Viewing profile — michael_nielsen

Thank you for sharing. And I'm very sorry for your loss.

A few comments have been kind enough to recommend the textbook I wrote with Ike Chuang. I'm glad they find it useful! It's worth noting: the book assumes a fair bit of mathematical…

Timothy Chow has a wonderful phrase for this - he describes one of his papers (on forcing) as solving an "open expository problem": https://timothychow.net/forcing.pdf

Agreed, & flagged the submission. The actual article is of interest, but I really don't want to reward inflammatory titles.

I've been wondering at what point AI assistants are going to reduce that to a manageable level? It's unfortunately not obvious what the main bottlenecks are, though Chris and Shan …

I see virtually no politics. Maybe don't follow accounts which post about politics?

A good brief overview here from Tim Gowers (a Fields Medallist, who participated in the effort), explaining and contextualizing some of the main caveats: https://x.com/wtgowers/sta…

You have not understood the statement.

Just so you know: you've completely misunderstood the statement.

There's (at least) two meanings for AI: (1) Software systems based on extensions of the LLM paradigm; and (2) Software systems capable of all human cognitive tasks, and then some. …

There goes 50+% of my use. "LLMs are no good for [use case X]" often means "I aren't very good at using LLMs for [use case X]". With many powerful tools - violins, say, or carpentr…

It was the records of $100 billion dollars in retirement assets that was deleted by Google. Not a small deal, and far more than many small banks. I am, unfortunately, a customer of…

Stoll has written a lovely 2010 mea culpa, originally a (now-vanished) comment at: http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html , I saved the comment. Quoting: "Of my…

I flagged this - it seems too clearly flame bait. If it was an honest mistake, my apologies. Disney had three movies in 2023 which took more than $200 million at the US box office

I mostly agree with this. Certainly the last line! I've been reflecting on Jeremy's comments, though, and agree on many things with him. It's unfortunately hard to tease apart the …

I'm not sure why they're so often so bad. I wonder if it's the Upton Sinclair effect; to paraphrase slightly: "It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when their h…

So are the rules of the road.

We have extremely detailed and well-tested models of climate. It's worth reading the IPCC report - it's extremely interesting, and quite accessible. I was somewhat skeptical of cli…

I co-authored that book (written in the late 1990s). I don't know when quantum computing will happen - I only follow developments very, very loosely now - but think you're being mu…

Quantum computers won't search unordered databases with fewer than ~ sqrt(N) queries. Proved in: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9701001