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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2024

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  • I don’t believe everything on the internet is a lie (although of course I don’t believe everything on the internet is true either). You have to read it and judge for yourself.

    In the case of getting medical advice, there is an inherent bias to finding anecdotes on the internet. The people who post are going to be the people who have something to say. That’s going to be either people who had a life changing positive experience, or who have something to complain about. The middle-ground experience is underrepresented.

    However, there is value in anecdotes. The doctor can tell you high likely a given side effect might be, but people on the internet might have a better description of what that experience is like.

    I try to take in as much information as I can when I am making an informed decision, including things like asking my doctor, finding anecdotes on the internet, and finding actual scientific papers.









  • So two things that are not accounted for here:

    1. This covers only brute force attacks, meaning you try every different combination. Shor’s Algorithm exploits patterns in RSA keys and is much, much more efficient than brute force.
    2. There actually is an algorithm (Grover’s search algorithm) that can speed up brute force search. However, this speedup is only quadratic, so brute forcing something like a 256 bit key is still infeasible. The discrepancy is quantum information doesn’t flow the same way that classical information does. A related concept is the idea of reversible classical computing: this derivation relies on the assumption that you change set a bit, thereby erasing the information of what that bit was before. If your operation doesn’t erase that information (e.g. if it’s specifically a bit flip, you know what the original bit was, it’s the opposite), then this argument about the minimum required energy falls apart. Most operations in a quantum computer are inherently reversible.