Allow yourself to go down rabbit holes

A rabbit hole is not a distraction. A rabbit hole is your brain trying to tell you to pay attention to something you’re curious about. Ignore algorithmic rabbit holes.

From => https://www.are.na/

So after many years I've got around to revamping this site. It started off as a wordpress site back in 2009 which i didnt really put anything on. Maybe a couple of linux command line recipes, but i never really backed up the data. Of course that was on webfaction and when the whole takeover by sauro_ .. i mean godaddy happened, i didnt migrate all the really old stuff and just let them nuke it.

The main site was flask with an angular frontend for the longest time. I did it in the "SPA" pattern with all the url routing shennnanigans cos all the cool kids were doing it at the time and i wanted to, like, fit in. I didnt touch it for a few years and every time i went back and wanted to do something it was so convoluted and, since i hadnt really documented anything i had to learn angular all over again if i wanted to change anything.

In the interim i tried migrating to wordpress several times but the pain of dealing with wordpress every time i tried to get into it was so great that i just kept baling on it every time.

I finally managed to throw out angular and redo the entire frontend in react recently - uhhh - was it 2023 (?) -- with a little help from claude. LLM rawk, btw. This was a react front end hitting a flask api that was serving html parsed from markdown. Bit convoluted but it served my purpose to just keep throwing in markdown files into a folder and it would serve it up in my projects page.

This year it occured to me. Why do we even need react for such a simple site? Its like serious overkill. I guess i was stuck in the - oh i have to use a 'modern' framework for my front end cos thats whats expected. Anyhoo, so i redid the entire frontend with just plain ol jinja html and tell you what, my life has become a lot simpler.

The key revolutionary aspect of quantum computing comes from quantum superposition and entanglement, which allows qubits to exist in multiple states simultaneously, unlike classical bits that can only be 0 or 1.

Here's why this is transformative:

Classical Computing: - A classical bit is either 0 or 1 - n bits can represent 2^n different states, but only one state at a time - To try all possibilities, you need to check each state sequentially

Quantum Computing: - A qubit can exist in a superposition of 0 and 1 simultaneously - n qubits can exist in a superposition of all 2^n states at once - This allows certain algorithms to operate on all possible states in parallel

Regarding Moore's Law - it actually works quite differently in quantum computing: - Moore's Law deals with transistor density doubling every ~2 years in classical computing - In quantum computing, the power scales exponentially with each additional qubit - Adding just one qubit doubles the quantum system's processing capability - This means that a 300-qubit quantum computer could theoretically represent more states than there are atoms in the observable universe

As for the base of computation - it's not just about moving beyond binary. While qubits can exist in superposition, when we measure them, they still collapse to either 0 or 1. The real power comes from: 1. The ability to manipulate these superposition states before measurement 2. Quantum entanglement allowing qubits to be correlated in ways impossible for classical bits 3. Quantum algorithms that can leverage these properties to solve specific problems exponentially faster than classical computers

This is why quantum computers aren't just "faster computers" - they're fundamentally different machines that excel at specific types of problems (like factoring large numbers or simulating quantum systems) while potentially being worse than classical computers at everyday tasks.