This is actually one of the most sober, balanced articles about Willow that I've seen so far. No breathless hype, no vitriolic hate. Nice job, PC Gamer. www.pcgamer.com/hardware/goo... - ThreadSky

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physicssteve.bsky.social • 81 days ago

This is actually one of the most sober, balanced articles about Willow that I've seen so far. No breathless hype, no vitriolic hate. Nice job, PC Gamer.

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/googles-willow-chip-is-a-big-leap-towards-usable-quantum-computing-but-its-claim-of-beating-a-classical-computer-by-a-septillion-years-is-meaningless/

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dangaristo.bsky.social•80 days ago

The tone is good, but as journalism goes, it's... fine. This is aggregation: It doesn't quote anyone and there's no reporting as such. (There's a reason it's coming out a day later.)

dangaristo.bsky.social•80 days ago

It gets the larger details correct (importance of QEC over the RCS result for future applications) but it mixes up small things (confuses coherence time with the ~hourly correlated error events). Sort of a mixed bag.

dangaristo.bsky.social•80 days ago

I would also say that the "10 septillion years" claim isn't meaningless, but misleading. Demonstrating quantum computational advantage via RCS has been an important benchmark, in lieu of doing actually useful calculations. One way to ameliorate confusion is to include a caveat graf, e.g.

physicssteve.bsky.social•80 days ago

Oh completely agree on the details and that it reiterates reporting from other sources. I just read a lot of things this morning that were either PR puff pieces or ultra-cynical tweets and it was nice to see an earnest attempt at explaining the work to a broad audience that's not the usual target.

dangaristo.bsky.social•80 days ago

Fair! And yes, it helps a lot to be a full-time physics journalist to do this kind of reporting, and I don't envy mainstream journos when they're asked to cover these kinds of stories.

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