pau_

I think we're a ways off from bubble territory, but I suppose it could happen. It is more like we have a modern day Bell Labs within Google and MS and several national laboratories focused on it. I do think AI, quantum computing, and fusion will all be world-changing in my lifetime, but who knows about what companies (if any!) will benefit, and what the timeline will be. [edit: with the caveat that there is a credible idea that scale quantum computing to a useful scale is impossible due to correlated errors—there is still some scientific uncertainty for QC] AI is already impacting my day-to-day in positive and negative ways. On the positive front, it is a great tool for thinking—you can't 100% trust its outputs but you can use it for brainstorming, high quality voice transcription, translation, summarization, and basic factual recall (sometimes astonishing at pattern matching) and research organization. On the negative front, I have started to see places where poor AI literacy and a hasty implementation of AI in business processes has caused people to believe things that aren't true or submit work to me that is incorrect, both in my personal and professional life. I am also seeing misinformation posts and fraudulent deepfake Musk scam ads on social media.

re. numerical algorithms, if we talk about prime factorization this is where we get a huge disconnect. you basically cannot do prime factorization over any reasonably useful time horizon for breaking RSA (and you can just just pick bigger numbers as compute improves and it will continue to take a bazillion years of compute), but shor's algorithm runtime once we can implement it at this scale will operate on human-scale (hours or days for RSA with current key sizes probably? also out of my depth here) timeframes and scale with key size at a rate that grows manageably vs impossibly (^n) (the hardware still isn't there yet in terms of gates and qubits, but google's result shows promise that it is possible). A good intuition to have about probabilistic computation is that it is trivial to confirm a result once you have a possible answer: you can use a classical compute step to check the results once you have them. Getting the answer is hard/impossible with classical computation, but once you have an answer, checking its validity is easy. (edit: this is not always true. I was just reading more about the willow result and it basically can't be confirmed by a classical computer at the scale they ran it; however, for things like factorization, you can just multiply the numbers together to check, trivially) Agree interesting times

I have done this! I watched this lecture several years ago and built a toy example that I ran on IBM's quantum computer. If you have a decent math or CS background I think it is a very accessible intro:

Right we won't get a speed-up on classical computation (and really companies and state actors can scale classical computation really well with money), but the few problems they can theoretically solve are really important, and Google's announcement sounds like a breakthrough in scaling up the technology. Major state actors have been recording decades? of encrypted internet traffic with the hope that eventually they will be able to retroactively decrypt them either through vulnerabilities in the implementations or eventually through the application of quantum computers, using Shor's algorithm to break encryption that relies on prime number factorization(i.e. even if it is 10 years away it is still relevant if we think it can happen) Current and future communications will be protected by a combination of post-quantum cryptography and eventually things like quantum key distribution. Also applications to materials science and drug development via simulation of physical systems, but I know less about this.

20 years from now BTC security will be long since broken by quantum computing. Are you not similarly worried about your bank account or brokerage account? Quantum computing is a threat to encryption because currently many forms of encryption rely on the fact that it's fast for a computer to multiple two very large numbers together but not fast to factor large numbers. There is an algorithm that runs on quantum computers called Shor's algorithm for factoring numbers much faster. There's a whole lot of work (Post-quantum cryptography) on finding and implementing encryption that doesn't rely on factoring and therefore isn't vulnerable to fast factoring by quantum computers. Google is already shipping and running post-quantum encryption in Chrome for a percentage of requests. https://security.googleblog.com/2016/07/experimenting-with-post-quantum.html As for bitcoin I imagine there are plans to upgrade to prevent quantum computing attacks (via a fork maybe?), but I don't really follow bitcoin closely so I don't know what the proposals are.

My guess is that this cannot be done non-destructively with the IronKey drive or he would have done this already. I personally wouldn't start desoldering connections on an SSD that contains the private key to a fortune. So the best bet is to wait for someone to discover a firmware vulnerability in the device that lets him bypass the attempt counter, or to have an epiphany. This story reminds me of a story in WIRED where a guy tries everything to recover 7.4 bitcoin locked on a purpose-made hardware wallet with an escalating pin-entry delay function (practically the same as a limit). https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-losing-dollar30000-in-bitcoin/

Politics please so I don't have to see it. Signed, an arrogant, entitled, pompous windbag!

Thanks Uccmal. I agree on fostering interest. My friend is starting from a point where I was basically explaining what public companies were and how buying shares makes one a part owner of the company and what that entails and why you might want to do it. So highly technical books are probably out (eventually he will have to learn financial statements, but right now, he just knows broad strokes). Peter Lynch sounds perfect. I haven't read his work but remember people talking about that premise when I was younger, and it mirrors how I got into it (writing to Apple because I loved the Mac my dad brought home from work and heard they had this thing called stock).

Thanks for the ideas. I've read Where are the Customers Yachts and agree it's an important one. Hadn't thought about it being a first one but that makes sense. I ordered the other suggestions, which I haven't read yet.

I have a friend who is a college student that I started talking to about stocks, and he wants to learn more and asked for a recommendation. I started by being fascinated with Apple as a kid and writing them (Scully's secretary wrote me back and sent a box full of marketing materials and annual reports!). Only later did I learn about Buffett and value investing. The first book I read on the topic was Buffettology, which I now realize has a lot of flaws. But it introduced me to the basic framework in a simple way. I know the orthodox answer might be The Intelligent Investor, but I think that's kind of a slog (especially if you're starting from 0), and it's easy to miss what's important (which is why I think Buffett just highlights two chapters). What book would you give to a new investor? Also open to suggestions on personal finance books—I want to make sure he has the big picture in mind as he embarks on this. Apologies if this has been beaten to death.

Just found this interview with Li Lu by the same journalist who interviewed him and Charlie in Omaha. He talks about the philosophy of Berkshire & long term investing, mentions it takes him years to learn an industry because he's "not too smart" (but dogged), and around 16 minutes in talks about China and the "visible hand" (govt/regulation) and the "invisible hand" as it relates to China as a developing country.

Bram Cohen (BitTorrent creator) announces a new cryptocurrency with aim to reduce power consumption required for a secure blockchain/currency TechCrunch: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly bitcoin competitor Chia Chia site w/ whitepaper and talk

It seems like a lot of the issues in Ethereum stem from giving developers a full (Turing complete) programming language to design contracts, instead of something more confined and straightforward. Making correct software is hard. You're giving people the equivalent of a chainsaw. Many of whom I suspect are amateurs who don't yet know CS and computer engineering fundamentals. These aren't new problems; you can read decades of literature about testing software, proving software, dealing safely with transactions, etc. etc. The new thing is that it is totally democratized. I learned programming making some small-scale web apps. Now we have people learning by making things that can transact massive amounts of value on a blockchain. Hopefully this will improve as higher-level tooling comes along (maybe a strongly typed language that compiles to solidity? property based testing?) and people with better fundamentals enter the field and incumbents learn lessons.

Buffett's NYT: Berkshire Hathaway Will Not Increase Its Oncor Offer "We're committed to being an exceptional long-term partner in Texas and our simple, straightforward deal is good for Oncor, its customers and the state."

Good point. I'm buying 3- & 6- month maturity CDs on Schwab for my cash position because they're available in better (smaller) increments for me. 1.35% recently.