Monthly Archives: March 2024

Brickpit

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Situation: The Australian Turf Club (ATC) managed to get into a bit of a financial hole. How anyone in the horse racing game gets into financial difficulty is anyone’s guess. But I’m tipping utter incompetence, of the highest order, or feigned difficulties, for effect. In any case, the NSW gub’ment is looking to solve the “housing crisis” (as helpfully promoted by the slapstick media, along with the Costa Living Crisis) by building a new suburb or two, preferably closer to the Sydney CBD than Goulburn. So, whammo, a deal is struck to sell Rosehill Racecourse to developers for the building of a new suburb, pre-approved for development by the NSW gub’ment. All done above board with no promises of future or current gain to the individuals involved, honestly! And to make it work, they, the gub’ment, will build the ATC a new racetrack nearby at the Brickpit lake at Homebush. It makes you wonder why they don’t just build the new suburb at the nearby Brickpit lake, doesn’t it? But don’t let’s get distracted now.

Complication: “Reported plan to move Sydney’s Rosehill racecourse to endangered bell frog habitat surprises conservationists”

Resolution: Well, the plan is buggered isn’t it? It will be lovely to watch this play out. Who will win? The weirdos and their frogs, or the brown paper bag merchants. I prefer none of the above of course.

Found in an academic paper.

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The conceptual framework of Organised Hypocrisy….

“The starting-point is that hypocrisy is the normal state of affairs in domestic politics. It is a response by political organisations, like national parliaments or governments, facing conflicting values, demands and interests: talk, decisions and action are decoupled or counter-coupled.”

You say Threskiornis molucca, I say bin-chicken.

AI

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I’ve reconsidered the scope of AI.

I think we need to focus our efforts to replace our federal govt, in its entirety, with AI.

The politicians, parliament house, staffers, govt departments, public servants, etc. They all get replaced with an AI engine running on a single Raspberry Pi.

It couldn’t be any worse and it would have to be cheaper.

Quantum Computing

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From a pattern recognition POV, quantum computing looks to be a boondoggle writ large. I have seen one or two in my time, and this looks bigger and hairier than most.

Practically speaking one wonders how the entrepreneurs and their minions get away with fooling so many investors.
Well, the same way they always do.
Spruiking through third party observers, creating the Fear Of Missing Out, hiding behind the technical mumbo jumbo, and genuinely believing their own bullshit.
And in this case the mumbo jumbo is hiding in plain sight – it is so opaque as to be impenetrable to most.

And that is the key for my research – is it possible or likely that quantum computers will ever work and do anything worthwhile?

About the only algorithm that has any value on a QC is Shor’s algorithm.
All it does is find the prime factors of an integer.
Practically speaking the best QC to date has run this algo for the integer 21.
No shit, 21.
My 6 year old can do that maths using brute force or intuition. 3 x 7 = 21, where 3 and 7 are prime numbers.
IBM tried to do the integer 35 and failed due to noise.

If Shor’s algorithm could work on a real QC it is in theory exponentially quicker than a digital computer.
Or super-polynomial faster, or whatever. Just much better, on paper.
You wouldn’t notice any improvement however until the integers got really big.

One might ask how a QC solves Shor’s algorithm…but that is the wrong question altogether.
In fact you would disappear into a bottomless pit of mumbo jumbo of integrals, Bra-kets, qubits and gates.
Its far more instructive to consider what limits quantum computers from solving the prime factors of large integers…

Qubits work by mysteriously solving vector and matrix problems through qubit entanglement.
The right answer just pops out of qubit entanglement like magic, so long as you setup and run the gates properly.
I don’t think the details matter much unless you are doing the programming.
Let’s call it “rabbit in the hat” computing. Ta-da.

I did some research with Simon Devitt and we concluded (i.e. I did such shit calcs that Simon was compelled to do it well) that by making reasonable assumptions, namely with the theoretical maximum of 4.2PB of RAM, using the entire MIPS computing capacity of the whole world in 2024 (ca. 2.8×10^16 MIPS) , we could emulate a 48-qubit quantum computer, error free and approximation free at an effective clock rate of approximately 21KHz.

However, Simon has a plan to create a 90 qubit emulator for Quokka v2.
So that got me wondering, does he have access to the RAM and CPUs of an entire other planet or two quadrillion, that I don’t know about?

No, Simon is going to use “non-exact” emulation.
The key to this sleight of hand is the amount of entanglement that is generated in a particular quantum circuit.
If your quantum circuit is not generating a lot of entanglement globally over the entire computer but instead works by generating limited “pockets” across smaller qubit subsets, it runs fast and more accurately.

As the circuit starts generating more and more entanglement across the whole computer, the tensors that you use to model the QC either begin to grow in size (exponentially) and you run out of memory or you start truncating them.

The truncation now introduces an error in the emulation (i.e. the output of your emulator becomes less and less accurate compared to what would be expected in a real machine). Sometimes you can theoretically bound the error in your final output, sometimes it is chaotic and your output from the emulated QC is completely unreliable. Which circuits you can bound, the approximation error, and which you can’t, changes depending on what you’re running.

Note that these approximation techniques always crap out too and often are not useful in quantum algorithms that provide exponential advantage over classical versions (such as factoring). If these emulation techniques worked well for general purpose QC then we wouldn’t really need to build actual QCs – we could run these algos using emulation on digital computers.

What this tells us is that to get rid of noise and errors you need to stabilise or isolate the qubits.
However to make a QC device useful you need to get entanglement over all the qubits.

Qubits that are controllable means they couple when you want them to couple, which also means they couple to shit when you don’t want them to, creating noise.
You’re playing a balancing act to have qubits that interact with you sufficiently to do stuff vs interact with everything else weakly enough to reduce noise.

This is fundamental and will likely result in the fact that QC will forever need high levels of redundancy through error correction. Unlike classical semiconductors, it is unlikely that errors in qubits will ever be low enough to remove the need for error correction.

But luckily, error correction is effective once error rates hit 0.1% or lower (that is, the additional qubit overhead used to correct errors doesn’t ruin the so-called supremacy of QCs over digital computers for certain problems) which is an error rate achievable with quantum technology while balancing on that knifes edge.
No one knows today if this needle can be threaded successfully. Of course they are all saying , yes we can. No self-interest there.

In my working experience developing all sorts of technology products, you need a (meta) steady state zone to make a product. If you are on a knife’s edge you can never make your product reliably enough for it to be sold.

So my money is on not, today. But we will see. Also I can sniff self-serving BS a mile away.

I would be happy to be wrong of course. So much money and so many brains – they might get lucky.
But you actually can’t beat entropy not matter how far into quantum theory you go.
I get this feeling that quantum people don’t actually understand entropy and how it applies to practical systems, i.e. the interface to these QCs is up here in the real world.

However even if they make the devices work, their application will be very limited to certain sorts of algorithms/problems which are enabled by rabbit-in-the-hat computing.
Actually they will be at least 10-100x times more limited than super-computers (by problem), which have never achieved, at any single moment, more than 0.5% of worlds MIPS processing capacity.
So let’s say $140m-$1.4b per annum based on the current supercomputer industry market size ($14b)
They will stay as supercomputers because of the cryogenic requirements, the size and cost, and the limited market need.

Even if it all works out, we have already over-invested into this market opportunity.

Human racism

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I’m starting to get a bit down on the human race.

Let’s say I think we’re a pack of dicks, fucking up the biosphere.

Is that racism? Or just a fact? (using the defamation defence)

We are after all a minority. There’s only 8 billion of us and there’s 20 quadrillion ants, for example.

So it begs the question, can a minority slag off at itself and avoid the label of racism?

Sexy theft

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Victoria (the state) is introducing the Confiscation Amendment (Unexplained Wealth) Bill in an effort to deprive criminals of the “use and enjoyment of their unexplained wealth”.

Basically the onus of proof flips to the holder of wealth. If they can’t explain where they got the cash for their yachts, penthouse suites and sex workers, then they get an equivalent debt to the state.

Basically Victoria is socialising the profits from criminal activity. That’s still criminal theft, no matter which way you look at it. Receiving stolen goods or the proceeds from crime is a crime, right?

However because our politicians are all totally corrupt to the core, it probably looks reasonable to them.

The outcome; their criminals will spend their ill-gotten gains elsewhere. Bad luck Victoria…

Geophagia

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Geophagia is the craving and purposive consumption of non-food items (clay mostly) – and is classified as an eating disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) if not socially or culturally appropriate.

Woke

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Diversity: the inclusion of people of different races regardless of any noticeable cultural differences between them.

Racism: any observation of the different cultural habits of different races.

Hypocrisy: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not : behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel.

Dissonance: an instance of inconsistency or disagreement.

BCC

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It’s voting day. Our choices are:

[  ] Corruption as usual – labour and the coalition

[  ] Incompetence and stupidity – Greens

[  ] Weird-arse fucktards – random independents

[X] none of the above

Just joking, that last option isn’t real. We’re we’re obliged to turn up at the threat of a $150 fine, and vote for one of these top three clowns.

Kerr

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It’s a bit confusing that Sam Kerr can make a racist remark that apparently isn’t racist because it was directed to a member of a racial majority. Then later an Islander Rugby league player abuses an Aboriginal player, and it’s racist.

My view is that they shouldn’t be thinking in racial adjectives at all, majority or minority. It just reflects a way of thinking that does you no good.

Looking back at my school days in the 70s I recall numerous racial slurs floating around.

They were meant to sting and they sometimes did because the recipient rarely had a useful comeback. As an aside, if they took it badly they were sort of buying into the racism.

The entire point of the slurs was to get in the last word in an argument before fists started flying.

I also can’t recall anyone being actually racist in the sense of genuinely believing that a certain race was inferior in any way.

In our melting pot of a school we simply had too much data that proved just the opposite. Plus, we had too many races present, and it wouldn’t have been very practical – you would have had no friends.

For example, in soccer the best players were all of Italian origin. We didn’t give it to them, the clear “racial” superiority. No way, we “Australians” and Greeks (plus the odd Armenian or Chinese kid) were much better at stats after all.

I guess I’m saying people can act racist without actually being racist. Which is why it makes sense to crack down on racist behaviour. It only works if the underlying person isn’t racist.

And for those genuinely racist types, well they will slowly be bred out of the human race with no affirming behaviours to hang onto.

Trump

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Trump just said;

“And in some ways, we’re a third world country. We live in a third world country with no borders”

I think he’s right, and there comes a point when we, Australia, need to rethink our allegiance to this third world global police force.

I’d be chatting to China about options right now were I in charge.

Go early and go hard…

Stealthing

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Stealthing, the media tells me, is the removal of a condom during sex, without consent.

They’ve just made it a criminal offence in Queensland, equivalent to rape.

What if it comes off all by itself? Do they charge the condom manufacturer with rape?

And don’t you get into a he-said she-said situation, where his (or hers I guess, or it’s/their) defence is that the condom did it all by itself, which does happen. In those situations, the party with the most money for lawyers tends to win.

I’m pretty sure they should avoid criminalising anything that requires a judge or a jury to display accurate and precise character judgement.

AAMI

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The truth is, I regret my insurance premiums every year, unless I claim on insurance.

When you think about it, insurance is like gambling. Over your life you’re guaranteed to lose because the insurance companies are profitable. That is, you pay them more than they pay you.

The longer you play, the more you regress to the negative mean return on investment, which is the simply the negative value of their average profit margins.

One simple way to hedge this stupid loss making gamble is to buy an equivalent dollar number of shares in your insurance company each time you pay your premium.

Here’s a better idea – a new form of insurance. A premium that just gives you access to a long term zero interest loan to cover your insurance claim.