that mocking behavior is a cultural exchange between some different level of English speakers on the one hand and the continual flow of the Chinese diaspora on the other, as much as it is simply laughing at silly language. Compare the "in bed" joke routine a big group might do with their fortune cookies at the end of a meal. These kinds of social behaviors are a big part of what invites foreigners into the Chinese restaurants and businesses, from the suburban malls to downtown Chinatown. People are definitely laughing at, not with, the misspeller or printer, but that's all still elemental in a peaceful -- and profitable -- cultural exchange.

Finally to the point: with machine language translation getting constantly better -- never mind a rigorous English education becoming even more ubiquitous -- I fear there will be fewer and fewer examples of Engrish to see in America. And that's a cultural loss -- not net loss, but change. The real-life fubar misprints will be gone and all we'll have left are the rehashed memes and occasional ironic t-shirts.

I guess this became my inelegant pre-elegy to Engrish. For all I know it's premature by 50 years; I can also conceive of a manner in which natural Engrish in some form, regardless of tech and education, would never disappear. (Note also this more or less can apply to any diaspora anywhere, but there's lots of reasons besides those listed for why the entire Chinese-American interweave makes such a richly complex case of its own.)

Thanks New Scientist asst. copy editor for getting straight to the point in the subhead, and thanks New Scientist senior editors for then missing it literally everywhere else. You never fail to disappoint, except seemingly always.

I'm not dissing the research by the way. But "we have to be cautious about the excitement level" regarding menopause seems to be quite the understatement. It seems all they're saying is it's another cool thing about the naked mole rat and it also might be usable as a model in future research.

Caution -- satirical rant -- don't bother unless you know what I'm referring to: Another MLK memorial is welcome, but it's never complete without one of his best, most iconic quotes (that fit within the requisite space using our limited selection of templated fonts). Like the famous "I have a dream that we'll be judged by our character!" Or "It really doesn't matter, because I've seen the mountaintop!" Or "Give us the ballot and we will fill our legislative halls with ... benches!" Remember, above all MLK was known for his oratory, so what matters on the memorial is not so much the specific words, but just that there are words.

If we can extend to the entire written word, I would unironically, mostly, at least for 99.9% of public access, would want the entirety of Twitter destroyed.

This is not because I think it corrupts the written word, or that I don't think attempts at literature on the medium have not been impressively artistic, or that I don't think it has seen effective use in mass organizing for good cause. But I think it also represents the worst of the past decade's internet in a couple key factors: 1) self-publication without self-scrutiny (and being serious about it instead of doing so on a s***posting forum); 2) poorly (or deliberately, but most likely just lazy) designed algorithms that encourage mob mentality by promoting outside traffic to the most heated polarized arguments and pile-ons; 3) no hysteresis combined with the two points above meaning the stupid stream-of-consciousness crap that a tween-to-twenties posts will follow them for life; and honestly it just goes on, but those are the big ones. Reformed algorithms can improve these issues to some degree, and they recently addressed/acknowledged the hysteresis problem a bit (or maybe just didn't want to keep buying hard drives), but it's still a crapville archive of the worst of internet mass socialization.

A lot of it is endemic to the problem that norms of social behavior on the internet are far behind those that have been established in irl society. I think burning down what someone once called the new Great Library (I feel like someone years ago called Twitter this, but I can't find it -- it's one of those things that was chuckled about at the time, but would be so beyond absurd to even mention now) would be a good symbol, like at the end of Fight Club (yeah, I was an edgy 90s kid and totally unique about it; how could you tell?) when they stuck it to creditors (but it wouldn't in reality do anything since there's several layers of backup records built in).

There are other sites (cough quora cough) that I think should be forcibly shut down but have the text archived for public use, but that's quite a bit different. In other cases I'd want additional legal options to norobots that expand, within reason, the rights of public crawling archiving for sites whose content and value is generated entirely by public users. Again, different, but it's effectively a total disruption of publishers, which if it were done to print publishing would be a chilling affront just like shutting down newspapers.