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Big if true! Would break most post quantum crypto with a quantum attack. Looks like a variant of Kuoerberg sieving and not that complicated so I’d expect we will know whether it is…

Two books that I highly recommend to give you a visual and numbers view of the cell: “The Machinery of Life” by David Goodsell is full of illustrations like the ones show in the ar…

Worth reading the comments over on scirate https://scirate.com/arxiv/2603.28627 for how to interpret some the claims.

The book "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder" about the museum is a good read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Wilson%27s_Cabinet_of_Wond... Recommend reading it after visiting, don'…

Agree that “Stella Maris” is amazing for this deep engagement with art. Perhaps in a similar vein I do think there are a couple of other books that do this . One is Anathem by Neal…

For 2, I don’t think you can break ties however you like because this would give you random left or right associativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_associativity For e…

When I was a high school student, I read “Artificial Life” by Stephen Levy and got really into alife. The book had snapshots of a daughter of Codd’s CA, Langston’s loops, on its bo…

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8525#comment-1997424 “Gil Kalai #23: So we’re perfectly clear, from my perspective your position has become like that of Saddam Hussein’s information …

>That's an EXTRAORDINARY claim and one that contradicts the experience of pretty much all other research and development in quantum error correction over the course of the history …

Yeah me too. I wrote a post about why it hurt so much to lose this place along similar lines https://dabacon.org/pontiff/2024/08/16/requiem-for-the-livin...

Maybe I’m the exception but I went maybe 30 or 40 times. There was so much joy in sharing my childhood with my child. Also the small gift shop had someone who knew their obscure te…

Edited Wait this is a different John Bell ( https://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/ ) than the Bell Inequalities ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_Bell ). But strangely that John…

I'm reminded of what Neal himself said when asked about building the primer: "Kids need to get answers from humans who love them" https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_…

There was a world before the dot com explosion when tinkering with computers was odd, a passion that gripped few, and was looked upon as extremely odd by most. This museum was the …

Please be gentle on my poor digital ocean droplet :) Note that these notes were not published and were probably something he typed up while thinking about the subject. If you haven…

These are notes he typed up, maybe for himself and maybe to share with others. Doing this is a highly effective way to clarify your own thinking. Most of his ideas are listed are m…

Yes sub exponential which is splitting hairs. Exp(O(n log log n / log n)). Thanks for the acknowledgment that I didn’t say runtime.

I didn’t say the runtime did I? The approximation ratio went from exponential to polynomial noise ratio. This just went from 2^n to n^4.5 and everyone seems to say “oh this is fine…

People seemed to be focusing on the fact that this wouldn’t break the NIST leading PQC public key cryptosystem, but I think that misses the point. This takes a problem at the core …

My favorite Serra story is when he was hired to build a sculpture by Caltech. In typical fashion he decided he wanted to build a giant wall across one of the few remaining wide ope…

"The Weil Conjectures" by Karen Olsson is an interesting read that connects Andre and Simone and the authors own experiences as a math major. I thought it did a good job capture th…

One distinction is maybe between the way the world works and way we humans work, with our language and our unconscious. My read is that Cormac is deeply skeptical of the rational s…

I'm surprised you find the Kekulé Problem not supporting that he liked science. I think of it more as pointing out that the unconsciousness has been ignored scientifically, but he …

I'm not sure this implies much about PQC. The model here is LOCAL distributed computing which is pretty far from what you're concerned about in PQC.