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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • One thing that I like about kbin is that it’s not trying to be “x, but federated” like lemmy or mastodon for example. It’s more exiting to try to make something new! I think it’s very apparent how some parts of lemmy are full of redditisms on purpose which I disslike.

    That said, I do have a lemmy account that I use for posting about other stuff. There are a tons of website sprouting up as contenders for a space in the new internet landscape and I’m having a lot of fun trying them out without really binding myself to one too tightly






  • I think reddit will remain in a sort of zombified form for quite some time. I don’t know if there will be any more outright migrations of subreddits for a while, but hopefully kbin (and lemmy) will become interesting places to post and read all on their own and maybe eventually take the place on the internet reddit had. Reddit started out as a small place dominated by tech nerds and eventually grew to the place it is today, so it’s possible that kbin/lemmy do something similar. I don’t know if this means an outright takeover, and I don’t know if that’s what I’m hoping for either to be honest. I would rather see kbin become it’s own thing on it’s own terms.



  • While I think that the article is correct in stating that mastodon isn’t currently a serious competitor to facebook, it’s possible that it (or something else based of activitypub) might become that one day. I think that there’s a decent chance that facebook might want to prevent fediverse spaces from potentially becoming serious competitors, and even if that’s not the main reason why their implementing activitypub, if e.g. mastodon ever does get to a point where it can challange meta (which I think most of us are hoping!) then facebook will use the position of power they will have over activitypub to try to prevent that. I think it’s a misstake to give facebook any power of our spaces because that means essentially giving up on the idea of an internet not controlled by large corporations like facebook.






  • Right now fediverse is mostly made up of techy people - which is fine! But there are many other kinds of people you might potentially want to interact with online. Threads could bring in normies and celebs to the metaverse. Normies are a mixed bag - this includes your racist uncle but also your really cool and funny friend who can’t be bothered to set up a mastodon account. Celebs are a source of real world influence (I’m including politicians and journalists for example in this category) which is obviously attractive. I’m gonna miss cyberbullying local politicians on twitter, and it would be nice to be able to continue doing so through the comfort of e.g. kbin.

    I get your point and I largely agree but it isn’t that hard to see the appeal of threads for me. I don’t think it’s gonna work out in the end though so I really hope they mostly stay of the broader fediverse.



  • (typed this out yesterday before @ZickZack s excellent answer, but couldn’t post it at the time due to maintenance…)

    No, you’ve got it wrong. This is a fairly common missunderstanding which is perpetuated by a lot of coverage about the topic being sloppy.

    You could argue that there is a grain of truth to the idea of processing multiple possibilities at once, but it’s a bit more complicated than that and the way it’s usually presented leads to people building a bad intuition of how it works. If you do get in to the nitty-gritty of Shors algorithm it feels to me at least a bit like a weird hack that shouldn’t work at all or at least not be faster than the normal way to compute prime factors. It isn’t a general speedup, just in certain cases where you can exploit quantum mechanics in clever ways.

    Of the top of my head the SMBC comic about it is actually pretty good. This article makes basically the same points, but a bit more elaborated (note that it was written a while ago so the part about the current state of quantum computing is outdated). I noticed that Veritasum put out a YouTube video which I haven’t watched, but he is in my experience good at explaining physics and math so I think that there’s a good chance that it’ll hold up. I remember liking this Minute Physics video about Shor’s algorithm too, if you wanna get a better understanding of it.

    I should clarify that I’m not a quantum phycisist, I’ve just done a couple of internet deep dives on the topic but I can’t say that I fully understand quantum computing at all. I do think my understanding of it is better than the one in this article and others like it.



  • This is article is missleading about how quantum computing works.

    Superposition increases the computing power of a quantum computer exponentially. For example, two qubits can exist in four states simultaneously (00, 01, 10, 11), three qubits in eight states, and so on. This allows quantum computers to process a massive number of possibilities at once.

    Quantum computers aren’t faster because they “process” multiple “possibilities” at once. Quantum computers aren’t any faster than regular computers when it comes to general purpose computing. You can exploit some interesting properties about quantum computing to solve certain problems asymptotically faster, like with Shor’s algorithm.

    This means that the time to solve a problem as the size of the problem grows scales better. Using Shor’s algorithm, the time to factor a polynomial is proprtional to (log N)^2 log log N, where N is the size of the input data, instead of the fastest known non-quantum algorithm which takes time proportional to e^(1.9(log N)^(1/3)(log log N)^(2/3)). Note that the majority of problems that we would maybe like to solve using a computer don’t have any fancy quantum algorithms asociated with them and as such are no faster than a normal computer,

    Given a large enough problem that can be solved with a quantum algorithm, a quantum computer will eventually outperform a non-quantum computer. This does not mean that quantum computers can solve arbitrary problems quickly.