I felt this was a much better layman explanation of what a quantum computer does than simply saying a quantum computer runs all possible paths in parallel.

A quantum computer is such a macroscopic state.

I don’t claim to understand them though. I have tried.

Maybe what I meant was this: if I perform a quantum experiment where the spin measurement of an electron could be spin up or spin down, the future me would end up in one of two branches: I measure spin up, or I measure spin down. There wouldn’t be any possible world where I measure a superposition of spin up and spin down, because such a a state is going to decohere rapidly. This makes sense. What I’m unable to grasp is that even though the wave function of the universe contains both branches, “I” somehow experience only one of the two branches.

The answer to that I guess if that the two branches are nearly orthogonal they will merrily evolve independent of each other. But somehow “I” only experience only one of them.

Sorry for the rambling. I’m not able to articulate what I don’t understand.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/) goes into this in some depth, and it seems like the right way to think about it is say that "I" in one branch is a different entity than the "I" in a different branch. I have somehow not been able to grok it yet.

And I agree about the naming. I really dislike the name "many worlds interpretation", which seems to imply that we have to postulate the existence of these additional worlds, whereas in fact they are branches of the wavefunction exactly predicted by standard quantum mechanics.

Maybe the train is software that's built by SWEs (w/ or w/o AI help). Specifically built for going from A to B very fast. But not flexible, and takes a lot of effort to build and maintain.

That would force the programmer to remove the std::move, making it clear that its a copy.

auto var = FunctionCall(...);

Then, in the IDE, hover over auto to show what the actual type is, and then replace auto with that type. Useful when the type is complicated, or is in some nested namespace.

Any software engineer who shares this sentiment is doing their career a disservice. LLMs have their pitfalls, and I have been skeptical of their capabilities, but nevertheless I have tried them out earnestly. The progress of AI coding assistants over the past year has been remarkable, and now they are a routine part of my workflow. It does take some getting used to, and effectively using an AI coding assistant is a skill in and of itself that is worth mastering.

For spec driven development to truly work, perhaps what’s needed is a higher level spec language that can express user intent precisely, at the level of abstraction where the human understanding lives, while ensuring that the lower level implementation is generated correctly.

A programmer could then use LLMs to translate plain English into this “spec language,” which would then become the real source of truth.