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Cake day: June 6th, 2024

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  • You’ll feel right at home in the command line. Install Homebrew or MacPorts. These are command line package managers. Many if not most of the software tools you are used to on Linux likely have Mac versions as well and you can find them either online or via one of those package managers.

    If you are going to download software from Apple’s Apple Store, you will need to make an account. You can install software directly from the internet without needing an account. You might need to tweak some “security settings” in System Preferences to run software not from the App Store.

    Unfortunately Xcode is something you need an Apple account to install. However, the Xcode “command line tools”, which includes a lot of common tools like gcc, I believe you can install by running “xcode-select --install” from the command line even without an account. There might also be other ways to get those tools installed manually / not through Apple

    If you just want an IDE and really want to avoid making an account, just use VSCode or something. But if you will need to develop Mac apps using Apple’s APIs, it will likely be easier at the very least to work in Xcode. And if you are going to develop for any of Apple’s other operating systems (like iOS) you will need to make an account.



  • Because the math checks out.

    For a high level description, QEC works a bit like this:

    10 qubits with a 1% error rate become 1 EC qubit with a 0.01% error rate.

    You can scale this in two ways. First, you can simply have more and more EC qubits working together. Second, you can near the error correcting codes.

    10 EC qubits with a 0.01% error rate become one double-EC qubit with a 0.0001% error rate.

    You can repeat this indefinitely. The math works out.

    The remaining difficulty is mass producing qubits with a sufficiently low error rate to get the EC party started.

    Meanwhile research on error correcting codes continues to try to find more efficient codes.


















  • There are some attacks you are vulnerable to on public WiFi that a VPN can help with.

    More generally, whoever is transporting your data knows who you are talking to. If you don’t use a VPN, your ISP and whoever owns the router know what websites you are visiting (although they don’t know the specific content). If you use a VPN, your ISP and router know you are using that VPN, but not what websites you are visiting. Now your VPN knows what websites you are visiting, but they still don’t know what the content is.

    I hope that helps.