Man, reading this makes me feel so small. Being a "software engineer" consuming APIs and updating database rows seems laughably childish compared to whatever the hell it is I just read. I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it. It's completely inaccessible. Only an elite few get to touch these machines.
> I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it.
Well, maybe you should just try for the hell of it and see how far you get? Becoming fit seems impossible to a morbidly obese 45 y.o, and it is if that person's expectation is unreasonable, but if they just change it to be more reasonable, break it down into manageable
routines, then they can get somewhere eventually.
Find some papers, fill many gaps, dedicate a few years in your spare time, in 6 months you'll be 6 months closer than you were.
Whether there's a reason or not, idk, it's something to do, be curious. Don't forget that by dedicating their life to something, they're naturally not dedicating their life to other things, things that you might be able to do, like climbing mountains, making pizza, or coming up with witty banter in social situations.
> in 6 months you'll be 6 months closer than you were
Not to be morbid, but…in 6 months you’ll also have 6 months less of your life left to do those things.
In the past few years, I have felt—-whether due to my aging, the chaos of current events, the mindless march of technology, who knows—-that our time here on earth is a gift that we squander at our peril.
I think some would find that bleak and grim, but I consider it an existentialist battle cry. Make a list of those things that someday you’d like to say you’ve done, or know, or have built, or have given to others…and do one of them.
All the more reason to spend it on things that matter to you. The opportunity cost of six months spent deep in abstract CS papers is six months not spent teaching your daughter to play guitar, visiting that place you always dreamt of seeing, finally finishing that book on your nightstand, etc.
Absolutely, it's fair to say there's a cost to dedicating huge amounts of time to anything, including work and school. I'd argue that people waste more time than they appreciate with inane things like scrolling Instagram/Tiktok, commuting. Everyone need to be somewhat aware of the microeconomy of their life, and there's some sweet spot where you're making decent money, not spending too much time working, not spending too much time getting to work, spending as much time as reasonable with your kid(s) when they're young if you have them and with your partner if you have one, engaging your own interests, and ideally taking care of yourself physically. It's all quite a lot.
When it comes to that category of your own interests, I don't really think one can afford not to spend time on them, lest you hollow yourself out. Whether any one thing is worth the time over another, like grinding papers vs travel, they're not always mutually exclusive; although trying to do both in parallel might be silly, I personally like to shift my attention periodically. I'll go and spend a few months learning, and then go adventure. I don't that much, but I'm happy to meet up with friends and do that too, and it means taking time away from video games or learning, and that's important too.
You are awake for at least 16 hours of the day, you telling me you cant find 4 hours a week to read a paper? So 4/112 hours or around 3.5% of your week...
I guarantee thats more time than most people will spend teaching their kids any musical instrument.
Just spend a week mapping out what you do ans how long it takes you every week and I'm pretty sure you can find double digit hours spent somewhere, maybe even right here on HN
> you telling me you cant find 4 hours a week to read a paper?
For me, four hours a week is sufficient to stay up-to-date on an active research area but making forward progress requires at least twice that.
> You are awake for at least 16 hours of the day, you telling me you cant find 4 hours a week to read a paper? So 4/112 hours or around 3.5% of your week...
Using awake hours as the denominator is misleading because most people have other non-discretionary time commitments besides sleep. For me I'd estimate ~60h/wk sleep, ~50h/wk work/commute, ~30h/wk non-discretionary upkeep of children/relationships/home/body. Assuming 8+h/wk to make progress out of the remaining ~28h/wk of discretionary time means I can handle about three non-discretionary priorities. (Pre-kids I could handle about five.)
Therefore, when someone with a job says "I don't have time" to pick up a hobby, skill, language, outside research area, instrument, volunteer position, etc I don't interpret their statement as meaning it is physically impossible for them to rearrange their schedule to accommodate it. I (and I suspect most people) interpret the statement as them admitting that it's not one of their ~3-5 non-discretionary priorities.
I don't disagree with you. But I have also opened screentime on some of those people with "no time" and it has 15+ hours on ticktok this week...
There are legitimately busy people and then there are people who wish they could achieve X if only they had time but don't put any effort into making time for that.
HINT: if research is directly related to your job, allocate time to it during working hours, those aren't 40-45 hours of time a company gets to take from you and also get benefits from your out of work time. I'm reasonably sure your boss would happily let you allocate an hour every now and then to improving yourself as an employee and if they don't, well... The internet has their usual answer to that even though I don't always agree.
> some of those people with "no time" and it has 15+ hours on ticktok this week...
Sometimes this is the result of black-hat products hacking their dopamine cycle, in which case screentime or a friend can help. However, I've found that in some cases staying on top of the zeitgeist like this is actually in someone's 3-5 priorities. In that case saying they have "no time" for X is another way of saying that using TikTok is a higher priority than X for them. (Baffling to me, but a valid choice.) I similarly know people who spend a non-trivial amount of time on other "useless" activities like watching TV shows, playing video games, reading novels, learning esoteric languages, growing plants with no utility, commenting on online forums, etc. Who am I to judge if they find it valuable?
So as technically imprecise as "I don't have time" is, I understand why people use the expression. When someone suggests that I should volunteer for a cause, participate in an activity, go to an event, learn a skill, watch a TV show, read a particular book, learn a language, etc and I tell them that it isn't a high enough priority to displace any of my existing priorities, they sometimes get defensive and/or attempt to litigate my current priorities.
> I'm reasonably sure your boss would happily let you allocate an hour every now and then to improving yourself as an employee
Absolutely, this is a major perk that knowledge workers should take advantage of. I'm spending quite a bit more than "an hour every now and then" to learn about LLMs and accessibility because they are in the intersection of my interests and my job responsibilities. However quantum computing (or game design, solar vehicles, gardening, etc) are not in that intersection and would count against one of my discretionary priorities.
I will always try to convince people against mindless media like ticktok, well unless it's in their life goals to be an influencer but that may also be an issue...
Other cauaes though, sure I don't mind if you don't have time to volunteer etc.
That's fine - but then it's no surprise if deep skills stay out of reach. Skills that take more than a few hours of watching a YouTube video or reading a book or two to acquire. Skills that one arguably should care about if one wants a career in that field.
I absolutely agree, which is why I try to constraint my social media use, and have long since stopped arbitrarily storing articles to read later in order to fake a personal sense of productivity. I still haven't bothered to learn anything to do with Crypto or AI, only because I don't feel like I have anything compelling enough to drive me to get anything satisfying out of it compared to like.. going outside or something.
However, that's also exactly why I didn't say anything like "You should learn X", because it's just a curiosity, and there's many curiosities. For example, last year I failed an interview at Apple because they got the impression my hardware-level knowledge of computers wasn't there, and it wasn't, and that convinced me to finally try and work my way through NAND2Tetris, which I'm now about 3/4's of the way through, and feel was incredibly rewarding even though the net benefit is likely nebulous. I was out of work then for about a year and a half, and it helped me pass the time well too, in a much more spirit lifting way than grinding through yet another rest api project or frontend framework.
Eventually a project may come along that I'll feel is compelling enough to dedicate some serious time to AI/Crypto, and I'll consider it then, but if I were to just try and learn it for no reason at all—including innate curiosity—I don't think it'd stick.
For me, "aha" moments often make me feel like I've come closer to understanding myself and the universe. I suppose it's a kind of pleasure, but it's not directly a practical goal. It can definitely happen with learning a new language, because the language may encode and communicate information in ways I've never thought about before.
Got it. I guess we're very different then, I don't feel like I'm getting any closer to "understanding myself and the universe" nor is it a goal for me. Perhaps it was when I was younger.
Yeah, we are probably different. I suppose my primary goal is to love and be kind. But trying to figure out what the hell is going on is a strong second place.
I think there's some nuance between your view and their's, but I do find these perspectives to often divide people. If you're learning an arbitrary language for literally no reason at all—you don't know anyone who speaks it or have any intention of ever speaking it to someone—then that activity might struggle to compete with other things you might have a more coherent reason to do. The people I know who are more driven by tangible results, money, and outcomes, struggle to value things that have no previously established obvious purpose.
I'd use the example of hiking literally all day without the promise of a good viewpoint; I'd invite the person out, with only a plausible estimate of the time required, and they'd want to just find something that takes less time so they can schedule something afterward. Along the way, they'll be rushing to meet that time, because this is just exercise or whatever to them, and in some way they aren't at peace the idea that we're both just here in the forest maybe chatting maybe not, there's no tangible justification for the mission.
Another type of person would replace tangible outcomes with the feeling that they always need to be learning, regardless of what it is, because it's intrinsically virtuous, and they also sometimes fail to be at peace with doing something for no reason, or nothing at all.
I've wavered between these over the years, and now I'll learn something because it's a clear weak spot, or I can imagine how it might be interesting, and if I don't have anything else that's more compelling (including doing nothing) I might give it a go. What's different now than a few years ago is how much I respect serious time involvement. Anything I decide is worth trying to learn is something I need to feel capable of dedicating serious energy to, at least in the first year; if I can't or don't want to, then maybe I won't, and I shouldn't fool myself into thinking I should or will, because I have other things going on. If I'm going hiking, that's my day, that's it, that's the whole activity, if anyone wants to join me then that's great, they need to accept the same mentality or they can stay home. If we happen to get back before the bars close, then that's great too. I might find Swahili interesting too, and if it seemed worth trying, I'd dive in on the basis that I'd just get a sense for how a different language works, and that there might be something surprising along the way, which to me is inherently valuable.
How boring would life be if you new at the outset how much pleasure you'd get out of any given thing? Goals are nice, but not everything should have a goal attached, and not all pleasure should be attached to goals
> ...that our time here on earth is a gift that we squander at our peril.
Yes but - it's up to each individual to decide on their own definition of 'squandering'. Ultimately everything we do is in service of our own search for meaning in life, and learning for its own sake can absolutely fulfil that role.
MSR has a very clear and accessible tutorial on quantum computing for anyone interested in getting up to speed with the fundamentals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM .
As an autistic that brute-forced the "witty social banter" skill early on and has recently turned 40... I kinda wish I'd learned quantum computing instead tbh.
Read a lot of popular books for conversational ideas, follow the news for topical application of them, and attempt cognitive & emotional empathy for per-person personalization of the application.
Simple in theory, juggling plates and knives in practice...
You don't need a "real" quantum computer to mess around with quantum computing and learn how it works any more than you need a supercomputer to play around with algorithms and learn how they work.
most experts in that field do not have access to a quantum computer. For the longest times it was a very theoretical field.
Having access to a physical machine will not help you for 99% of the knowledge you can acquire in that field right now.
i think you can. A very simple one - an optical based one, one qubit. Several thousand dollars of equipment of a typical university photon quantum entanglement lab.
Thank you for adding such a simple, positive, growth-mindset message to the internet. This instantly brightened my day and compelled me to write what might be my first ever comment on this site. idk if I can understand quantum computers, but I can climb mountains and make excellent sourdough pizza and that's not something I could say a year ago. Mostly, I'm just happier than I was 5 minutes ago and you did that!
Clicked on this article to learn a bit more about this newly released chip but instead got extremely motivated to pursue intellectual interests intensely
What books will get me started into understanding recent scientific publications?
I’m interested in the theoretical side but even more in the engineering/hardware side.
Same, but kind of; I'm so far removed from higher up engineering stuff like quantum stuff, nuclear fusion stuff, LHC stuff, astronomy stuff, AI stuff that I just scan it, grab a coffee, raise an eyebrow and go "Interesting", then go about my day and wonder what the fuck I'm supposed to be doing at work again. Oh right, implement a component, same thing I've been doing for the past decade or so.
Thing is, I don't know how to get out without on the one side giving up my comfort zone (well paid, doable work), and on the other side gaining responsibility / being looked at as an expert in any field (that's where impostor syndrome and responsibility aversion comes in). I really need a holiday lol.
This was me yesterday after reading the official Willow release.
Spent yesterday afternoon and this morning learning what I could. I'm now superficially familiar with quantum coherence, superposition, and phase relationships.
In other words, you got this. Now I gotta learn linear algebra. brb.
I gave a plug for this yesterday, but if you want to try the Quantum Katas from Azure Quantum, it runs in the browser and covers this stuff. See lesson 3 for linear algebra. <https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas>
One thing I did forget to mention is that you can play with this stuff in a "familiar to software developers" way in our VS Code playground at <https://vscode.dev/quantum/playground/> . This is a 'code first' approach familiar to software developers leveraging VS Code integration. The playground is pre-populated with a bunch of common quantum algorithms.
You can also install the extension in VS Code directly (<https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=quantum....>), you don't need to run it in the browser, but even in the browser it has a fully working language service, debugger, evaluator, quantum simulator, package management, etc. It's all written in Rust and compiled to either Wasm for the browser and VS Code extension, or native code for the Python package. (I'm thinking about doing a video on how we build it, as I expect it will interesting to this type of crowd. Let me know if so).
Disclaimer: I work in Azure Quantum on the product mentioned. AMA.
Hey there - professionally I'm a sr cloud engineer focused on Azure. I have an interest in quantum as a hobbyist and maybe a career focus in coming years/decades. Katas seems like a good place to learn things, but if you were to give a 5 year outlook, what specifically should I be looking into? Is there something as an administrator/architect of these quantum products that I should focus expertise on? Or something in the Azure/O365/etc ecosystem I should be looking at that leverages these technologies? If I was to become a consultant, what would be my focus as an Azure cloud engineer in relation to quantum technologies?
I'm unsure I am even asking the right questions. I'd appreciate any direction you can give me!
What do you hope to be doing in 5 years? Architecting quantum solutions? Reselling or consulting on cloud solutions? Building quantum applications?
I think the quantum space will have quite a bit of progress in 5 years, but I think most experts in the space (of which I'm NOT one) think we're still over 5 years out before there's broad adoption on running quantum programs with significant business value. (i.e, it'll still largely be researchers and bleeding edge adopters).
Linear algebra does seem to be a hard wall I've seen many smart software engineers hit. I'd honestly love for someone to study the phenomenon and figure out why this is.
Linear algebra is a relatively straight forward subject. I won't say easy because there are bits that aren't, and I struggled with it when I was first exposed to it in college. But in graduate school revisited it and didn't have a problem.
So, I really agree that it's about timing and curriculum. For one, it appears somewhat abstract until you really understand geometrically what's happening.
So, I surmise that most non-mathematicians don't have quite the mathematical maturity to absorb the standard pedagogy when they first approach the subject.
It seems wild to me since linear algebra is at the heart of basically all modern mathematics (alright maybe not all but so many things exhibit linear behavior, that it's still useful). Don't most CS majors require some math today? Linalg is like first year college, right?
Yes, but most people, like me, never gain even remotely intuitive understanding of it and quickly forget it after passing a few dreadful exams. Just like with most other math.
We are all small in every domain in which we are not an expert, which is approximately all of them. The "computer" domain has expanded wildly over the last 50 years to include so many specialties that even within it one cannot possibly acquire expertise in everything. And of course "computers" do not include (although they do impact!) the vast majority of domains.
If you want to go deeper into quantum computing, I can highly recommend Scott Aaronson's own book, "Quantum Computing since Democritus"[0]. Although I have a background in physics and math, I found his style lively and engaging with truly unique and compact recapitulations of things I already knew (two come to mind: his description of Cantor's diagnalization argument, and the assertion that QM is the natural consequence of "negative probabilities" being real. The later is a marvelous insight that I've personally gotten a lot of use out of).
It's also useful to understand the boundary of what quantum computing is. At the end of the day what we'll see are "QaaS" apis that give us the ability to, for example, factor large primes. You won't need to know Shor's algorithm or the implementation details, you'll just get your answer exponentially faster than the classical method. I would not expect desktop quantum computers, languages designed for them, or general user software designed to run on them. (Of course, eventually someone will make Doom run on one, but that's decades in the future.)
First of all, the formalism/practice gap is real: taking API calls and updating a database correctly has a mountain of formalism around it. And it is not easy to get right! Concurrent sequential processes and distributed systems theory and a bunch of topics have a huge formalism. It is also the case that many (most?) working software engineers have internalized much of that formalism: they “play by ear” rather than read sheet music, but what matters is if it sounds good.
Second, whether it’s quantum computing or frontier machine learning or any other formalism-heavy topic? It’s eminently possible to learn this stuff. There’s a certain lingering credentialism around “you need a PhD” or whatever, I call BS: this stuff is learnable.
Keep hacking, keep pushing yourself on topics you’re passionate about, but don’t consign yourself to some inferior caste. You’re just as likely as the next person to be the next self-taught superstar.
The theory of quantum computation is accessible with a good understanding of linear algebra. Anyone working in machine learning or computer graphics should feel encouraged by that, and take a look at the theory.
Quantum error correction is one of those “wow” moments like euler’s identity, it is worth making the effort to get there.
A few years ago I made peace with the fact that my space of ignorance is humongous and will only get exponentially bigger. Even in the domain of my work which is software engineering. It liberated me from the pressure or burden of having to learn or know everything and enabled me to focus on things that I truly like to pursue.
I’ve made a list of 4-5 things at which I want to be extremely good at in 10 years compared to where I’m today. Now I just spend time on those. I occasionally wander into something new just for the sake of diversion.
(Sadly, the Perl Module has to do classical calculations underneath to get the Quantum computing code/functions to execute, but it let you experiment with silly little QC toys - "Look, I factorised 15 in parallel!!!")
they buried the lede. google doesn't have 2 qubits to rub together 100%. 105 "qubits" make a "single" qubit after coalescing or whatever. I'm really annoyed because i've kinda followed this since the mid-90s and this is the first time i am hearing that "it'll probably take millions of physical qubits to crack 256 bit"
to me the whole endeavor smells like a bait and switch or something. I remember about 10 years ago canada or someone had at least a few hundred qubits if not close to 1000 of them, but these were physical qubits, and don't represent anything, really. Google's 105 finally makes a "fast enough" single qubit or at best half of a pair.
Silicon valley figured out decades ago that the trick to keep R&D dollars flowing is to balance on the verge of getting amazing results (AI/AGI; defeat cryptography) and not proving these efforts fruitless. The end result needs only be plausible and fantastic at the same time.
As hard it may seem to you to tackle that, it's harder to convince others like you that tackling it can be like child play. Not just QM/QC (which btw it's beeing successfully taught to highschoolers) but any "advanced" topic. I hope we'll be able to look back and laugh at how backwards education was "back in the day" and how dumb people were to think that some were "elite few", while the reality is that the "elite few" were the "lucky few" to not be deprived of learning to think either by having the right people around them or the right context to find it by themselves.
totally, education across the globe is currently severely suboptimized. At this point there's troves of research on what actually works when it comes to learning, yet the educational systems that implement these techniques are still incredibly scarce
Most education systems, particularly within the US, have very little interest in educating for critical thought and reasoning. They exist as both day care and labor exploitation pipelines.
When Corridor Digital was analyzing the really impressive time spaghetti effect in Loki season 2 they said "there are two kinds of CGI artists. The kind that use the buttons and the kind the program the buttons."
However, my sentiment is rather this: I wouldn't pass an assembly programming interview, but I know enough about it so that I know what I don't know. Same with embedded programming, fpgas, machine learning stuff, big data, networking, etc etc.
As for LLMs and quantum computing, I don't even know the basics, have no idea about the broader science behind it. Worst is that I don't feel like it interests me, I don't feel excited about it.
I guess if tomorrow I had to work with them, I could learn some "libraries that hide the complexity", but it leaves me with an empty feeling about these new technologies. Hence the existential question if I'm "too old for this" career path at all.
Nah. You don't have to feel excited about every single new bit of tech that comes along.
About 15 years ago I became interested in really advanced cryptography, because it was presented at a Bitcoin conference I went to. If you think AI is hard, that's kindergarten stuff compared to the maths behind zero knowledge proofs. And because nobody cared at that time outside of a handful of academics, there were no tutorials, blog posts or anything else to help. Just a giant mound of academic papers, often undated so it was hard to even figure out if what you were reading had been superseded already. But it seemed important, so I dived in and started reading papers.
At first, maybe only 5% of the words made sense. So I grabbed onto those 5%. I read a paper, put it down for a while, re-read it later and found I understood more. I talked to the researchers, emailed them, asked questions. I read the older papers that initiated the field, and that helped. It was a lot of work.
You know what? In the end, it was a waste of time. The knowledge ended up being useful primarily for explaining why I wasn't using those algorithms in my designs. A lot of the claims sounded useful but ended up not being so for complicated reasons, and anyway, I was mostly interested in what you could do with the tech rather than the tech itself. Turns out there's always a small number of people who are willing to dive in and make the magic happen in a nicely abstracted way for everyone else, for any kind of tech. QC is no different. There's, as far as I can tell, very little reason to learn it. If QC does ever "happen" it'll presumably 95% of the time be in the form of a cloud service where you upload problems that fit a quantum algorithm worked out by someone else, pay, and download the answer. Just like LLMs are - another topic where I was reading papers back in 2017 and that knowledge turned out to not be especially useful in regular life.
Learn the details of stuff if it naturally interests you. Ignore it if it doesn't. Being a specialist in an obscure domain can occasionally be like striking the jackpot, but it's rare and not something to feel bad about if you just don't want to.
It's also way harder to make money doing "not laughably childish" stuffs. The more accessible and human-connected it gets, the more likely people recognize and pays you. People criticize yes-men getting rewarded but you have to be nearly clinically insane to recognize value of a no-machine like a partial prototype quantum supercomputer.
> I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it
Why should you? I agree with your sentiment, super advanced quantum physics is probably out of reach for 99% of the population (I'm estimating here but I think it's reasonable to assume that's the average IQ of the physics PHDs who can actually understand this stuff to a deep level). You can probably make the effort to understand something about what's going on there, but it will be very superficial. Going advanced quantum physics takes a huge amount of effort and an incredible capacity for learning complex things.
And even the advanced physics guys don't and can't understand a bunch of very elementary things about reality, so it's not as if the feeling of not understanding stuff ever goes away.
To be fair you don't need to know advanced quantum physics to understand a lot of quantum computing, including Aaronson's discussion of this paper. It's pretty accessible with undergraduate-level linear algebra and computer science concepts.
We recently launched of our self-paced, mathematically rigorous course on quantum computing! This comprehensive introduction is designed to help you grasp foundational concepts like superposition and entanglement with mathematical clarity and depth.
> Being a "software engineer" consuming APIs and updating database rows ...
> Only an elite few get to touch these machines.
But lately many can run quite a lot of AI models at home. Doesn't require too crazy of a setup.
Why not build something software fun at home that doesn't involve a DB? Maybe using some free AI model?
I did experiment lately: automatically "screenshot" a browser and ask an AI to find the URL and ask if the URL and site looked like a phishing attempt or not. Fun stuff (and it works).
I tried installing one of these "photo gallery" in a Docker container (where you can put all your family/travel pics and let anyone on your LAN [or on the net] browse them). I saw some of these have "similarity" searches features. I also saw that SAM / SAM2 (Meta's Segment Anything Model) was plenty quick: some people are using these to analyze video frames in real-time. So I was thinking about sending all my family pictures through SAM2 (or a similar model: I saw some modified SAM2 to make it even faster) and then augmenting the "similarity search" by using the results of SAM2. For example finding all the pictures about "pool", etc.
And why limit myself to pictures? I could do family vids too: "Find all the vids where that item can be seen".
Possibilities at the moment seems endless: times are exciting if you ask me.
I haven't tried this yet myself, but have you tried plugging it into GPT or Claude or Perplexity and asking Qs?
I've made some progress on thongs this way, much faster than I would have the usual way.
Apply the usual precautions about hallucinations etc (and maybe do the "ask multiple AIs the same thing" thing). We don't yet have a perfect tutor in these machines, but on balance I've gained from talking to them about deep topics.
Some people say higher education is a privilege, but a few times during college while grinding out difficult classes it felt more like a huge burden.
Being part of a highly educated elite group like that has some huge benefits, but they have also shackled themselves to an insanely specialized and highly difficult niche. I can't imagine the stress they are under and the potential for despair when dedicating years to something with so much uncertainty.
Start with the handy precis that Mr A leaves at the top in yellow. You can drop that into conversation right now with some confidence! Mr A has quite some clout hereabouts let alone elsewhere, so that seems reasonable.
You can't know everything but knowing what you don't know and when to rely on someone else to know what you don't know and to confidently quote or use what they know that you don't know, is a skill too.
"Critical thinking", and I suspect you do know how to do that and whilst this blog post might be somewhat impenetrable it is still might be useful to you, even as just general knowledge. Use your skills to determine - for you and you alone - whether it is truth, false or somewhere in between.
For what it’s worth, Scott spent the last few years working for OpenAI because he wanted to do something much more applied than quantum information theory. As an applied scientist I’m aghast: he’s one of the few people who actually gets to “touch the firmament of the Universe,” why would you ever give that up for mere applied science (even science as interesting as whatever goes on inside OpenAI) :) But as a human being I understand it. The grass is always greener somewhere else, and doing tangible things is sometimes more fun.
TL;DR: whatever you’re doing, there’s probably someone who wishes they were doing it instead.
People feel like this about domains they don't know all the time. Don't allow your ignorance of an area to trick you into thinking you can't learn that area. It's just new to you!
Source: teaching beginners piano for years. Of course sheet music looks like gobbledygook, until you've spent a bit of time learning the basic rules!
To be fair, probably everyone who "touches these things" had extensive graduate work on the topic, or put in a lot of long years toiling away at far less exciting and remunerative grunt work. They weren't just super bright CS undergrads who got entry level jobs you couldn't.
I think the jargon makes it seem scarier/less approachable than it is. There's tons of jargon in every new branch of anything interesting that you first notice, but it's not as impenetrable as it appears (at least for a high level understanding imo).
I had exactly the same thought. I read it after struggling for hours, making notes, etc, with a very hard (to me) part of my code and it made it seem pretty trivial.
if it makes you feel any better, it is almost impossible to do anything practically useful at all with quantum computation at the moment. this is a field for researchers, people who are okay with not seeing the fruits of their work materialize for decades, if ever. by not understanding it, you're not missing anything more than what you're missing by not understanding e.g. string theory.
Anything that someone else does that you don't understand or can't do always sounds super important, impressive, and enviable. Usually. But you have to realize that he spends his life doing and thinking about this. And will stipulate he's gifted in this area. I've never heard of him but managed to download his CV.
I will also note that sometimes when I read HN links and think one thing then read the comments and people know enough to take issue with what is being said and even call it out.
