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dgerard@awful.systems

the quantum hype bandwagon is rolling out (www.ft.com)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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the VCs are pushing the quantum hype again. this is an FT editorial

(archive.is isn't working for me, anyone wanna post an archive link)

note lack of citation of actual results, a ton of handwaving about big companies, repeated "could," and the earliest date postulated is 2033

many of the important requirements for a VC bubble party

the tech press has been loaded with this shit, just a fuckin flood of it, all this nonspecific and glossing over the lack of mere existing tech in the present day

note that this has nothing to do with actual quantum computing, this is purely how to set up the tech macguffin for a bubble party

pretty good for a thing that is real - but doesn't exist as a technology yet or any time soon

bsky:

Tired: cloud computing

Wired: could computing

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I, for one, am excited, because this could be the ultimate bubble. Like think about it, crypto was shit, but at least it was vaguely a thing, like you could buy Bitcoin and order drugs through SilkRoad and you'd have drugs, that's a material use case. LLMs suck ass but ChatGPT exists, you can go to that website and type shit and it will respond, it's garbage but it's garbage you can touch and smell.

Quantum has none of this. It's ultimate vaporware, a technology that literally does not exist, you can't have a PoC, you can't have an early version that you'll lie about being a "big step towards General Quantum Computing" or whatever. This is SV's wet dream, can we make money from basically nothing at all?

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago

you can’t have an early version that you’ll lie about being a “big step towards General Quantum Computing” or whatever

So you might think that... but I recall some years ago an analog computer was labeled as quantum annealing or something like that... oh wait, found the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems . So it sounds to a naive listener like the same sort of thing as the quantum computers that are supposed to break cryptography and even less plausible things, but actually it can only do one very specific algorithm.

I bet you could squeeze the "quantum" label onto a variety of analog computers well short of general quantum computing and have it technically not be fraud and still fool lots of idiot VCs!