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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Well, yes and no.

    Quantum computers will likely never beat classical computing on classical algorithms, for exactly the reasons you stated, classical just has too much of a head start.

    But there are certain problems with quantum algorithms that are exponentially faster than the classical algorithms. Quantum computers will be better on those problems very quickly, but we are still working on building reliable QCs. Also, we currently don’t know very many quantum algorithms with that degree of speedup, so as others have said there isn’t many use cases for QCs yet.


  • This isn’t a “comic book” universe, but the parahumans story universe (Worm and Ward) fits this pretty well.

    Without spoiling too much of the story, characters all get powers in response to traumatic events. The powers they get also tend to reflect the type of trauma that occurred, so if they lost an arm they might get a healing power, or if they were trapped in a burning building they might get the ability to phase through walls and a resistance to fire. All of the powers in the setting tend to follow this approach, and stay within the rules of the setting.








  • Yes, but notably you can design to reduce the risk of leaking hydrogen. If the areas around the tanks are designed to allow any leakage to vent before it reaches dangerous levels, you can reduce the risk. Yes hydrogen is flammable, so tanks of it are dangerous. Jet fuel is also quite flammable, and we’ve used that for a long time.

    This is all in contrast to the design of the Hindenburg, which was specifically trying to hold onto a bunch of hydrogen in the flammable regime