I'm quitting my PhD

This can be true while it's also true that making a vague, unsubstantiated assertion about how your love for the field is just too deep and pure for academia is still unprofessional.

Of the people who claim they dropped out of school because they were just too smart or creative to go through the motions, the vast majority are probably very wrong. If you want people to take you seriously, make a better argument.

> "However, just a couple of months into my project, I figured out, I wouldn’t find anyone to discuss my research with..."

While studying physics and math, many, and I mean *many* of my friends had a difficult time trying to understand both, sometimes they would get bored and just try to get the "just right" grade to pass. I had that one friend that you like to discuss things and exchange ideas and concepts from this world, but this friend would halt his course and move on with other things and/or job.

After some time, I would get bored because none of my fellows had the patience to understand or try to grasp the basics of what makes, at least for me, these fields so interesting, like "bootstrap concepts" (Newton's laws, Thermodynamics, Trigonometry, etc...).

I don't blame them. The basic education in my country (Brazil) is somewhat crippled, not all of it mind you, but in my experience, it was depressing.

And of course, no one is obliged to have fun with this, I'm not complaining about this, I'm sad because there's almost no one I can talk to about this, and not that "I was better" than them, by no means, it's just that had an acute interest in these topics; this is one of the reasons I quit my degree in Computer Science, half a year through.

Nowadays I look for someone to interact with, about something new that I learned or that now I understand better. Right now, I'm looking for a friend that wants to study chemistry, physics or mathematics for fun, but with a deep interest.

But after two lost decades, I've noticed a shift lately. I think that people are getting fed up with centralized control of the supply chain and are maybe looking towards things like FPGAs as a way to get to a level above the current imperative programming paradigm, rather than working at the level below it in the glorified DMA transfer and shader paradigm we have now (vertex buffers).

For something as esoteric as quantum computing, I think it would help the world a great deal if someone would go back to first principles and explain it how it is. Not with complex notation, but with counting principles from probability and statistics. I had a great teacher in college who taught it just exactly that way, by imagining small groups of apples and bananas and how we could count them and detect larger patterns to get to stuff like Bayes' theorem.

So for example, we can imagine cubits as coin flips that we haven't looked at yet. If there are relationships between multiple unseen coins, then we can map out that potential solution space like a big tree. Then look at the tree with random sampling of the superposition to infer where the answer probably lies. Which is a lot faster than iterating through all all of the permutations with a computer. But I suspect that convergence will end up taking roughly the same amount of time as brute force, due to noise or some fundamental aspect of the universe we don't understand yet. But I'm probably wrong about that, because I haven't gotten clarity on how any of this stuff actually works, because nobody bothers to write it this way from first principles.

Even if the author isn't going to be doing quantum mechanics in academia, it would help the world a great deal to share what they've learned so far!