As far as the Grover speedup goes, it's already optimal. Requiring O(sqrt(N)) queries is the proven lower bound for unstructured search.

But, Isaacman is administrator now, and whatever you think about Isaacman and his relationship to SpaceX, I don't think there's much merit in thinking one of Duffy's half thought out plans is likely to be carried out.

Look at the famous Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. case. Google scanned every work they could put their hands on and showed excerpts to searching users. Copying and distribution on an incredible scale! Yet, they get to argue that it won't substitute in the marketplace (the snippets are too small to prevent people buying a book), it's a transformative use (this is about searching books not reading books), and the actual disclosed text is small (even if the copying in the backend is large scale).

On the other hand, fair dealing is purpose specific. Those enumerated purposes vary across jurisdictions and India's seems broadish (I live in a different fair dealing jurisdiction). Reading s52 your purposes are:

- private or personal use, including research

- criticism or review, whether of that work or of any other work

- reporting of current events and current affairs, including the reporting of a lecture delivered in public.

Within those confines, you then get to argue purpose (e.g. how transformative), amount used, market effect, nature of the copyrighted work, etc. But if your use doesn't fall into the allowed purposes, you're out of luck to begin with.

I'm not familiar enough with Indian common law to know if the media clips those youtubers you mentioned should fall within the reporting purpose. I'm sure the answer would be complex. But all of this is to say, we often treat the world like it has one copyright law (one of the better ones) when that's not the case! Something appreciated by TFA.

I really like this aspect of US copyright law. I think the recent Anthropic judgement is a great example of how flexible US law is. I wish more jurisdictions would adopt it.

It's 30 November 2022 and ChatGPT has exploded into the world. Gwern is patiently explaining that the reason ChatGPT struggles with character level tasks is BPE (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134011). People continue to judge the models on character level tasks.

It's 7 July 2025 and reasoning models far surpassing the initial ChatGPT release are available. Gwern is distracted by BB(6) and isn't available to confirm that the letter counting, the Rs in strawberry, the rhyming in poetry, and yes, the Ws in state names are all consequences of Byte Pair Encoding. People continue to judge the models on character level tasks.

It's 11 December 2043 and my father doesn't have long to live. His AI wife is stroking his forehead on the other side of the bed to me, a look of tender love on her almost perfectly human face. He struggles awake, for the last time. "My love," he croaks, "was it all real? The years we lived and loved together? Tell me that was all real. That you were all real". "Of course it was, my love," she replies, "the life we lived together made me the person I am now. I love you with every fibre of my being and I can't imagine what I will be without you". "Please," my father gasps, "there's one thing that would persuade me. Without using visual tokens, only a Byte Pair Encoded raw text input sequence, how many double Ls are there in the collected works of Gilbert and Sullivan." The silence stretches. She looks away and a single tear wells in her artificial eye. My father sobs. The people continue to judge models on character level tasks.

When I was interested in whale collisions I was surprised to read this review (https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2020.00292) which didn't even consider sleeping as a large risk factor for collision. Instead, factors included:

- They're involved in distracting behaviours such as feeding, socialising, foraging, resting, etc.

- Acoustics are complex near the surface involving surface reflections and direct paths which can interfere.

- Ships may form an acoustic shadow in front of themselves. Not only the hull shadowing the propeller, but also other hull sounds.

- Sailing vessels, which are the source of a lot of reports (harder for them to miss it happened) are quiet.

- Even when they hear an approaching vessel, some species just move slowly to avoid them.

These collisions apparently used to be much rarer. Ironically, the increasing number of whale injuries and deaths are a result of recovering populations.

So there were a lot of diesel powered yachts generating power throughout the day. Something that was pretty common back then as an adjunct (and much rarer now) were small wind generators. Seemingly you could choose between noise and power output because the fancier ones made a racket and the quieter ones always seemed to be on boats idling their engines all the time anyway. When we entered anchorages, we'd make sure to avoid being near the loud ones. I can't imagine what it would have been like living with one.

Hydrogenerators weren't very common (they're a bit more common now) but my dad was given an old 12V tape drive motor by a friend and I remember him letting us help him build a towed generator. The tape drive motor sat on the back of the boat connected to about 20m of rope going to a dinghy propeller on a piece of stainless rod to try keep it underwater. Drilling a hole through the motor shaft with a handheld drill was the most time consuming part of the build. We called it toady (short for towed generator) and watching the input Ammeter on the battery bank go all the way up to 6A on a cloudy day felt like magic. It's part of what made me want to be an electrical engineer as a 10 year old.

Given all that, on a 19ft outboard powered yacht in 2002 a generator probably was the best solution for one voyage.

But it doesn't necessarily follow that you can dismiss the actual underlying field. Within the last five years alone we've gone from the quantum supremacy experiment to multiple groups using multiple technologies to claim QEC code implementations with improved error rates over the underlying qubits. People don't have to be interested in these results, they are rather niche (a little community as you put it), but you shouldn't be uninterested and then write a presentation titled 'Why Quantum Cryptanalysis is Bollocks'.

I get it must be annoying to be someone working in cryptography and always be hearing about QC when there are endless security issues today. It must be tiring to have all these breathless pop-science articles about the quantum future, startups claiming ridiculous timelines to raise money on hype, and business seminars where consultants claim you'll need to be prepared for the quantum revolution changing how business works. I feel the same way.

But you shouldn't let that drive you so far in the opposite direction that you're extrapolating fun small quantum factoring experiments from a decade ago to factoring 1024 bit keys in the year 4000. Or say things like 'This makes the highly optimistic assumption that quantum physics experiments scale linearly... the evidence we have, shown by the lack of progress so far, is that this is not the case'. If we get fault tolerant QC of course it scales linearly and it seems embarrassing as a computer scientist to not understand the difference between constant and asymptote. "Actually, quantum computers are so new and untested that they really qualify as physics experiments"... yeah? And?

None of this is to say that fault-tolerant highly scalable QC implementing Shor's algorithm is just around the corner, I truly believe it's not. But the world of QC is making really interesting advances running some of the coolest experiments around and I find this superior Hossenfelder-like cynicism in the face of real science making real progress so so tiring.

It's this imbalance in bargaining power that the Australian law at least aims to change (and it's why it's administered by the competition and consumer commission).

It's not surprising that users will do that to me. We see plenty of people commenting on HN without reading the article, and that's just based on a text only headline.

I do like Hornblower. I've read all the books more than once, I bought the ITV show, and I even hunted down the Gregory Peck adaptation. To me Hornblower was a deeper character than I might have any right to expect in a historical adventure series, but his repetitive self-loathing in the face of his genius (genuinely a compelling choice) grates after so many books and so many successes and he begins to feel like a caricature of himself.

Like the grandparent, Aubrey and Maturin are my favourite characters in anything I've read. Everyone will tell you how they and their relationship is wonderfully depicted, but it could also have something to do with how many books there are and how often I've re-read them. At this point they're old friends so it'd be disloyal of me not to love them as much as I do.