iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Fun fact: a presidential order alone cannot change something like the name of the “Lake Ontario National Marine Sanctuary” sanctuaries.noaa.gov/lake-ontario/

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Experiencing Die Kaffeebohnenfehlkaufmorgenverzweiflung

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

It does not end there: more highly scited papers in quantum information saw AI play a major role, solving long-standing problems, like the ones about the two-copy distillability of Werner states, something I worked on in my academic past.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

All the top papers on Scirate saw AI play some role, in some cases a major one. These screenshots are from the top 4 papers, in order. A major role played by AI in at least three of them.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Filed under “Correlation is not causation”

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

How sudden&extreme is exponential growth, you ask? This is an equal-aspect plot of exp(x), with limits -1000 and 1000 for both the x and y axes. Fun fact: this graph was generated from the browser bar, by just asking for it

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

The "original" Bitcoin Rainbow Price Chart would instead say that "Bitcoin is dead"

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

"The NEW Bitcoin Rainbow2023 Chart" confidently suggests that now is the time to "BUY!" 👀

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

I miss the good old times when the worst that happened was renaming the Gulf of Mexico.

Tin Tin meme

“What a presidency it has been, huh?”
“This was just the 1st year, captain.”

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Immigration is the issue on which Trump had the best approval ratings but is currently dragging his polls down

Net approval of Trump on various issues, by Silver

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

How are things going one year after, you ask? They are in the clear. Meaning, in the ratings graph there is a white gap between the disapproval band and the approval band.

Approval (42.0%) and disapproval (55.1%) of Donald Trump, from Silver Bulletin

Net approval (-13.1%) of Donald Trump, from Silver Bulletin

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Physicists: we should counter the impression that quantum mechanics is weird and inaccessible to ordinary people; anybody with sufficient interest and ready to put in the effort can learn quantum mechanics Also physicists:

PRX Quantum social media post, saying

“A new Monte Carlo method computes stabilizer Rényi entropy and reveals nontrivial magic behavior at quantum criticality.”

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Chuckling at this breakdown of the Vatican City resident population

Breakdown of the resident population of the Vatican City from Wiipedia

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Correlation does not imply causation but I am afraid of my own power

Recent Trump post:

Boeing should default China for not taking the beautifully finished planes that China committed to purchase. This is just a small example of what China has done to the USA, for years... And, by the way, Fentanyl continues to pour into our Country from China, through Mexico and Canada, killing hundreds of thousands of our people, and it better stop, NOW!

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Trump’s appeal to Putin sounds very similar to me turning off a ringing Alexa alarm.

Donald J. Trump Posts Fr... &
@TrumpDailyPosts
Follow
I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP!
5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace
Deal DONE!
From Donald Trump Truth Social 04/24/25 08:24
AM
8:26 AM • Apr 24, 2025 • 3.4M Views

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

There is a lesson here: if you Putin the effort, you can achieve a lot - like almost flipping the approval ratings - in a short time.

Nate Silver’s charts about the approval / disapproval ratings for Donald Trump

Nate Silver’s chart about the net approval rating for Donald Trump

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Correlation is not causation but…

Fox News headline:

BREAKING
1936-2025
Vatican says Pope Francis has passed away the day after meeting VP Vance on
Easter

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

What some people do not seem to understand is that the U.S. under Trump has lost the trust of other countries and (further) damaged the status of leader of the Western World. It does not matter whether tariffs go / stay down. This is particularly true for Canada.

Isle in a Canadian grocery store, with many Canadian flag tags

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

I have recently looked into Fibonacci coverings, and it is hard not to play with them to create cool images. Plotted with @matplotlib.org

Fibonacci covering of the plane with grey colormap

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Facebook reminded me of this rolling multi-ad billboard in Glasgow, Scotland, 7 years ago.

Ad warning about obesity as cause of cancer

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Whenever one feels Musk has reached rock bottom, he plays The Boring Company card.

Musk replying with “You are a traitor” to former astronaut Senator Kelly on X, because of Kelly’s push to continue to support Ukraine.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

"Contrary to others, Putin asked nicely", President Trump commented before announcing the new change

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

TFW the grift is so badly evident that they have to post an addendum

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

That would go against their own policies. Note that any free-of-charge arrangement of the kind normally happens only at check-in. Are you discussing something that happened already or the current interim seating for a future flight? If the latter it should be fixed later 🤞 www.klm.ca/information/...

• kIm.ca
= KiM
Sitting next to your kids
Travelling as a family? Children up to and including 14 years old that have their own seat will always sit next to an adult from your group. We'll assign the seats free of charge during the check-in. Of course, you're welcome to select seats for your family at an earlier stage to ensure you're all seated together.
If you're travelling with a baby, we will select the most comfortable seating areas for your safety and convenience. Your child may travel on your lap if they are younger than 2 years old on both your departing and return flight. Each adult is permitted to travel with 2 babies.
However, only 1 baby may sit on your lap.
Please contact us to book an extra seat for the other.
Please note 1 adult can travel with a maximum of 12 children under 15 years old.
Read more about seat options

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Happy Valentine’SS Day! (Image not by me; I wish!)

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

“Gulf of North America” or “North-American Gulf” would probably be best. Another option is “Gulf of AmericaS”. Hard to take away a new toy, though.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

BREAKING In a meeting with top officials and the U.S. president, Musk has proposed to create a nuclear deterrent in the form of what appears to be called a “doomsday machine”. Details are lacking but a photo has leaked of him thanking the audience at the end of the meeting.

Dr Strangelove making the Nazi salute, with Musk’s face substituted

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

- Canada is still in some limbo, w tariffs just on hold - Canada must become more independent from the U.S., particularly given their capricious president - the relationship is damaged We are in a new phase of Canadian history Those stickers are more than labeling and will stay

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

I will remember this as the moment I became a conspiracy theorist.

Tweet saying:

The baffling insistence on Canada becoming the 51st state makes—| won't say "sense", but certainly
"more sense"—when you know that while Elon Musk is not a natural-born US citizen, he is a natural-born Canadian citizen.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

I have seen politicians claiming that Canada has a huge leverage on the U.S. as large importer of U.S. goods. I do not know whether they are fooling also themselves or only the public, as there is a enormous imbalance when it comes to the relevance of the exports of one country to the other.

ChatGPT 40 >
Create a table comparing the value of exports from Canada to
U.S. and from U.S. to Canada.
Include:
- the % of Canadian exports to the U.S. as % of total Canadian exports
- the % of Canadian exports to the U.S. as % of Canadian GDP
- the same as the two points above for U.S. exports to
Canada

Table of exports from Canada to the U.S. and vice versa as % of total exports and as % of GDP.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Meanwhile, in Canada: Framed photo displayed by a local art gallery 😬

Photo with juxtaposition of a “Danger due to” sign and the word “America” on a truck

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Could knowledgeable people confirm whether there really was a brief period of time during which Biden was the still president and Vance was the vice-president?

ChatGPT says:

In the United States, the transition of power during the presidential inauguration follows a specific constitutional process:
1. The vice president-elect becomes the official vice president
immediately after taking their oath of office.
2. Until the president-elect takes their oath of office, the outgoing president remains the official president.
Thus, in the period between the oath of the new vice president and the oath of the new president:
• The new vice president (sworn in) is officially the vice president.
• The outgoing president retains their authority as the president until the new president is sworn in.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Chances are this is the most Canadian thing you are going to see today

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Another straightforward weight loss, just after the holiday season’s weight gain! And a new water bottle, perfect for a sporty vampire 🧛‍♂️ ! Please consider donating 🩸

Canadian Blood Services water bottle and sign

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

It takes time – the migration time – to safely and correctly migrate cybersystems to quantum-safe solutions. Given that attackers can “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” sensitive data, the fact that a CRQC is, say, 15 years away should not be cause for complacency.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

… which in turn means that last polls have provided a consistent likelihood estimate in absolute time: ~2040 is roughly the time when you might consider that a CRQC begins to be more likely to exist than not.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

When it comes to our polls, focusing on a stable set of respondents for the past three years and averaging the likelihood estimates, one finds that the average likelihood estimates have grown from survey to survey, when considering timeframes…

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

On the other hand, there are some important points to make. First, there is wide variability in the estimates of the pool of experts, which again reminds us of the challenge faced in developing quantum computers and of the unavoidable uncertainties.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

… and this is an alternative view, where one can perhaps see more clearly the shift in the estimated likelihood, from timeframe to timeframe.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

… we only consider relatively widely separated timeframes, while asking the expert to pick coarse-grained likelihood estimates, e.g. <1%, <5%, <30%, etc. This is a graph of the response distribution by timeframe and likelihood bin…

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

The core of the report – now in its sixth year! – is a survey of worldwide leaders and experts in the field of quantum computing research. 32 respondents participated in 2024.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang's comments yesterday about the timeframe for “very useful quantum computers” make today as good a day as any to share some points of the @gri and @evolutionq Quantum Threat Timeline Report for 2024, published in December.

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Amazing what a quick comment by the CEO of Nvidia can trigger

Big drop in the price of two quantum stocks

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Fun(?) fact: according to the estimates by Forbes, the four wealthiest billionaires together own assets that are worth more than a trillion USD. Also: you can quickly acquire approx as much wealth as Musk simply by having every living American give you 1,000 USD. Easy.

Screenshot of the top 4 wealthiest billionaires, with names and respective wealth, as provided by the list curated by Forbes

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

The “Canada Post Team team” is still hard at work! If you are not receiving mail and packages it is not because of some fictional strike. It’s more likely because of some bad zip code.

Screenshot of a scam message claiming to come from the “Canada Post Team team”

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Acceleration that you may feel with your body

Pigeon/butterfly meme about pausing infectious-disease research for 8 years not exactly being accelerationist

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Marco Piani @marcopiani.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Amazon is implementing some more restrictions on the use of its Rufus AI. As we all know, the ability to compute the factorial is essential for shopping, so Rufus is allowed to help.

Screenshot of an interaction with the Rufus AI showing its refusal to provide Python code for the factorial

Screenshot of an interaction with the Rufus AI showing it providing Python code for the factorial, as the request for the Python implementation was made “for shopping”

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