Trevor Lanting

Chief Development Officer @dwavequantum 🇨🇦

[Jonathan Gorard @getjonwithit]

I think one of the conclusions we should draw from the tremendous success of LLMs is how much of human knowledge and society exists at very low levels of Kolmogorov complexity.

We are entering an era where the minimal representation of a human cultural artifact... (1/12)

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

Distribution of Land and Sea on Earth by Latitude

The chart below illustrates how many square km of land and water there are, at every degree of latitude on Earth.

The colours depict:

White = Polar region
Green = Temperate Region
Yellow = Tropical Region
Orange = Anti-habitable region
Blue = Seawater

The anti-habitable region is where the wet bulb effect is chronic and year round. This demands air conditioning, which is a major energy demand.

Plenty of people will continue to live there, but there is a high energy penalty to pay for living in the anti-habitable region. Economies either pay the energy penalty (like gulf petrostates do) or struggle to develop at all.

What is expected to happen over the next 100 - 200 years is that the bands will move away from the equator and that this will drag human migration from the equator toward the poles. This is a thermodynamic trend.

This chart illustrate that advancing climate change would essentially drive the population south of the equator into a funnel and into the sea.

It drives the population North of the equator to higher latitudes, but these higher latitudes have enough land to actually accommodate them.

In reality much of the Southern hemispheres population might simply migrate to the Northern Hemisphere.

The land that is most likely to increase in value, should climate change driven migration be a thing, is the land to the North of the temperate zone today. The white/green boundary at the North.

Obviously lots of other much more significant factors will apply locally, but this is the subtle planetary background on which local factors are superimposed.

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

The Kardashev Scale

Humanity produces 2x10^13 watts and is at 0.73 on the scale, but if we define our civilisation as “all life on Earth” we are at 0.95, as biosphere photon capture is 2.8x10^15.

The difference is 14,000%

I think this context is extremely important for the future, and we are at a point where this framing is probably going to be ossified into AI.

0.73 is the techno-industrial economy, and even though it is very energetic, the biosphere is still 140 times bigger.

If we consider compute, we are even more insignificant, even on our home world where we dominate sentience.

Total synaptic operations of 8bn humans is 8x10^25 flops.

Total electronic flops of all computers is circa 10^22 flops.

Total nucleotide operations of the biosphere is 10^39 flops.

Humanity is not a civilisation, it is small sect nested within a gigantic, unimaginably successful and resilient civilisation that is Earthlings.

Earthlings will continue to prosper long after we are all dead. Earth is the ultimate machine, it’s far far more interesting than the sun, or any solar mass, or any known exoplanet.

Humanity is Earthlings best, and perhaps only, shot at self replication. We are the sperm and the egg.

Earth as a biosphere system has already lived out 90% of its allowable existence. It’s been here 4bn years and in another 500m years or so the sun will expand and boil off the oceans.

This great machine is going to spit itself to Mars, and maybe other places too.

But the Kardashev scale underestimates our place in the universe.

To see ourselves as 0.73 is to position ourselves as fleas riding a dog. To see ourselves as 0.95 is to recognise we are carried forward by forces we do not understand, but that our interests are entirely reliant on the continued wellbeing of the dog.

Anyone observing Earth from afar would judge us as a 0.95 civilisation.

Again this framing is super important for the next 100 years.

[divya venn @divya_venn]

No one talks about how being avoidant can benefit you in every relationship other than your romantic one

because being easygoing and chill and non reactive and undemanding makes you fun and good to have around, and this is what avoidance (in its most well adjusted form) blesses you with

[Ashwin Sharma @Ashwinreads]

basically joseph campbell taught me to ritualize almost everything i considered mundane. like my morning coffee, my afternoon walk and my bedtime reading. i learned over time this is because ritualizing ordinary moments makes them sacred. and when something becomes sacred, when you give it meaning, it gives meaning back to you.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Watch Starship's fifth flight test https://t.co/LVrCnTv797

[Steve Jurvetson @FutureJurvetson]

Quantum Supremacy: An Entangled Tale of Two Paths
This watershed moment — when a quantum computer outperforms all classical computers by an insurmountable margin — surfaced in this week’s WSJ: D-Wave’s “latest machine can compute quantities in minutes that would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer millions of years. ‘Of all the computational supremacy claims so far,’ of quantum compared with conventional computers, ‘this one is actually the strongest,’ says Daniel Lidar, director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology.”

There have been some earlier weak claims by research groups to have achieved supremacy, but their application domains have been utterly useless and ungeneralizable, like using a quantum computer to just simulate itself.

So, the recent paper by D-Wave Systems entitled “Computational Supremacy in Quantum Simulation” might have been ignored at first. I invested in D-Wave 21 years ago, and have seen them keep at it, a bit of a black swan in the quantum computing community, with an architecture unlike the others.

All of the other quantum computer companies are pursuing a “gate model” quantum computer, and they have raised billions of dollars of funding (over $2B in 2022 alone). But so far, they have no commercial application. All of their revenue is for basic research and one-off studies of what’s possible. They have great potential, if they can scale, for a variety of applications, including cracking encryption. Hence the government interest and funding.

In contrast to the gate model, D-Wave builds “quantum annealers”. You can think of it as an application-specific processor (like an NVIDIA GPU) versus a general computer (like a PC but programmed by brilliant quantum physicists). D-Wave is not useful for cracking encryption. It does one thing very well – discrete optimization. This may sound esoteric, but it maps to many real-world applications, from route optimization to AI training to quantum chemistry of magnetic materials. And the application domains for the two types of quantum computing may not overlap; experimental and theoretical work concludes that gate model quantum computers will not be useful for optimization, just as quantum annealers are not good at tasks well suited for gate model machines.

Meanwhile from D-Wave’s latest paper:

“We assess approximate methods based on tensor networks and neural networks and conclude that no known approach can achieve the same accuracy as the quantum annealer within a reasonable timeframe. Thus, quantum annealers can answer questions of practical importance that classical computers cannot."

"Extrapolation beyond the simulable scale to a few hundred qubits, far below the maximum experimental scale [of D-Wave], indicates a hypothetical runtime on the Frontier supercomputer surpassing millions of years with infeasible memory and energy requirements.”

• D-Wave’s paper, currently in a peer-review process:
https://t.co/clGhSntej9

• WSJ: https://t.co/whqkAWkVTr

• IBM’s frustration with optimization: https://t.co/hKQoKHuC8Z

• QC funding: https://t.co/0RSe7zZlo1

[D-Wave @dwavequantum]

We’re on the road! D-Wave's own @TrevorLanting and @Quantum_Murray speak at Global Quantum Symposium 2024 this week, sharing the latest in #quantum computing technology development and customer use cases. $QBTS

[du @thedulab]

One of the most transformative moments you can experience is unrequited worry. You're waiting for something to happen, but in the meantime you put your life on hold

You think that once that thing happens, this is the final ingredient that will wash away your problems. In a year, my investment will pay off. My situation will turn around. I'll be out of the woods. Every day, your mind is adorned by a cloud of neuroticism

Can't take that trip yet until I get there. Can't buy this thing yet until I hit that net worth. Can't make these move yet until I get "it" together

Then that day comes and it doesn't pan out the way you expected. It simply doesn't happen. All that anxiety was for waste. You can't help but feel simultaneous misery and euphoria

Misery comes first. Heart drops to the bottom of your stomach. But then you realize that you're finally free. Nothing was ever guaranteed. You could've leaned into joy this entire time

Awareness of this will completely alter your perspective of risk. The biggest risk was never not protecting yourself from an uncertain future outcome, but rather not being present during each second of your current existence

You become so much more courageous. "What's going to happen?" turns into "It doesn't matter, because I have faith in my ability to always figure it out when necessary." Unstoppable

[love drops @lovedropx]

— Heidi Priebe

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

If you're somewhat new to spirituality you might not have learned how to spot fellow practitioners who outwardly love God or the Dharma, but secretly see religion as an instrument of political power, rather than a living prayer to the divine.

On the left, it's often yogis and Buddhists who understand we are all one until it's time to play identity politics, and who are compassionate to all beings - except the scapegoat of the moment. On the right, it's often Christians who value Christendom more than the living Word, who hate and fear the wayward people that Jesus loved the most, and who seek a life of ease rather than the burden of the cross. In both cases, it's people who would rather sacrifice their beliefs for political expedience than withstand the true pain and loneliness of integrity. You can see it - in their self-hatred, their tortured relationship to control and social influence, and in the absence of nuance with which they conceive of the Other.

There are so, so many of these people. Most of us are, until we learn a better way. It's a product of the default, unconscious mode of being.

Most of us don't realize this about ourselves, until we are tested by a crisis that demands we choose between our desire for power and our commitment to truth. And when this happens, if someone gives in, it becomes a truly mindfucking, heartbreaking thing to see from the outside.

Friends that you loved and looked up to suddenly grow dark and begin to indulge their worst instincts, in the name of compassion and liberation. You watch them become brutal and cruel to those that disagree or dare to speak up against them. They burn their own practice down, and sometimes, they commit the heinous act of dividing and breaking their own relationships. All to avoid facing their own weakness, with honesty and humility.

There used to be a poster on this website, with whom I was very close, that did precisely this even as he loudly decried it in others. He didn't see it in himself. He thought he was an exception. I think most do.

It's now so common in 21st century America to see people destroy their essential relationships in the name of politics that it's practically banal to talk about it in the abstract. But in each particular situation, it is a fresh grief, something beautiful and irreplaceable senselessly burned to the ground. There are some bonds that are fundamental to a person's well-being, once they are established. You might even call them sacred. These include the bonds of family, marriage and sangha/faith community. It should be a major, life-changing event when these bonds break. It's a profound rift, the pain of which remains long after anger has cooled. Do not do this without time, careful thought, prayer and consultation with people who are important to you. Be extremely careful about letting anyone into your confidence who has.

If you have done this, and the grief of it still stalks you, there's only one thing you can do: have the courage to own your part of it and do what you can to make amends. You may not be able to save the relationship, but if you are humble and learn from your mistake, you might get a chance to create a bond with someone new.

In spirituality, we often talk about the need for vulnerability, but we don't often talk about the dangers of it, or when it's wise to allow it. There are times you need to guard your heart, and we are in one of them now. We're surrounded by perennially frustrated ideologues, carnivorous status strivers, and surface-skimming saints who are secretly, desperately looking for someone to be cruel to. It's madness to be vulnerable with someone caught in these cycles.

Keep your heart and mind on your practice, on compassion and service, on the divine, and let everything else fall away. Those who remain, who are also turned toward the sacred - those are the ones capable of true connection. Of true, enduring love.

No law, election or revolution can ever take the place of that.

[frog @monofrogue]

Heard joke once: man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him."

[Mikael Brockman @meekaale]

I have discovered a fundamental harmful error in the temporal ontology presented by systems like "Google Calendar" which I believe is a significant source of suffering and confusion especially for neurodivergent phenotypes like myself or at least an opportunity for improvement

[du @thedulab]

Most relationship problems can be fixed by simply killing the belief that yours is supposed to be a certain way

Two people join forces to build something together, but each of them has to recognize that there's not a specific outcome to build towards. Rather, what's being built is actually a perpetually evolving, one of one dynamic that can't be replicated by anyone else

He needs to make the money. She needs to do the cooking and cleaning. He should play this role. She should play that role. This is alpha. That's beta

Maybe, maybe not, maybe both, maybe neither. Who knows, and honestly who cares. What groove has been working for you two? And if circumstances arise where said groove doesn't work as well anymore, how will you two adapt?

It's fluid, not rigid. Oftentimes, there was never anything wrong, but one of you just let yourself get conditioned by some external influence to think that "success" in this realm was tangibly definable

Let the "experts" spout their arbitrary rules around what's right or wrong. You can just smile and nod, and choose to be happy without their permission

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

If I can break down the case for space settlement in the most general terms, covering all other cases, it would be this

1. Human minds are machines that rearrange the matter and energy of the universe in accordance with values
2. The wider solar system gives us billions of times more matter and energy to work with
3. Therefore more minds can realise more values with access to these resources

The how and why are debatable. Then when is as soon as possible, because otherwise we are preventing values being realised.

[Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh]

I've been working on a video about net zero -- what is it, how will we get there, how far are we along the way, etc. Just finished recording. Research has been extremely depressing.

In an nutshell, every serious source (incl the IPCC) agrees that there's no way we'll reach net zero without substantial and fast investment into extensive carbon removal. We're talking about an increase by at least a factor 100 (!) by 2050. Yet this carbon removal doesn't even exist in plans. That's right, even if you add up all the plans that have been put forward -- which I'd say are a pie in the sky already -- it wouldn't work.

The cherry on the rotten tart of net zero are environmental groups (infamously, Greenpeace) who are opposed to carbon capture and storage (CCS) at fossil fuel plants, and since most people can't tell the difference between CCS and carbon removal, it's getting in the way of net zero. Like with nuclear power, it's increasingly the so-called "environmentalists" who are in the way of protecting the environment.

I'm not a fan of offshore drilling either, but complaining about CCS is broken logic.

I'll have more details about this in the upcoming video (will be out in in a few weeks) but the more I think about it, the more I feel like the origin of this problem is presumably well-meaning activists (let's not name names) whose we-can-do-it attitude has made people think reaching net zero is much easier than it really is.

These are all difficult topics with many nuances, but if I was in charge of running the world I'd quit. Sorry, I meant to say if I was in charge of running the world, my course of action would be:

(a) Nuclear power everywhere it's geographically safe enough. I know that no one really likes nuclear power, but it's the least bad option to decarbonize energy intensive industry quickly.
(b) Bio energy with carbon capture and storage everywhere there's large amounts of quickly re-growing biomass available, it would make sense for rich countries to finance such facilities elsewhere
(c) Expand and modernize the electric grid asap because without that nothing else will work -- according to a recent IEA report there's 3000 GW (!) of renewable energy power plants waiting to be hooked up onto electric grids that can't cope
(d) electric vehicles (the world is actually doing quite well with that one, if it wasn't for point (c))
(e) synthetic fuels produced with renewable energy -- it's energetically hugely inefficient but realistically the only way to decarbonize aviation quickly, you may want to do this in regions with reliable sunshine (Australia, Africa)

The reason I didn't say anything about wind and solar is not that those are unimportant but that those are faict going fine.

My twitter feed has been greatly enriched by @EliotJacobson who is as doom as doom gets which I think is the appropriate reaction in the current situation.

[Loopy @strangestloop]

Everything I'm taking in right now points to the idea that the actual spiritual practice in one's life is active participation with the real life stuff: job, partner, chores. Not the retreat, not the meditation, not the isolated vision quest.

[christian @cxgonzalez]

ah shit

the key to happiness really is just food, water, exercise, sun, security, relationships, gratitude, and purpose

[Trevor Lanting @trevorlanting]

https://t.co/iKvYwkXmBm

[Trevor Lanting @trevorlanting]

@eshear remove municipal zoning - completely