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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I’m mean life on Earth, obviously. No one is saying that the planet is going to explode or disappear or anything like that. We’re talking about the climate, and life that depends on that climate.

    And before you start coming at me with some “but but such and such life will still…” I’ll clarify again that there is a matter of scale here. A very large number of species that have been around for a very long time will soon be extinct (many have been lost already). So although we might still have mosquitos and jelly-fish for a long time to come, a lot of the complex life that is currently enjoying a comfortable and otherwise-sustainable life on Earth will no longer be able to do so; because of us. That’s what I’m referring to.

    Yes, humans have does this to ‘ourselves’, but we are nowhere near the worst effected life in this situation. In fact, most of the ill effects on humans are just knock-on effects from other life failing. (In particular, reduced capacity to grow food is likely to be a problem for humans.)



  • There are a few different physical systems that people are trying to build quantum computers with. Superconducting loops are one of the most promising ones, because of a halfway decent decoherence rate. And yeah, superconducts needing near 0K temperature to operate is a problem. It’s just hard to scale up while everything needs to be so cold. Room-temp superconductivity would be a huge advantage.

    But even then, the decoherence rates are still too high for any long quantum computation. Last I heard, the best qubits are maybe barely getting to good enough errors rates that quantum error correction would be possible - which is great, but ‘possible’ and ‘practical’ still have a significant gap between them.

    So in short, basically everything about the hardware needs to be better; and its just very very hard. Probably too hard to ever achieve the dream of having arbitrary quantum computation. (But there is always the possibility of some big new idea that makes everything work better.)


  • We aren’t talking about security though. We’re talking about what information should be presented on lemmy.

    Let me put it this way: have you personally ever tried to see who upvoted or downvoted a particular lemmy post? And if you did, did you talk about what you saw?

    My point is that currently basically no one sees the data. The expectation is that no one is looking. And it is not socially acceptable to discuss who is voting for what. But if the votes were changed to public then everyone would see it, the expectation would be that it is common knowledge, and so obviously it will be discussed. Is that what we want on lemmy?


  • I’m seeing lots of comments here saying that server admins can already see vote data, and therefore it is not private.

    But from my point of view, having a handful of people able to extract voting data using their position of trust on the lemmy network is very different from broadcasting voting data to everyone on lemmy. And although you can argue that it is possible to create a new server and federate and blah-blah-blah to view votes; that argument sounds to me like “don’t bother locking your front door, because that type of lock can be defeated by a lock-picking tools.”

    And even aside from all that discussion about who can access what; there is another key point that I think is overlooked: Making voter information public makes it ‘normal’ thing to monitor and discuss. Currently there is an expectation that people won’t look at or discuss that information (even if they hypothetically could get access). But by making it public, the expectation then is that everyone will look at that information. That would create a change in tone and meaning of votes and discussion around votes.