Let us look back on 2023 and look forward to 2024!
From a personal perspective, we added another human member to our family, which has been great fun. On the blogging side, we’re clocking in at ~800 subscribers, which continues to surprise me, but I’ll take it. Professionally, QC is still looking mostly healthy, despite some turbulence.
The Blog
I started 2023 with a 299 subscribers. This number rose linearly until around July, at which lots of people subscribed until about mid-September, at which point things leveled off. Currently there are 8011 people subscribed to my occasional rantings. My ‘goal’ in 2024 is to break 1000.
I continue to be grateful for your readership, even if my output is… ah.. diminished.
If you remember last year’s post, I aspired to post a lot more. This, categorically, was a failure. It turns out I didn’t have that much smart stuff to say about the state of the field, and most of my cognition was spent on my day job and figuring out how to manage a toddler.
While I couldn’t write about the technical aspects of my job2, writing from the perspective of a team lead is relatively easy, and perhaps even useful for some people. I still think it is cool and good to write technically focused posts, so I will endeavor to finish more of my drafts. My only technical post this year was basically a catalog of my (slightly embarrassing) failure to finish a project.
I figure that, much like everything else in the world, getting more reps (drafts) in will lead to more posts overall, even if the drafts:posts ratio explodes. Who knows, some of the posts might even be good.
QC Prediction Markets
My favorite post (and your favorite post) this year was about prediction markets!
Let’s check in on those.
It… was not an amazing year for QC SPACs, but D-Wave and Rigetti managed to, more or less, pull their asses out of the fire. These companies continue to Do Things, but it’s not clear why. For example, Rigetti is now offering Novera, a self-contained sample space with a 9 qubit processor (+ 5 stand-alone processors) for the colossal sum of $900,000. I honestly have no idea who would want to buy this for more than the price of a dilution refrigerator when they could get more and better qubits on the IBMQ systems, for way less money and heartache. After all, anyone who buys Novera also has to install it, wire it up, and then perform the initial characterization and calibration3.
Will D-Wave and Rigetti survive another year? I dunno, someone should make a prediction market!
‘The Market’ is still optimistic about 99.9% 2Q gate fidelity from a corporate effort. This year we saw some pretty amazing results from neutral atoms, so I could see this happening with SC qubits, trapped ions, or neutral atoms. Exciting!
I also accidentally created the most popular market on Manifold (for about a month or so) after the LK99 preprint was leaked. This was great fun, but also exhausting. As you can see, most people don’t expect this result to replicate based on experiments that were written up in the days and weeks following the first pre-prints. I still have some reservations here, specifically with respect to the thin film results, but I think the bulk definitely is not a superconductor. It was not a great year for high temperature superconductivity in general, as the other major HTS result was eventually pulled due to funny business (obvious scientific misconduct and fraud). Better luck in 2024.
Quantum Observer 2024
Last time I made a prediction about what I was going to blog during the year, I was really, really wrong. Nonetheless, you gotta set goals. Get those reps in, etc. I continue to want to blog more intentionally about technical stuff. I also want to work through at least one textbook this year. Perhaps some of the more interesting exercises will become decent blog-fodder. This will require some more focus and planning than I usually care to devote to hobbies, especially in winter. My initial strategy is going to be to fix my SAD problem (MOAR LUMENS) and to be less tired.
Yes, the solution to all of my problems will be sunlight and exercise4.
Personal Stuff
Ignore this if you don’t care about books I’ve read or whatever.
Last year, I finished 17 books and abandoned 4-6. This year I finished 42 and abandoned 11. Next year I am hoping to abandon many more that I find boring.
Torchship Trilogy by Karl Gallagher
Space hackers Trilogy by Steven Wire
Steerswoman books 1-3 by Rosemary Kirstein
Imperial Science by Bruce J. Hunt
Delta V + critical mass by Daniel Suarez
Liftoff! by Eric Berger (audio)
When the Heavens went on Sale by Ashlee Vance (audio)
Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan
Accelerando by Charles Stross
Outlive by Peter Attia
Hacking Gallileo by Fenton Wood
Aristillus Duology by Travis J. Corcoran
Again, Hazardous Imaginings by various
Codex Babylon by Robery Kroese
The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven
The Measure of Reality by Alfred W. Crosby
Man of War books 1-3 by H. Paul Honsinger
Cloud Castles by Dave Freer
Apollo by Murray and Cox (audio)
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia
Nothing Like it in the World: The Story of the Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad by Stephen Ambrose (audio)
Small Worlds by Misha Burnett
Conrad Stargard trilogy by Leo Frankowski
You Can Be a Stock Market Genius by Joel Greenblatt
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming
Chaplain’s War by Brad Torgerson
Shoot the Devil 2 by various
Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen
O Jerusalem! by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (audio)
Books 2023- Non-Fiction
Early in the year, I was on a real space kick and the best of those books was easily Apollo: Race to the Moon. While the contemporary looks at the modern space-flight startups (Liftoff! and When the Heavens Went on Sale) were legitimately fascinating and engaging in their own right, they suffered from a strange effect I have termed ‘Journalist History’ where seemingly important details are elided in a very obvious way. Or, at times, two adjacent sentences might be totally contradictory. I don’t have good examples of this from the aforementioned books5, but I noticed it a lot in O Jerusalem!.
I also really liked Peter' Attia’s first book, Outlive: The Art and Science of Longevity. Despite the title, this book is NOT about living forever, it’s about living more healthily, longer. That is to say, doing everything possible to stay healthy, strong, and active until well into your 90s. This book gave me a new perspective on what could and should be possible when I’m 90, and I realized that if I want to be able to do simple things like climb stairs and lift up my future grandbabies for fun and hugs, I need to be taking strength and cardio training very seriously. And, really, this book gave me a new appreciation6 for the benefits of cardio.
One of the more striking charts from the book:
I would highly recommend Outlive.
Later on, I read The Measure of Reality, which was a fascinating survey of the evolution of human thought from pre- to post- enlightenment Europe. Highly recommend this is a way to really internalize how different the past was. I plan on going back through this at some point to mine the references for intriguing titles.
In the same vein, Nothing Like it in the World: The Story of the Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad was a fascinating look at pre- and post- railroad America. Travel from NYC to SF went from an ordeal lasting at least 6 weeks and thousands of dollars, to a weeklong adventure costing about $1000. This was one of the last great American projects started and finished almost purely by muscle power (man or beast). It is also a sordid tale of intrigue, corruption, courage, cleverness, perseverance, and so on.
I finished up the non-fiction year with You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, which while titled provocatively, can basically be summed up as ‘retail investors should seek asymmetric advantages’ and describes a few such circumstances that might be interesting. I got this rec from the Jeremy Giffon episode of the Invest Like the Best podcast. That episode is also pretty interesting and worth listening to, if you like this kind of stuff.
I enjoyed, but did not particularly benefit from the reprint of Richard Hamming’s The Art of Doing Science and Engineering. I think this could be a nice gift for the smart undergraduate in your life, or just a nice bookshelf filler.
Because of the Hamas attacks of Oct 7 and the ensuing shitstorm of Terrible Takes all of the internet, I was motivated to learn more about the early days of the modern Israeli state. To that end, O Jerusalem! is a very broad look at the events of 1947-1948 that culminated with the birth of Israel. It suffers from ‘Journalist History’ but is a very nice survey of the time in general. I think it is beneficial for people (like me) who knew nothing of the history of the time and place. Now that I have much more background info, I can read more targeted histories to fill in various gaps.
Best of 2023- Fiction
Much of the fiction I read this year was.. not very good and much was good, but was a re-read because I didn’t have anything new on my list. Of the books that were new to me, my favorite by far was the Delta V Duology by Daniel Suarez. Just the right amount of hard SF and optimism, with tons of gripping scenes. A real page turner. Would recommend!
I laughed out loud a few times reading Cloud Castles, which is a much sillier book that’s basically set in Space Australia. It’s a fun, light-hearted romp about a naive aristocrat who finds himself alone in The Big City.
Continuing in the more libertarian vein, I also enjoyed the Torchship and Space Hackers trilogies, as well as Devon Eriksen’s debut novel Theft of Fire.
If can’t stomach the libertarian politics of the previous set, you should try the Steerswoman books. I love SF/F works that drop readers in media res and let us try to figure out what is going on before it is explained later in the text (if ever!) and The Steerswoman delivers. Books 1 and 2 were great, book 3 hard horrible pacing and I was not interesting in continuing to book 4. You should also try Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire if intrigue, Space Byzantium, and empire sound like a good time to you. I found the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace to be tiresome and boring, but if you like AMCE, you’ll probably like ADCP.
Lastly, Small Worlds is a charming little anthology from Misha Burnett.
The End of 2023
That’s it! Thanks for reading, thanks for smashing that Like button (you know who you are), and thanks for subscribing.
See you next year!
!!!
Unfortunate, because the work is really interesting. So I’m stuck choosing technical topics that don’t conflict with what I do for a living. That makes it extraordinarily hard to write a technical post in any reasonable amount of time.
If you have the expertise to do this on site, you probably have your own 9Q processor. Or you could if you wanted it.
This is the solution to your problems, too.
I didn’t realize what it was until reading O Jerusalem! late in the year, but as I reflected on the year’s reading, I realized that Liftoff! and WtHWOS evoked the same kind of bafflement in me, at times. Usually this is due to critical details being omitted for the sake of the narrative.
Any appreciation, actually.
Nice one! I think "outlive" tops my 2023 non-fiction list as well.
Regarding learning about the Israeli-Arab conflict, I recently listened to a very interesting EconTalk episode on the topic that I'm happy to recommend: https://www.econtalk.org/an-extraordinary-introduction-to-the-birth-of-israel-and-the-arab-israeli-conflict-with-haviv-rettig-gur/. The guest wrote a book entitled "Letters to my palestinian neighbor", which I haven't read, but I imagine it's excellent.
“I honestly have no idea who would want to buy this for more than the price of a dilution refrigerator when they could get more and better qubits on the IBMQ systems, for way less money and heartache.”
Thanks for the shout out! Can we quote that on the marketing pages? (Just kidding.)
But seriously, this particular offering does seem a bit odd except perhaps in the context of what would be a slow-rolling parts liquidation.
I can think of a few people or States who might like to get their hands on one...will be interesting to see who the takers are in 2024 and what kind of volume this sort of deal supports.