Zolgo see's the angle

 Which is you

Quantum computing has been plagued with problems relating to reliability since the inception of the technology. The quantum bits, or qubits, used by quantum computers have a reputation for being highly fragile and tend to collapse at even the slightest disturbance. However, Microsoft believes it has solved the problem through the development of Majorana 2, its advanced quantum chip, and the company was not working alone.

Also read: Microsoft has built its own AI reasoning and coding models: No OpenAI, no shortcuts

A 1,000x jump in reliability

This number alone is amazing; Majorana 2's qubits are 1000 times more reliable than those in previous generations. Typically, the lifetime of a qubit, i.e. the time for which the qubit maintains its quantum state, is measured in microseconds. However, Majorana 2 provides a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds, with some cases reaching up to a minute. It might be best explained by an analogy made by Microsoft itself: while the average qubit lifespan is comparable to a single day of life of your cell phone battery, the qubit from Majorana 2 will last almost three years.

Related video: Why the race for quantum supremacy just got real (Undecided with Matt Ferrell)

Undecided with Matt Ferrell

Why the race for quantum supremacy just got real

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This achievement is due to changes in material design; while the first version uses aluminium as the superconducting material, Majorana 2 utilizes lead, which is normally used as a means of protection from cosmic rays in hospital equipment.

Where AI came in

Microsoft’s Majorana 2 Quantum Chip explained: 20 second Qubit lifetime and an AI-assisted design

Also read: Snowflake-Anthropic deepen AI handshake as India emerges as key market

The switch between materials was a human discovery. However, turning the Majorana 2 into reality entailed dealing with the unfathomable number of variables – fabrication parameters, measurement iterations, years of cross-disciplinary data, international research teams. This is when Microsoft Discovery came in – the AI-based platform developed by Microsoft to accelerate scientific R&D.

The AI-driven agents were able to automate the measurement process which used to take weeks per iteration, reducing the turnaround time exponentially. Some agents analyzed huge volumes of fragmented experimental data from years ago to find links that could not be discovered by humans. One particular agent noticed an uncalibrated temperature sensor which was secretly undermining all the fabrication efforts.

"Agentic AI has permeated almost everything we do," said Chetan Nayak, Microsoft Technical Fellow. The human researchers set the direction; the AI ran the legwork.

2029 is the new target

Having achieved the development of Majorana 2, Microsoft has moved up the year for their scalable quantum computing from 2039 to 2029, which is 10 years sooner than expected. The new chip's impressive attributes include qubits that last 20 seconds, operate at one microsecond and have dimensions 1/100th of a millimeter

Wag the dog

 OH WHAT A WAR

Israel cancels airstrikes on Lebanon at request of Trump after phone call. 

Nine hours ago

Israel continues attacks in southern Lebanon despite Trump intervention 

Six hours ago

ISN'T MULTIPOLARITY WONDERFUL!

Woit!

 

" . . .  String theory and its role in the destruction of a crucial part of our scientific culture is now a story not about the future but about the past. In its post-scientific phase, you can now read about String Theory for Metaphysicians, which is basically a rehashing of the highlights of decades of hype, carefully ignoring the existence of any critique of the hype. Here at Columbia it's a beautiful day, and once you get through Checkpoint Charlie, the campus is as attractive as ever. The army of security guards has done an excellent job of keeping us "safe", which basically means no publicly visible criticism of the state of Israel and the genocide in Gaza. The US/Israeli wars and threats to end Iranian civilization with massive bombardment have drawn attention away from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Looking back, the Columbia students with their encampment were very much right about what was going on. You can read more about the current situation in Gaza here or here. Netanyahu's announced intention to kill enough Palestinians to get them out of 70% of Gaza (with 100% for later) has received little attention. Part of the end of our civilization is that we now live in a post-truth environment, with a Fascist dictatorship in power and oligarchs doing their best to exploit this to their own ends. Finding out what is really happening in Gaza or elsewhere is not easily done. In the Israeli genocide story, one thing that has clarified things for me is listening to people I know well like Scott Aaronson, who with his characteristic clarity of thought explains the logic of why Palestinians and their children must be killed (they want to kill his family). It's all too clear here that what's going on is a descent from civilization into tribalism, with Scott's latest explaining that he will cut off all ties with one of the few relatively reliable sources of information around (the New York Times), because it is telling him things he doesn't want to hear. To try and end on a more positive note, I recently found out that Edward Witten is on bluesky, with posts like this that provide some counterpoint to the Scotts of the world. Once you get out of Columbia's gates, you're in the city of New York, which now has a wonderfully talented and sensible mayor, who refused to joint Israeli officials like Bezalel Smotrich as they marched through Manhattan on Sunday. His statement was: You can see in the participation of the far-right Israeli Minister Smotrich, as well as a number of other ministers, a vision of annihilation, a complicity in genocide and frankly, a belief that does not have much value for even the sanctity of children in Gaza... And I am offended, as I know many New Yorkers are, by their participation. Maybe there's still hope... Comment

Little Miss Freud

 Very strict

Chatbots have a well-deserved reputation for sycophancy, but they are also skilled at adopting whatever persona you want from them. If you want the model to punch holes in your argument instead of lavishing you with praise, you can just ask for it.

AI also enables another form of cognitive uploading: triaging novel hypotheses to determine if they warrant our own deeper attention. So much of my creative thinking as a writer is a variation of hmmm.. I wonder if there’s something interesting here. By chance, I stumble across an article about ant colonies a few weeks after I’ve finished reading a book about urban development, and in my head I think: I wonder if there’s a useful connection to make between those two fields. The cost—just in time alone—of going down a rabbit hole like that has been reduced exponentially over my adult lifetime. When that ants/cities connection first occurred to me in the late 1990s, as I was gathering ideas for the book that became Emergence . . . "

FROM  - Steven Johnson

Cuba eat your heart out

 Staunch Marxist leftists believe that CCP state-owned enterprises (SOEs) embody the alleged socialism. In reality, SOEs today are as capitalist as it gets.

The SOEs take on a variety of forms. Some of them are analogous to nationalized firms in Great Britain after World War Two, in France under DeGaulle, and in Japan during its rapid industrialization in the 1960s and 70s.

Many SOEs were privatized entirely. “During the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, the state sold around two-thirds of SOEs and state assets to non-state owned firms.”xl The new owners were typically Party officials who had been managers in the SOE. They “bought” the firm on credit, paying the debt out of the profits of the enterprise.

LENIN FOR STATE CAPITALISM

The remaining SOEs became part of the overall capitalist economy. They were no longer run according to a state plan, because there is no such plan.xli SOEs are corporations; units of the state own all or most of the shares.

Various central government agencies own around a hundred large SOEs. Their industries range from petroleum to power grids, metal ores, telecommunications, shipping and more. One of them is China National Tobacco Corporation, which produces 46 percent of all cigarettes in the world, 2.5 trillion per year. It buys tobacco leaf from Argentina, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia.xlii CNTC made $214 billion profit in 2021.

The age of Terror Famines

 

The Communist Party of China, in the ninth of a series of open letters about Khrushchev’s revisionism, noted:

“The members of this privileged stratum appropriate the fruits of the Soviet people’s labour and pocket incomes that are dozens or even a hundred times those of the average Soviet worker and peasant. They not only secure high incomes in the form of high salaries, high awards, high royalties and a great variety of personal subsidies, but also use their privileged position to appropriate public property by graft and bribery. Completely divorced from the working people of the Soviet Union, they live the parasitical and decadent life of the bourgeoisie ".

https://www.idcommunism.com/2023/04/material-forces-that-turn-socialism-into-capitalism.html

Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Yuri Andropov, oh my

Blueshirts into Spain

 Again

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/06/02/irish-far-right-figures-join-gathering-in-portugal-to-push-idea-of-remigration/

On the bright side catholic snakes were driven out of Ireland