@glyph Did you quote post something?
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@miss_rodent the expert I would go to ask about that is @xgranade and I am pretty confident that she would not be bullish on this particular likelihood any time soon
@glyph Fair, was just a suggestion for a potential 'next thing' that might actually work, though last I looked into it (admittedly been a few years) it did... not seem particularly hopeful as a 'next big thing', at least not anytime soon.
As far as I know it still has quite a few limitations and caveats to what it's useful for, and of course the major limitation of all computers, being restricted to, y'know, only things which can be computed or achieved by computation in the first place. -
@glyph Fair, was just a suggestion for a potential 'next thing' that might actually work, though last I looked into it (admittedly been a few years) it did... not seem particularly hopeful as a 'next big thing', at least not anytime soon.
As far as I know it still has quite a few limitations and caveats to what it's useful for, and of course the major limitation of all computers, being restricted to, y'know, only things which can be computed or achieved by computation in the first place.@miss_rodent I'm pretty sure it will be useful, but probably in some pretty limited verticals. It's definitely not The Way Computers Will Work and the things that it will unlock seem like pretty quiet infrastructural improvements and not significant population-wide stuff. Per my existing thesis I do think it's almost certain that it will, at some point, be A Thing, but it will not be Big
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@miss_rodent the expert I would go to ask about that is @xgranade and I am pretty confident that she would not be bullish on this particular likelihood any time soon
@glyph @miss_rodent Yeah, no, I'm not particularly bullish. There's a couple parts to why not... while I'm quite convinced that building a quantum computer is probably possible, and we have some good mathematical evidence to back that up, it's been five years away since 1997. I'm suspicious of any particular claimed timelines, as the problems left to be solved are huge.
The other part, will quantum computers create a new class of easy next big things once built, that's more complex still.
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@glyph I've aspired to "lunch-scale projects" for several years now. Intentionally meaningless—semantic choice in opposition to the differently meaningless "Web scale"—but generally:
- not for crowds (used by one person at a time, maybe a small group)
- bite-sized projects with a smaller scope
- the kind of work where I could fix the average bug before lunchtime
These ideals *have* made it hard to be persuasive in dev job interviews, alas.
All this to say I agree with the thoughts and CTA.
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@glyph @miss_rodent Yeah, no, I'm not particularly bullish. There's a couple parts to why not... while I'm quite convinced that building a quantum computer is probably possible, and we have some good mathematical evidence to back that up, it's been five years away since 1997. I'm suspicious of any particular claimed timelines, as the problems left to be solved are huge.
The other part, will quantum computers create a new class of easy next big things once built, that's more complex still.
@glyph @miss_rodent The short version there is that we currently haven't found any *practical* problems for which quantum computers are *provably* better than classical computers by a large enough margin to justify using a quantum computer.
We've found impractical problems (she said handwavingly af), and practical problems like cryptanalysis where we have good evidence that quantum computers are better, but no hard proof.
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@glyph @miss_rodent Yeah, no, I'm not particularly bullish. There's a couple parts to why not... while I'm quite convinced that building a quantum computer is probably possible, and we have some good mathematical evidence to back that up, it's been five years away since 1997. I'm suspicious of any particular claimed timelines, as the problems left to be solved are huge.
The other part, will quantum computers create a new class of easy next big things once built, that's more complex still.
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@glyph @miss_rodent The short version there is that we currently haven't found any *practical* problems for which quantum computers are *provably* better than classical computers by a large enough margin to justify using a quantum computer.
We've found impractical problems (she said handwavingly af), and practical problems like cryptanalysis where we have good evidence that quantum computers are better, but no hard proof.
@glyph @miss_rodent Part of that is that it's hard to come up with new algorithms when you don't have the hardware to run and test them on, leading to a chicken and egg kind of situation. Part of it, though, is that what quantum algorithms — not programming quantum computers, but coming up with genuinely new algorithms for them — tend to require a peculiar kind of cleverness and trickery that slows down the search for new problems which might admit a quantum advantage.
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@glyph I am very, very tired of Next Big Things anyway.
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@miss_rodent @glyph I'd even go beyond theoretically possible, as someone who did a lot of quantum computing work. I think the set of things that would have to be true for quantum computers to be fundamentally impossible or even inherently impractical would be pretty surprising.
At the same time, I don't have any particular evidence that we're especially close, nor that there's any easy wins in terms of Next Big Things once one is built.
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@miss_rodent @glyph I'd even go beyond theoretically possible, as someone who did a lot of quantum computing work. I think the set of things that would have to be true for quantum computers to be fundamentally impossible or even inherently impractical would be pretty surprising.
At the same time, I don't have any particular evidence that we're especially close, nor that there's any easy wins in terms of Next Big Things once one is built.
@miss_rodent @glyph Chemistry is about as close as we have to a field where quantum computers are probably going to be commercially useful, which could unlock some several dozen new exciting materials science things, but that's pretty far from (as to @glyph's point) what VCs seem to expect, where every company will need to buy up QC time. It might even be a bigger impact in the long run, but it sure as hell isn't VC's Next Big Thing.
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@miss_rodent @glyph Chemistry is about as close as we have to a field where quantum computers are probably going to be commercially useful, which could unlock some several dozen new exciting materials science things, but that's pretty far from (as to @glyph's point) what VCs seem to expect, where every company will need to buy up QC time. It might even be a bigger impact in the long run, but it sure as hell isn't VC's Next Big Thing.
@miss_rodent @glyph (Sorry... I tend to infodump on demand about quantum computing.)
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@miss_rodent @glyph (Sorry... I tend to infodump on demand about quantum computing.)
@xgranade @glyph I tend to infodump too, so, very much no need to apologize/I appreciate the input, it's a field I have looked into a little bit but not very deeply or very recently, just kinda looked into it as something tangential to the residual math/physicist nerdery that lingered after I dropped out of Uni.
And yeah, it seems unlikely to be a thing corporate and finance types would be that interested in, or if it will be does not seem like it will be anytime soon.
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@miss_rodent @glyph (Sorry... I tend to infodump on demand about quantum computing.)
@miss_rodent @glyph I guess the last thing I should add is that there's a lot of problems where we know a priori that there *isn't* a quantum advantage — if someone spends most of their CPU time now on one of those problems, then they're not likely to be a huge QC customer, making it harder for VCs to sell quantum computing as the Next Big Thing.
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@xgranade @glyph I tend to infodump too, so, very much no need to apologize/I appreciate the input, it's a field I have looked into a little bit but not very deeply or very recently, just kinda looked into it as something tangential to the residual math/physicist nerdery that lingered after I dropped out of Uni.
And yeah, it seems unlikely to be a thing corporate and finance types would be that interested in, or if it will be does not seem like it will be anytime soon.
@miss_rodent @glyph I mean, there have been at least two or three big waves where corporate and finance types were very *very* interested in quantum computing. I think, and again to @glyph's point, there's a large degree to which that can be explained by zero or negative interest rates.
Each time, there's a concrete event that sets off the hype wave, and it dies down when people realize that QC is *always* five years away.
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@bitprophet you're the first one to catch that (I guarantee it hurt more to write than it does to read :))
@glyph the rest of the post is good too btw!
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@miss_rodent @glyph I mean, there have been at least two or three big waves where corporate and finance types were very *very* interested in quantum computing. I think, and again to @glyph's point, there's a large degree to which that can be explained by zero or negative interest rates.
Each time, there's a concrete event that sets off the hype wave, and it dies down when people realize that QC is *always* five years away.
@miss_rodent @glyph Like, one time wound up being a coincidence between the timing of a complicated bit of tax... er... well, not *fraud* exactly, as it was all perfectly legal, so I'll call it tax shenanigans... around the F-35 project and the Volkwagen emissions fraud that indirectly created a gigantic hype wave. That was weird.
Another time, it was the failure of an NLP-based "AI" product that created a hype wave.
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@miss_rodent @glyph Like, one time wound up being a coincidence between the timing of a complicated bit of tax... er... well, not *fraud* exactly, as it was all perfectly legal, so I'll call it tax shenanigans... around the F-35 project and the Volkwagen emissions fraud that indirectly created a gigantic hype wave. That was weird.
Another time, it was the failure of an NLP-based "AI" product that created a hype wave.
@miss_rodent @glyph I'm being intentionally vague here in public, but I promise those are both fully accurate descriptions even if a bit cryptic.
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@miss_rodent @glyph I'm being intentionally vague here in public, but I promise those are both fully accurate descriptions even if a bit cryptic.
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@miss_rodent @glyph Yeah, no, fair. It's a weird one in that I think there's a lot more there there to QC than AI, by a long shot, but also it's not the line-go-up kind of thing VCs seem to hope it will be, and definitely not on the timescales they seem to think that it will happen on.
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@ireneista @cthos @xgranade this isn't exactly a "cheerful" thought, but it's also not horribly grim: I think we already saw it break down in 2020, and we saw both how brittle it is (nobody had enough slack in their supply chain to actually weather the disruption without exposing catastrophic delays to customers) but also its resilience (customers were super mad, alternate pathways DID come online in less than a year)
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Early 2026 is a very weird time to be an open source maintainer.
On the one hand, the burden of codebase maintenance has dropped dramatically. Small teams with long todo lists now have the ability to accomplish more than ever before. On the other hand, the dynamics of the software industry are rapidly changing, and some of the foundations open source projects built upon are looking increasingly shaky.
Any open source project that achieves a degree of success will at some point face the reality of a competing company taking your open source code and using it to compete with you.
Substack has – at various points – wholesale copied and pasted significant chunks of Ghost's source code into its own product.
Open source maintainers have been fighting this sort of thing for a while with increasingly restrictive licenses, or keeping certain parts of the development stack private, like the test suite.
"If you want to use our code, you have to follow our rules."
But the dictating of the rules has largely been built upon a premise that code is intrinsically valuable because it's a scarce resource. Difficult to maintain. Expensive to write.
AI is now rapidly overturning that premise, as evidenced by Cloudflare this week, who took a competitor's open source codebase and cloned it in the space of a few days into an entirely new product:
How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one weekOne engineer used AI to rebuild Next.js on Vite in a week. vinext builds up to 4x faster, produces 57% smaller bundles, and deploys to Cloudflare Workers with a single command.
The Cloudflare BlogSteve Faulkner
If anyone can point Claude at an open source codebase and have it rewritten from scratch, without actually using any of the original code, what does that mean for software licenses? More specifically: Do software licenses mean anything?
Some will debate whether this is even a thing – with a lot of hand waving about "vibecoding slop" – but the trajectory is clear to see.
In December, Simon Willison wrote about porting an HTML parsing library from Python to JavaScript, raising these legal/ethical concerns as a thought exercise. Two months later, we have a publicly traded company shamelessly cloning the entire product of a competitor purely for the sake of strategically undermining them.
In some ways this feels like the start of software's Studio Ghibli moment.
But it would be a mistake, I think, to imagine that only open source software will be susceptible to being cloned.
I don't imagine it will be long before any sufficiently successful proprietary product with a public-facing interface can be reverse-engineered and rebuilt by a motivated competitor with access to frontier models. What took Cloudflare a week with an open source codebase will likely soon take a week to do with a closed one.
LLMs, it turns out, are already pretty good at reverse engineering.
the z80 technique reveals the source code for Atlassian’s ‘rovo’ AI assistantEver wondered what happens if you take the technique at “Can a LLM convert C, to ASM to specs and then to a working Z/80 Speccy tape? Yes.” and run it against the Atasslian Command Line (ACLI) interface? Strap yourself in, as the Z80 is amongst one of the
Geoffrey HuntleyGeoffrey Huntley
Which is an interesting wrinkle.
What happens when we get to a point where closed products can just as easily be cloned and released as open source?
When Stallman launched the free software movement in 1983, it was a reaction to a world where software was closed, proprietary, and wielded as an instrument of control.
Open source was built upon the idea that anyone should be able to study, modify, replicate and share software. Free from the grasp of corporations and copyrights to prevent it.
In a strange way, I'm beginning to wonder if AI might end up fulfilling that vision more completely than open source ever did.
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Lime green
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@eniko after the computer rapture i'm gonna befriend a bear and teach it how to juggle
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Ad aprile in #Ungheria si vota. L'abuso del veto da parte di Orbán non deve essere tollerato - Euractiv Italia https://euractiv.it/section/mondo/opinion/labuso-del-veto-da-parte-di-orban-non-deve-essere-tollerato/
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2 anni https://mastodon.uno/@fucinafibonacci/112644171933445424 buttati nel cesso. Complimenti ai cittadini ma soprattutto alle cittadine (sono maggioranza) che hanno eletto questi politici. Battaglia "My Voice My Choice" su #aborto termina con risposta Commissione #EU https://www.eunews.it/2026/02/26/la-battaglia-di-my-voice-my-choice-per-un-aborto-sicuro-termina-con-il-no-della-commissione-europea/
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L’Associazione per i popoli minacciati presenta il film
Dalai Lama – La saggezza della felicità
Wisdom of HappinessUn film di Philip Delaquis, Barbara Miller, Manuel Bauer / USA,
Svizzera, 2024, 90′ / Con: Tenzin Gyatso; Prodotto da Richard GereMartedì 3 marzo 2026, ore 20, Filmclub Bolzano
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@keremgoart thank you kindly
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@bbfnart thank you! ^^
