Quantum computing gets a reality check

Changelog

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What up, nerds? I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week for Monday, February 19th 2024

Our much-anticipated Ship It! reboot has launched its first episode and early reviews are positive, to say the least:

“Very good start on ShipIt 2.0 :)” posted Lars. Thomas writes: “Justin and Autumn are a fantastic pair” and Konrad says: “Quite cool first episode and happy to see ship it continue”

Give it a listen for yourself at shipit.show. Ok, let’s get into the news.

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In a piece titled, “Quantum Computing’s Hard, Cold Reality Check”, IEEE Spectrum lays out the bear case for near-term quantum computing applications, some of which has been hype-driven. Surprised?

Some of the more ambitious timelines proposed by quantum computing companies have suggested these machines could be impacting real-world problems in just a handful of years. But there’s growing pushback against what many see as unrealistic expectations for the technology.

The article also quotes folks are more optimistic about it. I guess we can add QC to the list (alongside cryptocurrency, autonomous vehicles, generative AI) of computing endeavors with smart people on either side debating their validity, timeliness & long-term effects on the human race. Me? I’m not holding my breath or my qubits.

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In a post to the nginx mailing list, Maxim Dounin announced a fork of the massively popular web server that lives at freenginx.org. Maxim is one of the earliest (and still most active) Nginx contributors who worked for F5 after they acquired Nginx Inc. in 2019. There’s a lot of history here, which Ars Technica covers quite well (link in the newsletter). Here’s what Maxim says about the fork:

Unfortunately, some new non-technical management at F5 recently decided that they know better how to run open source projects. In particular, they decided to interfere with security policy nginx uses for years, ignoring both the policy and developers’ position…

As such, starting from today, I will no longer participate in nginx development as run by F5. Instead, I’m starting an alternative project, which is going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities.

“Free” in this case for Maxim isn’t “free as in libre” neither is it “free as in beer”. It is “free as in free from arbitrary corporate actions”

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Nadia Eghbal Asparouhova goes deep on AI & the “effective accelerationism” movement, which is abbreivated e/acc and pronounced “ee-ack”, which I learned from Nadia’s piece, that also says:

Artificial intelligence is a rare domain where technologists themselves are being proactively cautious about their own power before any demonstrable harm has been done. The moral panic now comes from within — a stark deviation from how technological revolutions historically influence society…

I’ve been reading Nadia’s writing for a long time, and I find it to be deep, easily consumed & thought-provoking, regardless of her subject. Here’s another quote, which will hopefully intrigue you enough to read it for yourself:

“It was the tech backlash of the 2010s that tore a hole through tech’s image as it previously saw itself: a burgeoning industry composed of startups and their financiers, whose members would grind away writing code on their MacBooks and attending Y Combinator’s demo days, whose hardest decision every year was whether to go to Burning Man. Though a founder’s life was filled with highs and lows, the cycle of tech seemed stable and predictable. Most importantly, tech was beloved by the outside world, who gleefully consumed stories of young founders and their mythical overnight successes. What went wrong?”

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Angie Byron (long-time member of the Drupal community & lovely person who we’ve had the pleasure of knowing a little bit) writes up some advice on how to get started in open source. Here’s her high-level bullet points. You can click-through for the details:

• Start with your interests
• Find a welcoming project
• Community, before code
• Start with the Docs

On that last point, Angie says this which is so true somebody should put it on a billboard or a t-shirt or something:

“You might not know it yet, but as a newcomer to an open source project, you have this AMAZING superpower: you are often-times the only one in that whole project capable of reading the documentation through new eyes. Because I can guarantee, the people who wrote that documentation are not new.”

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Miroslav Nikolov knows the cost of a refactoring gone wrong, so he took some time to lay out the risks and how you can effectively address them and gives some solid advice on whether or not you should refactor. Here’s 4 pieces of advice, with caveats:

1. Refactor if things are getting too complicated, but, stop if you can’t prove it works.
2. Accompany new features with refactoring for areas you foresee to be subject to a change, but copy-pasting is ok until patterns arise.
3. Be proactive in finding new ways to ensure refactoring predictability, but be conservative about the assumption QA will find all the bugs.
4. Move business logic out of busy components, but be brave enough to keep the legacy code intact if the only argument is “this code looks wrong”.

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That’s the news for now! Have a great week, tell your friends about Changelog News if you dig it & I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

Changelog

Our transcripts are open source on GitHub. Improvements are welcome. 💚