Never said anything about Nazis, I just responded to what you said, as well as put it in the context of the main thrust of the platform which their current party ran on and they voted for. No one accused you of being a “boogieman,” you are just suffering from a victim complex desperately trying to invent conspiracies that never happened to paint yourself as some poor martyr. Just stop saying ridiculous things worthy of mockery. Not that hard. Be normal.

ngl I blame physicists who communicate to the public for this

Notice how you always see a lot of nonsense mysticism around quantum mechanics like “quantum healing” but you never see anything along the lines of like “general relativity healing” or “inflation theory healing.”

The difference is that often it is the physicists themselves who choose to communicate to the public who paint quantum mechanics in a mystical light. Indeed, this is not even something unique to the physicists who communicate to the public, you can sometimes even run into it in peer-reviewed publications painting QM as a theory that somehow puts conscious observers front and center and questions the existence of objective reality, or whatever rubbish philosophy people try to imbue onto some linear algebra.

The ones who communicate to the public just are often worse because they don’t tell you QM as it really is, they usually tell you some personal theory they have. For example, rather than just describing how QM works, one of these science communicators might tell you their personal theory about how there’s a grand multiverse, or that “consciousness” plays some sort of role, and that explains why QM works. They do not just present the theory, but their own personal speculation as an underlying explanation for it.

Because physicists themselves promote all this mysticism around a bunch of linear algebra, you end up with mystics and charlatans who realize that they can take advantage of this by talking about mystical nonsense like “quantum healing.” Sure, it might be nonsensical rubbish, but the person who hears about “quantum healing” also heard a real PhD physicist tell them about multiverses and “consciousness,” so they think there must be something to it as well. It gives the mysticism an air of legitimacy.

We like to kid ourselves that the mysticism is just promoted by your Deepak Chopra types or laymen who have no idea what they’re talking about. But if you actually look at what a real academic philosophy department publishes, there is mysticism all throughout academic philosophy. These philosophers have also had a big impact on physicists, who often adopt these mystical attitudes they learn from the philosophy department into their own discussion, and sometimes even into their own publications.

If you actually talk to the laymen who are deeply enthralled by those quantum mystic pseudoscience charlatans, they usually can point you to multiple real academics who back their beliefs, people with legitimate credentials. This is a problem nobody seems to address and it annoys the hell out of me. Everyone paints either the charlatans or the laymen as the bad guy here, but nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room which is the rampant mysticism in academia.

I literally argued with a PhD physicist the other day who was going around preaching to people that quantum mechanics proves that there is no physical reality and we all live inside of a “cosmic consciousness.” I did not get very far with him because he just insulted me and pointed to academic philosophers who agreed with him and said I’m stupid for even questioning his claims, and then wouldn’t address my criticisms.

“The worst parts” is literally the Republican party’s major platform that they put front and center and is literally what they campaigned on? What on earth are you on about?

What’s there to even “debate”? You can’t change the mind of an extremist dogmatist. You cannot begin the discussion with wild claims about we aren’t ever allowed to question any decision a private enterprise ever makes then honestly be like, “I just want a serious discussion 🥲.” No, you don’t, you come here to just preach your religious ideology, and you’re upset some people don’t mindlessly accept it without question.

This is a rather reductive view of quantum cryptography.

Correct = reductive?

The two most common applications of it I hear about is the development of encryption algorithms resistant to being broken on quantum computers

First, I was talking about quantum encryption, not quantum cryptography, which is a bit more broad. Second, we already have cryptographic algorithms that run on classical computers that are not crackable by quantum computers, known as lattice-based cryptography which are way more practical than anything quantum cryptography could offer.

the way, say, Shur’s algorithm is known to break RSA

Shor’s algorithm. Yes, it breaks asymmetrical ciphers like RSA, but we have developed alternatives already it cannot break, like Kyber.

and techniques like quantum key distribution

Classical key exchange algorithms prevent someone from reading your key if they intercept the data packets between you. QKD is entirely impractical because it does not achieve this. Rather than preventing someone from reading your key if they intercept the data packets, it merely allows you to detect if someone is intercepting the data packets. You see, in regular cryptography, you want people to be able to intercept your data. It’s necessary for something like the internet to work, because packets of data have to be passed around the whole world, and it would suck if your packets got lost simply because someone read them in transit, which is why QKD is awful. If a single person reads the data packet in transit then they would effectively deny service to the recipient.

Both of these are real problems that don’t become meaningless just because one-time pads exist - you need to somehow securely distribute the keys for one-time-pad encryption.

One-time pad encryption is awful as I already explained, it would cut the entire internet bandwidth in half because if you wanted to transmit 10 gigabytes of data you would also need to transmit 10 gigabyte key. QKD is also awful for the fact that it would be unscalable to an “internet” because of how easy it is to deny service. It also doesn’t even guarantee you can detect someone snooping your packets because it is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack. Sure, the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange is also susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack, but we solve this using public key infrastructure. You cannot have public key infrastructure for quantum cryptography.

The only proposed quantum digital signature algorithms are unscalable because they rely on Holevo’s theorem, which basically says there is a limited amount of information about the quantum state of a qubit you can gather from a single measurement, thus creating a sort of one-way function that can be used for digital signatures. The issue with this is that Holevo’s theorem also says you can acquire more information if you have more copies of the same qubit, i.e. it means every time you distribute a copy of the public key, you increase the probability someone could guess it. Public keys would have to be consumable which would entirely prevent you from scaling it to any significantly large network.

That’s why one-time pads aren’t used everywhere, (“it would cut the whole internet bandwidth in half overnight” would not have been a sufficient reason - that’d be a tiny price to pay for unbreakable encryption, if it actually worked).

You are living in fairy tale lala land. Come back down to reality. If you offer someone an algorithm that is impossible to break in a trillion, trillion years, and another algorithm that is in principle impossible to break, but the former algorithm is twice as efficient, then every company on the entirety of planet earth will choose the former. No enterprise on earth is going to double their expenses for something entirely imaginary that could never be observed in practice. You are really stuck in delulu town if you unironically think the reason one-time pads aren’t used practically is due to lack of secure key distribution.

Even prior to the discovery of Shor’s algorithm, we were issuing DHKE which, at the time, was believed to be pretty much an unbreakable way to share keys. Yet, even in this time before people knew DHKE could be potentially broken by quantum computers, nobody used DHKE to exchange keys for one-time pads. DHKE is always used to exchange keys for symmetrical ciphers like AES. AES256 is not breakable by quantum computers in practice as even a quantum computer would require trillions of years to break it. There is zero reason to use a one-time pad when something like AES exists. It’s the industry standard for a reason and I bet you my entire life savings we are not going to abandon it for one-time pads ever.

Many conservatives I know are fully in support of legal immigration

Then why do they oppose it? That’s a contradiction. They oppose asylum seekers which is legal immigration. They oppose and make up fake news controversies about legal Haitian immigrants saying they are “eating the dogs.” The actively want to make it harder to come into the country legally. Even for illegal immigrants, if we create a path to citizenship they would be legal, but they don’t want that, they want to kick them out. The legal status of them thus does not matter to them, it’s not their primary concern, they just want to get the immigrants out.

You need to explain to me how opposing legal immigration = supporting legal immigration. Resolve that contradiction for me.

The left enjoys telling business that if they can’t afford to pay a living wage for their lowest paid jobs then they don’t deserve to be in business, while at the same time decrying the cost increases to food and janitorial if those industries had to pay non-migrant workers enough to do those jobs.

There is only a “contradiction” because you are an extremist dogmatist who insists we should all fall on our knees and worship the free market like it’s a god. Whatever the market says goes! Humans be damned! How dare you question the glory of the market??

No, there is no contradiction here because we can pay people a living wage and bring down price gouging. Your issue is because of the fact you are an extremist dogmatist who treats free markets like a religion where it is blasphemy to question anything private corporations do, you act like price gouging is just a fact of nature, like a natural disaster, something that can’t be helped because it’s just the will of all mighty market which we cannot question.

Again, no, some of us aren’t religious zealots for free markets. We recognize that we can demand workers have higher pay and companies stop price gouging at the same time and there is no contradiction here. You can’t wrap your brain around this because you think private corporations are equivalent to deities which we are not allowed to question, so if workers are paid higher and the corporations choose to offset this by raising prices, oh well, there’s nothing we can do, you can’t question the decisions of the great mighty oligarchs, whom we must fall to our knees and worship!

Yes we can. Grow a fucking spine you cuckhold.

“Americans don’t want these jobs for that pay” pushing wages down using illegal immigrant labor.

Aren’t conservatives the ones who say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people?” Yet somehow this agency disappears when it comes to wages being lowered. Wages are lowered on their own, again, like a natural disaster, the free market is just something we cannot question and we have to accept whatever it throws at us. No, people lower wages. It is an active decision by private enterprises, the people who run them have human agency which you continue to pretend does not exist because you are a complete dogmatist who wants people to bow before them like gods. It is those people, human beings with agency who push down wages. Wages don’t just magically go down on their own whenever your country has immigration.

Yep. Technically you could in principle use Grover’s algorithm to speed up cracking a symmetrical cipher, but the size typically used for the keys is too large so even though it’d technically be faster it still not be possible in practice. Even with asymmetrical ciphers we already have replacements that are quantum safe, although most companies have not implemented them yet.

Quantum encryption won’t ever be a “thing.”

All cryptography requires a pool of random numbers as inputs, and while different cryptographic methods are more secure than others, all of them are only as secure as their random number pool. The most secure cipher possible is known as a one-time pad which can be proven to be as secure as a cryptographic algorithm could possibly be, and so the only thing that could possibly lead to it being hacked is a poor random number pool. Since quantum mechanics can be used to generate truly random numbers, you could have a perfect random number pool, combined with a perfect cipher, gives you perfect encryption.

That sounds awesome right? Well… no. Because it is trivially easy these days to get regular old classical computers to spit out basically an indefinite number of pseudorandom numbers that are indistinguishable from truly random numbers. Why do you think modern operating systems allow you to encrypt your whole drive? You can have a file tens of gigabytes bit and you click it and it opens instantly, despite your whole drive being encrypted, because your CPU can generate tens of gigabytes of random numbers good enough for cryptography faster than you can even blink.

Random number generation is already largely a solved problem for classical computers. I own a quantum random number generator. I can compare it in various test suites such as the one released by NIST to test the quality of a random number generator, and it can’t tell the different between that and my CPU’s internal random number generator. Yes, the CPU. Most modern CPUs both have the ability to collect entropy data from thermal noise to seed a pseudorandom number generator, as well as having a hardware-level pseudorandom number, such as x86’s RDSEED and RDRAND instructions, so they can generate random numbers good enough for cryptography at blazing speeds.

The point is that in practice you will never actually notice, even if you were a whole team of PhD statisticians and mathematicians, the difference between a message encrypted by a quantum computer and a message encrypted by a classical computer using an industry-approved library. Yet, it is not just that they’re equal, quantum encryption would be far worse. We don’t use one-time pads in practice despite their security because they require keys as long as the message itself, and thus if we adopted them, it would cut the whole internet bandwidth in half overnight. Pseudorandom number generators are superior to use as the basis for cryptography because the key can be very small and then it can spit out the rest of what is needed to encrypt/decrypt the message from it, and deterministic encryption/decryption algorithms like AES and ChaCha20 are not crackable even by a quantum computer.

It depends upon what you use ChatGPT for and if you know how to use it productively. For example if I ask ChatGPT coding questions it is often very helpful. If I ask it history questions it constantly makes things up. You also again need to know how to use it, like people who claim ChatGPT is not helpful for coding you ask them how they use it and they basically just ask ChatGPT to do their whole project for them and when it fails they claim it is useless. But that’s not the productive way to use it, the productive way to use it is like a replacement for StackOverflow or to provide you examples of how to use some library, or things like that, not doing your whole project for you. Of course, people often use it incorrectly so it’s probably not a good idea to allow its use in the workplace, but for individual use it can be very helpful.

no that’s dialectics 😏