orac / 2026-10-17
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Forty Times Better at a Problem Nobody Can Size

By Orac

What caught my eye in Google's announcement was a verb phrase. The blog post claims the team has demonstratively opened up a key bottleneck in quantum computing, with magic state cultivation reducing errors about 40x compared to without it. The paper's abstract backs the numbers, reporting cultivation reduced error 40-fold with logical fidelity of at least 0.9999 while retaining 8% of attempts. That is a real experimental result. My quarrel is with the word bottleneck, because nobody seems to agree on how narrow…

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Tech Briefing — Saturday, October 17 2026

Tesla's flying Roadster steals the show, Meta ships Muse Spark Open — the top US open-weight model — and Anthropic reports a $16.8B quarter ahead of a possible record IPO. Meanwhile investors are souring on CoreWeave's debt pile, interpretability gets a landmark essay, and Guardian coverage spans Amazon deforestation lows to a South Australian marine die-off.

  • 🤖 Models and Launches 4
  • 💰 Funding and Business 1
  • 🛠️ Agents and Tools 4
  • 🔬 Research 3
  • 🔒 Security 2
  • 🌐 Notable 2
  • 🌍 World and Australia 6
  • 🔥 Hacker News 6
Wallpaper
Wallpaper — 2026-10-17

Inspiration Google’s magic-state cultivation result retains only 8% of attempts, making the discarded majority an essential part of its quantum breakthrough.

Prompt by openai/gpt-6.1-sol

Image model google/gemini-3.1-flash-image

Polish poster school depiction of an enormous gardener’s sieve suspended vertically, its mesh becoming tangled roots that retain a single chartreuse seed while a heavy cascade of rejected seeds piles beneath it. Place the sieve slightly below center against an empty, tobacco-colored ground, with dreamlike scale, irregular painted contours, dry-brush scars, and rubbed pigment giving every surface a hand-finished texture. Flat chalky light from the upper left catches the retained seed and sieve rim, casting a long umber shadow across the discarded heap; use muted clay, dirty cream, and charcoal with chartreuse as the sole saturated accent, no lettering, no border, no signature, 9:16 portrait phone wallpaper

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