iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Campbell McLauchlan

Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 25/09/2025

Official petition to the 🇦🇺 govt: make part-time PhD students' stipends tax-exempt! www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/... Stipends are low but at least tax-exempt. Unless they go part time, then it becomes taxable. This disproportionately affects PhD students w/ care duties, health issues, young children..

aph.gov.au

e-petitions

11716

Reposted by Campbell McLauchlan

Error Correction Zoo @eczoo.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Peter Shor receives a small gift on the 30th anniversary of his QEC paper at #QEC2025.

0243

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

It's been an amazing week at QEC25 seeing the incredible work people have done in the field over the past couple of years! Abe Jacob did a fantastic job presenting our new work on trivariate tricycle codes, quantum LDPC codes that combine several nice fault-tolerant properties.

1151

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

That's a wrap on the #Coogee25 Sydney Quantum Information Workshop! Thanks to all the brilliant speakers who came to talk about their research!

0152

Reposted by Campbell McLauchlan

Stephen Bartlett @bartlettquantum.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Now with a cool logo! #Coogee2025

0121

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Slaughterhouse 5 was incredibly influential for me when I first read it. Still one of the only novels I've re-read. It's an amazing book!

010

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

A useless but awesome fact from reddit: the range of a trebuchet does not depend on the planet on which you fire it. E.g. on the moon, the initial launch speed is smaller but the gravity pulling the stone to the ground is weaker, and the effects cancel out. (from this blog post: shorturl.at/8AqV8)

030

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Couldn't there be highly-energetic, stable, complex systems in a universe without significant energy dissipation? With slow energy dissipation there would be slow energy exchange between systems which could maybe lead to stability?

000

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

With this year's big successes in quantum error-correction, is a Nobel prize somewhere down the track? (Or maybe one for quantum computing more broadly?) If so, who would be on the list of possible recipients?

010

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

I hear rumours about Brisbane 2032...

000

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

You're thinking of "poll vultures" which are news outlets that, around election time, report constantly on the polls to maintain uninterrupted coverage

100

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

3.9bl in 1986 to 93.4bl in 1991. Although I think it's hard to agree with everything in the book, it is a fascinating description of a tumultuous and very relevant period of history.

100

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

None of them really wanted to be heading up a coup. - Interestingly, you can see continuity between the Russian nationalist reaction to Ukraine's declaration of independence and Putin's claims at the start of the invasion. - A simple demo of reform failing: the number of rubles printed grew from

100

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

This is an incredibly well-researched account of how the Soviet Union fell apart. The main argument is that the collapse was not inevitable and it was helped along tremendously by Gorbachev's reforms. Some interesting tidbits: - The August 91 coup plotters were a nervous shambles from the start.

110

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Can't wait for your reaction to tomorrow's connections! (love from Australia)

020

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Additionally, while comparing the X3Z3 code numerically to the CSS Floquet code and two honeycomb code variants, we found some interesting features about the performance of those previously existing codes under biased noise models.

000

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

The bad (but interesting) news: you seemingly can't do as well as bias-tailored surface codes (or color codes). We relate this to symmetries and back this up with no-go theorems for Floquet codes suggesting the X3Z3 code might be optimal.

100

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

The good news: just as in the surface code, you find better thresholds and sub-threshold scaling using the X3Z3 code compared to other Floquet codes. You can also find bias-preserving measurement circuits.

100

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Okay obligatory paper meme: Recently Setiawan, at Riverlane, and I released a preprint on how to tailor Floquet codes to noise that is biased towards, say, Z errors. This "X3Z3 Floquet code" could improve performance on architectures using, e.g. the heavy-hex lattice. www.arxiv.org/abs/2411.04974

151

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

0 should always be at the top! Change my mind. Also while we're at it, world maps should be oriented South-up.

110

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

The Philosophize this podcast put me onto this essay. Love it! The podcast and the essay.

000

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

I'm loving Kant here: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another... Have courage to use your own understanding! That is the motto of enlightenment." From What is Enlightenment?

130

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Would there be any observational consequences if the universe were in a mixed state rather than a pure state? This might be a question for the quantum reference frames crowd. But if not, then the distinction might just be metaphysical speculation.

010

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Do cosmologists think in terms of maps on density matrices at all (Genuine question)? I thought it was all like scalar inflaton fields etc etc

110

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

I wrote a blog post on the Shor code for the non-expert back in the day! Not sure how successful I was at making it understandable, but it was fun to write. More QEC education in unis and elsewhere is a great thing! universealacarte.blogspot.com/2020/08/code...

universealacarte.blogspot.com

Codes and Demons: Are Quantum Computers Possible?

A physics blog for people curious about the universe, covering topics from quantum computing to black holes and everything in between.

070