I had a friend, already over 40 have a similar episode, mixing a conspiracy belief triggered by searching for patterns in data, incorrectly treated bipolar disorder and a HUGE amount of cocaine. It was not schizophrenia, but a long episode of mania with delusions of grandeur, where he was the main character on a erotic-thriller-like story.
It would be the fastest way to bootstrap a local hyperscaller, I mean, most of AWS is open source software with a HUGE integration to make it easy to administer.
Nobody is trying to get 7 TRILIONS of dollars investment on calculators being capable of doing any task, but OpenAI swears to god that any day soon their language model will became a general intelligence capable of doing all things, including math.
Here in Brazil criminals are starting to use those to send phishing SMS, exploiting our ubiquitous mobile payment system (pix) or pretending to be a second authentication factor for banks.
In my PhD I did study systems in higher dimensions (including fractal dimensions) and it is not a metaphor and no, I did not visualize them, it was more like defining a mathematical representation of the system geometry and working on top of it.
It's not a particle, it is a quasi-particle. Those are field manifestations that happen on solid state, like solitons and holes, so it is cool, but no fundamental change do the standard model or anything like that.
About your first point, "outpaces current supercomputers, solving tasks in minutes that would otherwise take billions of years.", that is the point of the article. They used their computer to model a system that can't be verified with a classic computer algorithm, so no, we are not certain that it is solving anything.
About the other points, quantum computers are massively different from classic ones, so much that there are very few algorithms for them. For example, GPUs are faster at matrix multiplication because it can be implemented independent parallel threads, but they suck at other problemas. A quantum computer is good for running quantum algorithms [1], of which there are very few at the moment, and most of them are useful for simulating quantum physics. It is not a "faster" classic computer in any way.
Quantum computing seems to be in the same realm as nuclear fusion as a power source. My Quantum theory professor used to say that in the 1960's, when he was a physics student in the Soviet Union it was "the energy of the future, in 20 years everything will be powered by nuclear fusion".
When i was an undergrad student 20 years ago I did hear that "soon, quantum computing will change the world", and yet here we are, every year someone builds a new machine but no one has yet to factorize that 21 = 7x3 in a general way.
A big problem in science in general is reproducibility. There are thousands of papers being published every month with peer review, which prunes out the most obvious errors, but the whole system is built on trust.
Very few labs around the world are tasked with testing results instead of trying to produce new science, and in this specific case, only google has access to the device being built and the computation tested by them impossible to verify with classic computers, unlike Shor's algorithm which is trivial to test with known primes.
I kinda read this paper, and holy crap, it's what we used to call in college "one of those guys", during the early 2000's.
A computer scientist or engineer who is reasonably competent in his area, but that for some reason decided that he is the one who is going to unify all of physics with his pet theory based on a superficial understanding quantum theory and relativity (always special relativity, never general relativity).
I IS a physics problem. Non physicists tend of think that the only areas being studied are high energy and/or cosmology, but modern physics covers a multitude of areas, including complex systems.
Not all modelling is physics, but a rather large part of modeling is. My PhD is in complex systems, and you would be surprised by the range of systems we did study. My work was on a more "traditional" field of high dimension fractal surfaces, but we had a student working on public transit models, another on ecological pattern formation, and so on.
I remember at some point some novelty shops selling bluetooth and wired phones resembling old school landline phones, those could be a useful starting point for such a design.
I've been using xen in production for at least 18 years, and although there is been some development, it is extremely hard to get actual documentation on how to do things with it.
There is no place documenting how to integrate the Dom0less/Hyperlaunch in a distribution or how to build infrastructure with it, at best you will find a github repo, with the last commit dated 4 years ago, with little to no information on what to do with the code.
Brazil has a long history of dubbing, not only translating but also localizing tv shows and movies. In some cases the shows are actually better dubbed, because the voice actors are better at emoting than the original cast.
For the bathroom mirror there are already DIY designs called "magic mirrors" using half reflective mirrors in front of a tv screen, which are immensely more cost effective than transparent screens.
More than that, in developing countries, such as my own, Meta has peering agreements with telephony companies which allow said companies to offer basic plans where traffic to Meta applications (mostly whatsapp) is not billed. This would certainly reduce their costs immensely, considering that people use whatsapp as THE communications service.
As it is usual with ALL plants, the carbon is usually used to build plant matter. So the algae in the cells are certainly reproducing, which brings the question of algae growth management. This system can not operate as a closed loop cell, it must continually have water cycled in and excess algae cycled out.