At the time people thought that you might build new supercomputers with an on-site cryostat (or something like that) housing a bunch of QPUs.

The UK govt announced £162m in cuts to research council funding last month, then this month they announced £2bn for a massive quantum computing project. I’m all for blue sky research but the field is basically a giant money pit. £2bn would have bought multiple general purpose supercomputers that could have been used for biology, materials science, astrophysics etc. The quantum computing research is inevitably going to yield a quantum processor with less than 1kb of memory that can only run for a few nanoseconds. The government is disproportionately funding this stuff because of the siren song promise that quantum computing will help them break encryption, but the field has taken so long to materialise anything useful that we now have quantum-resistant classical encryption algorithms. Also, plenty of physicists are now skeptical of the idea that quantum computers will be intrinsically faster than classical computers for most tasks.

The matrix sequels definitely muddle the pacing and characters, and they struggle to fill the void left by the central mystery of the first film, but the philosophising and action are both as good or better than the first film.

Speed racer has already been critically reevaluated so I guess my wachowski hot take is that Jupiter Ascending is due. It’s idiotic but it’s a sweaty blast of pure cinema.

• machine learning models will continue to improve their output somewhat but gains will be incremental and the intrinsic problems with ml-derived content (e.g hallucinations, context window limitations, long-term coherency) will remain
• open source models will catch up with commercial ones
• the smaller ml companies (like openai and anthropic) will be absorbed, probably by Microsoft and Amazon
• The increasing cost of hardware and energy will force companies to raise prices for ml subscriptions and eventually lock ml features behind paywalls
• Computer parts will remain expensive for a long time
• Programmers will collectively spend the next decade wrestling with the consequences of filling their codebases with millions of lines of ai generated code
• Google images will never fully recover

my mum bought a fairphone 3 about 5 years ago and is extremely happy with it, so far she’s gone through one usb-c port and one battery. it looks and feels exactly like a normal phone but it pops open with just 4 screws. helping her fix it has taught me that phone manufacturers could make repairable phones easily and they all just choose not to

I looked in stoat’s issue tracker and there is an issue asking for video chat which is 5 years old and still open. Safe to say it’s a dead project.