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.

Tenure track assistant prof job up for grabs in Basel. It's quantum computing theory, based in computer science, and part of the NCCR SPIN. Whoever gets this job will probably have to collaborate with me. Whether you see that as a pro or con is up to you. jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stell...

Academia.edu's terms of service are pure evil. I'm seeing people say "I quit it when I got an email saying they had generated a podcast using AI based on one of my papers without my permission" and "I discovered it was sending automatically-generated emails in my name without even telling me"

⚡️3 people arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia in UK. A 35-year-old woman and two men aged 41 and 46 were detained in a counter-terrorist operation at two separate addresses in Grays in Essex.

Stumbled upon the paper "Sorting with Bialgebras and Distributive Laws" ( https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/nicolas.wu/papers/Sorting.pdf ) which introdued me to the idea that certain sorting algorithms can be considered 'duals' of others:

Does anyone have any good resources for loss landscape analysis in optimization? Binary variables preferred but just about any kind of variables would do. What metrics/phenomena to watch out for etc. I know it’s broad and I wonder what generalizations may/may not exist!

I think this is video on inflation is an all-time Hossenfelder moment. It's a beautiful illustration of how poorly her philosophy of science works and why she fights against progress every step of the way, to champion it only when it finally succeeds. It deserves a breakdown 🧵

"…and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel.”

Hello world :) Nowhere feels like home for science, still, but I’ll give this a fifth try. Maybe some equilibrium will be reached!

Actually insanely proud that 6 months of drumming in I can do this at .9 the speed after only a few hours of practice 😅

What a day for counterdiabatic driving research! 2 new massive papers on the arXiv: * "Universal Counterdiabatic Driving" from Morawetz & Polkovnikov arxiv.org/abs/2503.01952 * "Counterdiabatic Driving with Performance Guarantees" from Finžgar et al arxiv.org/abs/2503.01958

Our paper "Speeding Up Quantum Measurement Using Space-Time Trade-Off" was finally published recently in PRL and has received Editors' Suggestion! :)) Thank you to Chris Corlett, Andrew Daley, Cica Gustiani, Gerard Pelegrí and Jonathan Pritchard for all the work! journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

DOGE is like if Fyre Festival was a government agency.

At QIP in case anyone is around and wants to say hi :))

Someone should absolutely gamify the exercises in this book, I can already see the puzzles in my head

It’s really not the fact that it’s happening as much as it is the fact that there is so little appropriate reaction

Aaand this is now published! :) The code repo is available for anyone who want to play around with computing non-adiabatic effects for their Hamiltonian. Paper: scipost.org/SciPostPhys.... Code repo: github.com/ewenlawrence... I plan to write a quick blogpost on the results, so keep an eye out!

Coming back from Eastern Europe in the winter and realising that Londoners are actually such a friendly approachable bunch 😅

I love this paper by Bill Kuszmaul. His proof of Chernoff bound is much more illuminating than the standard algebraic proof I learned.

Phasecraft internship applications are open! Anyone working on quantum info at an early stage (or adjacent fields!) who wants to experience working with a fantastic research team on cutting-edge quantum algorithms is welcome to get in touch :)

🖊️ @qzoeholmes.bsky.social and I are editing an issue for Quantum Science and Technology journal ow.ly/fR1W50Uu1av We want - (Wacky) new ideas for variational algorithms - Honest benchmarks, if you show it don't work, we want it (be thorough) - Studies on classical simulability - Power of data in QML

Dropping in with some good news that two of the last papers from my PhD have recently been accepted to their respective journals, SciPost and PhysRevLett :))) Many thanks to the hard work of all my collaborators! 1/3

Today I was asked in an interview about folks who use the weirdness of ✨quantum✨ to hawk pseudoscience junk. I think that kind of grift proliferates because of a big misunderstanding a lot of folks have about quantum mechanics, which is not really their fault! 🧵

Was I the only one to not know that Ettore Majorana, of equation and fermion fame, disappeared without a trace in his 30s likely to live out the rest of his days in anonymity in Venezuela? roma.corriere.it/notizie/cron...

What a fascinating read. TIL that the information rate for humans tasks in almost always at most 10bit/s (but that our senses gather that at 10^8 times that speed!) arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

Hi #quantum folks, does anyone have any favorite examples of non-demolition measurements and links to papers where these have been implemented in practice?

This orange marmalade and sage duck is officially in my top 10 recipes

Our house rn

I recently lost much of my faith in goodness and humanity in a big way. This has taken a toll my mental+physical health. Despite this, I’m delighted to say that Phasecraft as a workplace and @bgavran.bsky.social as a partner are enough to restore it. To a brighter future ❤️❤️

Have to admit that this is very cool. arxiv.org/abs/2412.13164 It's time to dump your quantum stocks and buy shares in companies that make mattresses or any other kinds of springs or pendulums! Harmonic oscillators are soon going to fly off the shelves like NVIDIA cards!

I don’t know how to start this so I’ll start in the words of @miniapeur.bsky.social : Do not work for Symbolica. I will explain my reasons for saying this below. 1/n

🥰 🎄

I have an unfortunate personal announcement: I was fired from Symbolica. This was a complete surprise. I am in shock and, honestly, still not sure how to process this. If you've been following me, you understand just how excited and optimistic I am about the programme of categorical deep learning.

I’ve visited and can vouch there’s great physics and even greater craic in Dublin. Apply! 🍀

Kudos to what seems to be an amazing first-of-its-kind QEC demonstration by Google! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Corollary of Great Man Theory, I suppose Teach people that science is driven by individual Great Men who came up w/ a crazy idea from nowhere and everything else is basically just clockwork done by unimportant worker bees, and many will conclude "hey, I can also come up w/ crazy ideas from nowhere"

Rewatched “My Neighbour Totoro” with @bgavran.bsky.social yesterday and was once again reminded of the goodness in humanity, if only for a little bit :) deeply recommend doing so given the state of the world these days

I’m giving a guest lecture on quantum computing at Vilnius Uni this coming week, the audience will (I think) be ~MSc students that have gone through an intro to QC course. What might be good topics to present on? I was thinking “practical quantum advantage, SotA of quantum tech” or smthn?

While @jenseisert.bsky.social celebrates an h-index of 100 (which is insane and amazing), I'm pretty delighted that I finally breached 100 citations :)) I know many people at my career stage tend to do way better, but I'm still delighted that my work was useful to this many people!

When I tell people I have eclectic tastes

Since I’m taking down my xitter profile soon for good, I was thinking of posting a thread here with my best tweets, for posterity. Does that sound like a good idea or would that be too gauche?

I think this just about hits the nail on the head for me too. Near the end I figured I would stay to try and be a positive in that sea of bull**it, but pretty soon realised it was futile

In the spirit of friendly academic shit posting... (Or because we lack imagination?) We picked another IBM experiment to benchmark our small-angle Pauli propagation alg. This time: arxiv.org/abs/2404.08053 @quantummanuel.bsky.social's plot below is for TFI on 127 qubits in a heavy hex topology

If you're curious about quantum computing and want to learn the basics, check out the "Quantum Quest" created by me and Michael Walter! www.quantum-quest.org/material

~20-30h of drumming in, I’m going for Toxicity, wish me luck

Sometimes I’m an idiot to the compiler and a genius on paper. Other times I am a genius to the compiler and an absolute moron on paper. The cycle of life.