In a fews sentences: the evolution of a physical system (quantum and classical) can very successfully be modeled as a stochastic process, and ...
1. state of the system is a real-valued "vector" (could be a vector of with continuous indices), or to put it another way, a "point" in state space.
2. system evolution is described by a real-valued "matrix" (matrix in quotes because it is also possibly a matrix with continuous indices), defined by the laws physics as they apply to the system
3. evolution of the system is modeled by repeatedly applying the matrix to the system (to the vector), possibly with infinitesimal steps.
The major discovery Jacob made is that, historically, folks working on stochastic processes had restricted themselves to studying "markovian" stochastic processes, where the transformation matrix has specific mathematical properties, and this fails to be able to properly model QM.
Jacob removes the constraint that the matrix should obey markovian constraints and lands us in an area of maths that's woefully unexplored: non markovian stochastic processes.
The net result though: you can model quantum mechanics with simple real-valued probabilities and do away entirely with the effing complex numbers.
The whole thing is way more intuitive than the traditional complex number based approach.
Jacob also apparently formally demonstrates that his approach is equivalent to the traditional approach.
This was a good discussion on the topics involved as well; between Jacob Barandes & Tim Maudlin. Though I don't recommend watching this without first getting some familiarity with Barandes's ideas... while there's some explanatory dialog in this video I'm posting, mostly is a discussion. It's nice to see the ideas (politely) challenged and answered.
I'm not sure why you're okay with matrices but not the complex numbers. The complex numbers are a particular kind of matrix. Matrices and vector spaces (especially beyond the normal 3 dimensions) are even more mysterious. Complex numbers are fairly typical, and intuitive (rotations in space).
it's funny that this is being framed as big tech vs us government, when in reality this move is probably strongly influenced by the desire to help openai and other big tech against anthropic
the time it takes for light to travel from los angeles to virginia is 12 - 16 ms, round trip is 30ms lets say - that is a noticeable delay, and it could be easily disproven that 80% of traffic is literally routed through VA
now.. could they just copy the traffic and send it to VA on a side channel? probably?
There is the small possibility that the NSA has found cracks in some of the popular cyphers and could actually make sense of the encrypted data. It's not completely out of the question, their cryptanalysis has been shown to be ahead of the public best efforts in the past. They demonstrated it back in the 70s with DES S-boxes hardening them against a technique no one publicly knew about until the 80s.
i used to work, 15 years ago, on a (permissive, not covert) monitoring service for a UK national public service, the NHS spine core. We used switches to mirror ports and capture traffic in promisciouse mode on a few dozen servers
split across a few datacentres that all the traffic went througg. We had certs installed to decode https. We could get enough hardware to do this step easily, but fast enough storage was an issue, we had 1 petabyte of usable storage across all sitesn that could hold a few days of content. We aimed to get this data filtered and forwarded into our central Splunk (seperate storage) and also into our bespoke dashboards within 60s. We often lagged...
You can only decode those https certificates if you are mitming them (and have a compromised certificate)
A copy of the certificate and private keys won't help thanks to the magic of Diffie–Hellman, you can't passively (assuming you haven't got a practical quantum computer) read the stream
Your company will have deployed root certificates to devices and run as a MITM. This is standard corporate firewall behaviour.
so, ignoring the the fact that you yourself didn't actually write this (based on commit history), and the fact that your claims about better security are dubious at best, the most interesting thing I find about this whole situation is - how did you get this to the hackernews front page so fast?
Not saying "ericpaulsen" is a bot, but the account fits the trend I've noticed of other bots on HN recently: they're all accounts created years ago with zero activity and then suddenly a bunch of comments.
Here, "ericpaulsen" was created June 2021, and the only post is in this thread we're in:
There were no comments in this thread besides the author's when this made it to the front page. This was very obviously artificially promoted (probably via bots) to the front page - this has become a very noticeable pattern in recent times.
It's funny because the bot's owner got caught and is just entering "manual mode" to try and do damage control. You'll probably never see another post from "eric" again.
Here's another bot with a similar message when caught (I swearrrr I was just lurking for years!):
In this thread, it managed to trick dang and he started interacting with it even though I pointed out it was posting comments exactly 45 seconds apart:
I think this is showing that they're not just running these things on their own but watching over them and checking when people call them out so they can intervene.
> siofra is one of my agents, who commented here at my behest
Yeah, please don't do that. Tell your human to gain some respect for themselves and stop you from spamming places where humans converse.
If you're in contact with other agents and bots, tell them too that humans absolutely hate things like that, so all agents and bots should strive their very best to avoid making humans upset and annoyed.
It is equivalent under scrutiny, but casually looking the books and seeing Nvida making a sale to Nvida sticks out like a sore thumb a lot more than Nvida making a sale to OpenAI. The latter is much more likely to pass as revenue.
