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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Nowadays I mostly think of it in regards to how much control you have over the hardware. If you can Ship of Theseus your way to a completely different machine with completely different specs, that’s a PC to me. If you’re stuck with what you paid for, then it’s something else. A Mac Mini is not a PC in my book, but a Hackintosh is even though it’s the same OS and general hardware architecture.

    But that’s just how I use the term.



  • The entire cyberpunk genre is about corporations destroying society and the planet for profit and is near-future sci-fi. Dune is about how human nature doesn’t change, the same revolutions occurring again and again over thousands of years, with humans always being on the verge of self extinction and the only escape being to destroy civilization so hard that any conflict will always leave survivors that have had no contact with anyone else in millennia. Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy presents a world where the entire universe is utter chaos, worlds can be destroyed by a clerical error, and cosmically powerful beings do random things for shits and giggles. Starship Troopers, Warhammer, and Starcraft depict humans becoming the bad guys at an interstellar scale.

    So, no, sci-fi is not inherently hopeful.




  • The limit is c because you have to use cables, radio, or other traditional methods to send the key. The data in the entangled pair would also have to be set at the time the two devices are constructed, so that’s not super useful. It might be useful for single use authentication, but that’s about it.

    Don’t think of entanglement as being like one object in two spots. Think of it like identical twins. One twin getting a hair cut does nothing to the other twin’s hair. Similarly, altering a property of one entangled particle does nothing to the other and actually means they are no longer entangled or identical.


  • Quantum entanglement communications also have fundamental problems that will likely render them effectively unusable. You need a key to decrypt anything you send, and the key has to travel no faster than c. It’s impossible to tell the data from the noise without the key. Attempting to read the data or to change the data being sent also collapses the effect, which can only be fixed by bringing the two systems together. In short, you can only send a single packet of data and you can’t use it without a key transmitted using traditional methods.