hbartab

Not even politicians follow the law consistently...

> We believe that higher levels of greenness can reduce violence through four major mechanisms: reduced crime, improved short-term and long-term mental health, sending a signal that a place is well-cared for and increasing the use of outdoor spaces by nearby neighbors.

While I did not read the paywalled paper, it seems like a latent variable might also explain it: affluence and greenery might be positively correlated and police are less trigger-happy in rich neighbourhoods.

> The authors cite various other studies on remote work showing how it frees up time by reducing commuting, increases productivity, offers more flexible hours, and reduces employee monitoring.

Sounds like a benefit to society to me. When people do not waste time on commutes, they spend it either with their families and friends or thinking about solving problems, which occasionally turn into new businesses. Without such time freed up, these business ideas would never have come to fruition.

I also don't see why how employees spend their time off (as almost no employer counts commuting as work time) should factor into remote policies.

If this were just about tech transfer, in which private firms commercialize public research, I agree. But that's not what Jason Pruet is saying. In the Q&A he notes:

> “Why don’t we just let private industry build these giant engines for progress and science, and we’ll all reap the benefits?” The problem is that if we’re not careful, it could lead us to a very different country than the one we’ve been in.

This isn't about commercialization, it's about control. When access to frontier models and SOTA compute is gated by private interests, academics (and the public) risk getting locked out. Not because of merit, but because their work doesn't align with corporate priorities.

What is crazier still is that so many people revere (tech) executives as if tech were a cult.

That is exactly what Germany did with its scientists in the 1930s/1940s.

I am not attempting to draw any parallels between governments or ideologies here. My goal is to state the obvious: such a self-inflicted brain drain has happened before and it will happen again unless we learn from history, which we (humans) rarely do.

Indeed.

$5 billion in added valuation in just 6 months on $35 million in annual revenue [^1]. That's a 400× multiple for a company that mostly wraps other companies' LLMs [^2].

Is that a bubble popping, or just my headphones?

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/7621cd5f-901e-4948-879d-011e0edb3... [2]: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/technical-faq/what-advanced-ai...

> We certainly need to partner with industry. Because they are so far ahead and are making such giant investments, that is the only possible path.

And therein lies the risk: research labs may become wholly dependent on companies whose agendas are fundamentally commercial. In exchange for access to compute and frontier models, labs may cede control over data, methods, and IP—letting private firms quietly extract value from publicly funded research. What begins as partnership can end in capture.

As others have already pointed out, the article has a clickbait title and is entirely in line with D-Wave's recent marketing push for "quantum realized" to one-up IBM with "quantum utility." This work amounts to brute-forcing an integer with very specific as constraints @rainsford noted. It has very little to do with RSA-2048.

Moreover, D-Wave's quantum computers rely on quantum annealing, not Shor's algorithm. Quantum annealers are NOT gate-based machines. Only for the latter is there a theoretical exponential speedup over a classical computer. For the former, we still don't know if there is any speedup at all. And if there is, it probably is not applicable in general: getting lucky with a specific integer does not count.