We are at an airport restaurant. A robot just drove up to us with our food, said, "Hi! Here I am!" and then drove away with our food.

What I’m seeing in some of the Epstein revelations about well known scientists who maintained contact after his conviction, is folks who always thought they were the smartest person in any room, sure they could shrewdly navigate a route that gets them what they want without getting dirty themselves.

I've been asked several times to comment on arxiv.org/abs/2602.11457, which claims to reduce the qubit cost of factoring by 10x. My take is that they demand a *lot* more qubit connectivity for that number. Your mileage depends entirely on how plausible you find those demands.

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

The paper is up! A project impressively led by Kenny Chen, co-advised with Julian Mestre, on Forrelation, a slightly-artificial up task introduced by Aaronson to show an exponential separation between classical and quantum computers.* Small 🧵 below! 📝 arxiv.org/abs/2602.07503 *(in the query model)

Good thread. This is why, when convenient, I like to switch to the completely equivalent but imo much more intuitive picture "the size of the universe is fixed but the speed of light gradually decreases" Nice bonus is imo "light moved infinitely fast" is easier to picture than Big Bang singularity

Teaser: coming soon to an #arXiv near you! (my coauthors did not change the title in time)

Did you know you can simulate quantum states with Pauli and Majorana propagation? In short: High-temperature states are provably and practically sparse, and we can use imaginary time evolution to get there starting from the infinite-temperature state. scirate.com/arxiv/2602.0...

I'm quite proud of how far I've been able to get with TensorType: https://github.com/bgavran/TensorType What started out as a casual "I wonder if I can implement type-safe tensors" question has now evolved into a fully-fledged library

A DISCWORLD PRIMER* *or, why should I read this thing that everyone keeps going on about? Come on in, sit down, pull up a chair. If you have followup questions, feel free to ask me or @ankhmorporkcity.watch, we're always happy to help. (1/a lot, idk, we'll figure this out as we go)

Today we get the computer scientists' view on the transition into fault-tolerance. There will indeed be a whole lot of classical computing involved in getting early fault-tolerance running, and the better it is, the more quantum we can use. arxiv.org/abs/2601.20247

Come and visit me at the poster session at #QIP26 today! :)))

Love the rock concert vibes of #QIP2026!

If you're interested in some of the design choices behind TensorType, have a look at the great blog post that @Andrev just posted: types.pl/@Andrev/1159... TLDR; Tensors in NumPy are secretly built out of the composition product of containers

Russia is scaling up its educational programs for journalists in Southeast Asia, Africa, China, and India, pushing a pro-Kremlin agenda and propaganda under the guise of an "alternative narrative" and a "fight against fakes."

Reading that while from Kyiv with no light, no heat, no warm water and working with a hot bottle on my lap from under my duvet so yes, I will indeed point out that Ukrainians are going through hell than marvelling at their resilience. ❄️ Temperature outside is -15°C...

⚡️ Russia welcomes Trump's tariffs on NATO allies over Greenland as 'collapse' of alliance. "The transatlantic alliance is over," Kremlin economic negotiator Kirill Dmitriev said.

❗️Poland says Russia carried out a cyberattack on its energy sector. In late December, the country nearly lost power, but the attack was successfully repelled. Poland’s minister described the attack as “digital tanks” that are already here.

This year's Quantum Computing Theory in Practice Conference (QCTiP) is scheduled for 04/20/2026-04/25/2026 in Oxford, UK 🇬🇧: qctipconf.github.io Talk submission deadline is just round the corner: 01/11/2026. Looking forward to many exciting contributions and a great time in Hogwarts🪄, aehm Oxford🎓.

Postdoctoral Researcher in Quantum Randomness Certification to develop a certifiable security hierarchy for Quantum Random Number Generators (QRNGs), in Malta. www.quantiki.org/position/pos...

I try to avoid talking about religion and politics here, but this time they've gone too far - I gotta say something. The Bishop of Paris banned a list of 219 propositions, and number 68 goes too far: I must object. (1/n)

Logged into twitter main for the first time in 2 months, chucked a live grenade, logged out again

Remember Symbolica, that ML company that suddenly hired and then just as quickly fired a bunch of category theorists? Well, I've looked at the docs for their newest library claiming to do 'typed agents', and it's complete slop, bordering on comical levels of misunderstanding of what a type is.

⚡️ Update: Putin falsely claims Russia 'did not start this war,' denies responsibility for deaths. "We do not consider ourselves responsible for the deaths of people because we did not start this war," Russian President Vladimir Putin said.

every goddamn time

I'm surprised that this video isn't now widely shared as it explains (i) How full of hate the Russians are. (ii) That the Russians don't want any deal that deserves that name. (iii) That the Russians are still completely delusional about the greatness of their military and economic power.

I find that, at work, I seek out both strong professionalism (i.e. a clear set of goals and behaviours beneficial to the outcomes of their job, which each person around me can define, explain and generally engage in) as well as a strong component of socialisation and, cautiously, community-building.

If software engineering is replaced by vibe coding, we should also replace electrical engineering with vibe wiring, civil engineering with vibe bridging, aerospace engineering with vibe flying etc

In recent months I began somewhat enjoying bsky. Maybe I’ve fixed the timeline somehow, maybe it’s the people, but it feels a bit more like home. I’ve been lurking without posting, but I think it may be about time to start posting again!

⚡️Vilnius airport halts flights for 3rd time this week after balloon sightings. Operations at Vilnius International Airport were briefly suspended on Dec. 6 after unidentified objects — believed to be Belarusian balloons — were detected in the surrounding airspace, the airport said.

Everyone is 12 theory remains undefeated

I helped Sam with this video on the new scourge of science populists: the people who feign to be science communicators to channel populist sentiments into science circles, work to undermine public faith in science & in doing so serve antiscientific political movements Have a listen! He's very good!

Bellingcat’s contact email has always been a magnet for people with fairly unusual views; paranoid delusions, sprawling conspiracies, the works. But recently, the pattern has shifted, we’re seeing more and more emails clearly written with ChatGPT.

Remember kids, theoretical physicists have irreparably ruined public trust in science by saying they *hope* we *could* find BSM evidence at the LHC, but Elon gets to predict his products will "do the sci-fi" and be wrong 100 times per year for profit but he's just giving them hope

When doing calculations, how do you figure out which side of the napkin is the back?

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

Turns out Springer Nature website is broken in such a way that "many references lead to the wrong article, typically to Article Number 1 of a given Volume [...] which we estimate affects the citation count of millions of authors". Poor Nature, their $12,690 APC is barely enough to run a website...

After last week’s demonstration on an ion-trap quantum processor, Phasecraft showed the quantum simulation of a fermionic system on Google’s superconducting devices. This suggests that quantum computers are becoming practically useful for studying quantum many-body systems. arxiv.org/abs/2510.26845

“The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues.”

Phasecraft demonstrates a quantum simulation of a 56-qubit 2D Fermi-Hubbard model on Quantinuum’s trapped-ion system, reaching a regime too complex for exact classical simulation. They observe spin-charge separation. arxiv.org/abs/2510.26300

Coming out of social media hibernation to ask: Are you interested in hosting a future QEC conf? We are looking for detailed bids for QEC27 over the next month (provisional deadline 21st November). For more info: DM or email me. QEC26 will be in Santa Barbara

⚡️ EU to reportedly restrict Russian diplomats' travel amid espionage surge. The measure follows a surge in hybrid operations targeting Ukraine's partners in the EU and NATO, including arson, cyberattacks, infrastructure sabotage, and drone incursions.

Programming language autism spectrum

⚡️Russia using 'shadow fleet' tankers to launch drones towards European cities, Zelensky says. Russia's so-called "shadow fleet" of oil tankers are being used to "launch and control" Russian drones over European cities, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sept. 28, citing intelligence reports.

Today, as I do in every class, I said to my students: "Actual competence doesn't matter! It's the 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 of competence that's important!" This always gets a laugh, but hopefully by the end of the term, they realize they can only appear competent in a mathematics class if they actually are

So much of what I read from the center left amounts to "what if the powerful did nice things for us without us having to make them" and folks, that's simply not how it works

An ever-increasing number of top Western officials are signaling support for the shooting down of Russian aircraft violating NATO airspace, following a string of recent incursions along the alliance's eastern flank.

Another one bites the dust… scirate.com/arxiv/2509.1...

⚡️Update: Russian fighter jets violate safety zone of Polish drilling platform in Baltic Sea, Border Guard says. The same day that MiG-31s crossed into Estonian airpsace, the Polish Border Guard reported that Russian figher jets violated the security zone of a drilling platform in the Baltic Sea.