Hello. My name is Shashvat. I am from Singapore and India. I am doing a PhD in Quantum Computer Science at University College London. I am currently a ...
There are some injustices we are living through today and some that we remember from history, that we commemorate. We rally behind the victims to show them support, to remember what they have suffered so that these things are never repeated again. In all of history just think about the many small countries, sultanates, kingdoms, duchies, tribes, religions, races, etc - against which serious…
Some months ago I was having happy hour oysters at Gibson , after I had just finished reading Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene - a book about environmental issues in Singapore. I asked our friend, the bartender, where the oysters were from - and with second hand passion for oysters from the sister bar Humpback downstairs he informed me that they were probably from the US West Coast. I…
This post has some resources for understanding Ion Trap quantum computers at the "story level". The ion trap is a chip placed in a vacuum chamber that uses electromagnetic fields to hold ions in position floating just above the chip. Two energy levels of each ion act as the two levels of the qubit. Gates and measurements can be applied to the ion by laser pulses. Two-qubit gates in particular…
Quantum computers can be more efficient than classical computers on some tasks. Quantum computers cannot simply take any classical computational task and reduce its time to completion. A computational task can be solved more efficiently by a quantum computer only in some special circumstances, such as when the task can be translated to a quantum mechanics problem which is what quantum computers…
The following was my speech at Joy Wang 's Teck Whye Convention (5th Edition). It concerns two topics: Our misidentification of technological progress with high technology as opposed to the broad adoption of techne or technique. How to assemble a browsing bookshelf to repel surveillance capitalism I want to take this occasion to give a fully written talk. I think this subject and this venue is far…
What are stablecoins? Fiat-backed cryptocurrencies, e.g. USDT and USDC . The idea: The price of cryptocurrencies fluctuates a lot. This is undesirable for a medium of exchange and for a store of value. Design question: How can we combine familiar and stable fiat currencies with decentralised ledger technology? Solution: Tokens are issued by a private company on various distributed blockchains…
There is this joke in academia: “don’t stress about writing your thesis, because no one will read it”. I’m writing my thesis but I know someone who will read it. Someone who will not just read it, but compare it to their encyclopaedic knowledge of everything else in the world and if I said something novel, they will remember the few bits of insight that they got from reading my thesis. I’m talking…
"Is there any point i buying a deepfake NFT with your Bitcoin to impress your AI girlfriend during a VR date?" In this post I talk about the different shades of reality, and use it to look at why fiat, gold and cryptocurrencies are “real” in different senses. Shades of reality I think the essence of reality is objectivity, or mind-independence . Another essence of the concept of reality is to…
Computer voice is getting awesome Text-to-speech is now allowing less robotic reading voices. This will boost the accessibility of written media. When I talk to voice agents now (particularly, Sesame), I feel some of those feelings that I feel when speaking to a real human. One feeling in particular, is that I feel compelled to speak up to direct the conversation in the direction I want to take it…
Question The Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement emphasizing rationality, science, universalism, and progress . It was a faith in human reason as the tool for understanding the world and improving society. Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual revolt against what it saw as the cold, mechanistic worldview of the Enlightenment. It emphasized emotion, intuition, nature,…