A nice application of LLMs (Codex with gpt5.5 here) for research. Yesterday, a paper appeared on arXiv with an improved lower bound on the capacity threshold of the depolarizing channel, one of the most frustrating open problems in quantum information theory (1/4)

Haven't read it in detail yet but looks very cool!

"Europa, so wie es in seinen hellsten Stunden leuchtet, ist aus dem genauen Gegenteil von Nationalismus und Abgrenzung entstanden. Es ist entstanden aus der Liebe zum Frieden, aus der Bereitschaft, zu lernen. Aus der Faszination für das Neue". - @bundespraesident.at

Some history about this commemoration: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Mig... "The enslaved Africans brought by the settlers [to San Miguel de Gualdape in 1526] became the first documented black slaves in what would become the continental United States and carried out the first slave rebellion there."

Day 2 of the Canvas hack/shutdown: U of I canceled all exams over the weekend, whether the course uses Canvas or not. I'm teaching a large course with ~1700 students and finals taken at computer test centers, which are currently overbooked for the rest of the exam week. Fun 🫠😬

A silver lining about the Canvas hack is that everyone I know is live-tweeting it. Bluesky has got a 2019 Academic Twitter vibe to it today.

UIUC Canvas has been hacked, as have many more universities. The hackers clearly know that finals are ongoing to maximize damage with this.

Yes Google I know, because I can't for the life of me remember the 1000 identities involving binomial coefficients.

After grumbling for years in our substacks about uses and abuses of probability in machine learning, @beenwrekt.bsky.social and I decided it's finally time to put down some concrete ideas in a manifesto with a DOI. Here it is, give us your best feedback. (1/4)

I was so annoyed about wrong information on the internet that I decided to make a video about how non-trinary neutrinos move and what quantum tunneling is. Andy Weir may be more bestselling than me but I'm more expert lol 🧪⚛️ Buy my book to learn more! 💙📚 www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/746817...

A little task to get your brain going today: Prove the statement in the picture!

That both of these things are true gobsmacked me when I was a student: * Modules are a special case of abelian groups because every module is just an abelian group with extra structure. * Modules are a generalization of abelian groups because every abelian group is a Z-module.

I am FLOORED that my book—out May 19—is the #1 new release in general elections and political processes. I want to disseminate its justice-focused message as widely as possible. Can you support the momentum by sharing this post or preordering at www.amazon.com/dp/0691276153 or your fave bookseller?

Representation theory is the way.

a new issue of nate's gates is available on my website :))) nates.place/gates/

In recent weeks (if not months?) I've been getting an extraordinary amount of review requests (for journals). I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same thing? Both at my career stage (late tenure-track) and more generally.

Creativity is not a talent. It's a process and a practice available to everyone.

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have been named the winners of the A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, for their work establishing the foundations of quantum information theory. The award comes with a $1 million prize. www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-cryp...

I'm really proud to have contributed a tiny part to the amazing success of the open-access and not-for-profit journal Quantum, both as an author and as a member of the editorial board.

Celebrate with us Quantum's approaching 10 year anniversary in 2026 with the publication of the 2026th paper! Do you know which paper that is? quantum-journal.org/2026-quantum...

It's official! The Theory of #Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography conference (TQC) 2028 will be held in Sydney, 🇦🇺 Australia, in August'28! tqc-conference.org/2026/2027/ #TQC2028 (TQC 2027 will take place in Grenoble, France)

🧪⚛️ Brief thoughts on the passing of Tony Leggett, an outstanding theoretical physicist with a lasting impact across multiple topics. nanoscale.blogspot.com/2026/03/rip-...

Just in time for Quantum's 10th anniversary, our paper "Localizing multipartite entanglement with local and global measurements" with students Chris Vairogs and Sam Hermes has been published in Quantum 🥳 Huge congrats to Chris and Sam! quantum-journal.org/papers/q-202...

10 years after its founding, driven by the energy, enthusiasm, & dedication of the community @quantum-journal.bsky.social quietly published paper #2000 some days ago. At least I think this is a big deal, big shout out to the founders & all authors, reviewers, editors, board members & contributors!

I think large parts of this sentiment apply to STEM as well.

It’s going to sound quaint, but the best way to resist an AI takeover of the humanities is to assign physical books, sit around, read them, and argue about ideas. Academic has become such a competitive arena, that we ourselves are trained to look for the winning angle, instead of the best education.

QIS Sloan Fellowships for Anand Natarajan, John Wright, Jake Covey (UIUC) and Isaac Kim, and a non-QIS Sloan for fellow UIUC math member Ben Castle. Congrats!! sloan.org/fellowships/...

given the existence of skeleton and luge, i postulate the existence of two other, yet to be discovered, winter olympic sports

I had a mini disc player (stereo at home and portable)

New many-body postdoc offering at @UMDscience; come join us! umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UMCP/job/Uni...

"But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders." Charles Darwin, who had a pretty bad day every now and then, was born #OTD in 1809. 🧪 The letter to Charles Lyell with the quote above: www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter?docId...

New paper "Privacy-Utility Tradeoffs in Quantum Information Processing" with my postdoc Theshani Nuradha and my student Sujeet Bhalerao! scirate.com/arxiv/2602.1...

Our paper on approximate unitary designs in logarithmic depth with Nick LaRacuente is now published in Communications in Mathematical Physics! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

My TQC submission.

I bury my head in the sand when I see some of these maps

Whaaaaat. OT here we come. This is so stressful

#GoBears 🐻

Several postdoc positions to work on quantum computing with Simon Devitt, at UTS: quantumts.org/open-positio...

The real reason why you need to submit your slides before the start of #QIP2026 is so that during the conference you have time to work on your #TQC2026 submission.

Asking researchers to submit their presentation slides by Wednesday of the week _before_ the conference starts is a tall order 😅 good luck! #qip2026

🐻♥️

Some of the responses and quote skeets are 👌

We recently received a referee report from Phys. Rev. Lett. @apsphysics.bsky.social that was obviously written by generative AI. It is so bizarre to read it; I have never received anything like it before. What measures is @apsphysics.bsky.social taking to ensure the integrity of the review process?

Pedro Pascal in Turbo Pascal

🐎

Just ordered a copy to pick up in my local book store,* been meaning to read this for a while now! 🤗

shut up and purify arxiv.org/abs/2511.15806

To be clear (it is the internet, after all) there are plenty of truly wonderful, non-sociopathic people in positions of influence within academia. I just think we are too forgiving of the bad people.

The list of accepted papers for #QIP2026 is now online at qip2026.lu.lv/programme/ac...