425: Ruby in the Rough

Episode Links

• Sorbet Compiler — For the past year, the Sorbet team has been working on an experimental, ahead-of-time compiler for Ruby, powered by Sorbet and LLVM. Today we’re sharing the source code for it.
• Patrick Collison on Twitter — We’re big believers in multi-year infrastructure bets. After a few years of Ruby infra work, our in-house Ruby compiler is now 22–170% faster than Ruby’s default implementation for Stripe’s production API traffic. If interested in working on such problems, we’re hiring!
• Sorbet · A static type checker for Ruby — Sorbet is 100% compatible with Ruby. It type checks normal method definitions, and introduces backwards-compatible syntax for method signatures.
• Time crystals — But time crystals want to be coherent. So putting them inside a quantum computer, and using them to conduct computer processes could potentially serve an incredibly important function: ensuring quantum coherence.
• White paper: Observation of Time-Crystalline Eigenstate Order on a Quantum Processor — Here we implement a continuous family of tunable CPHASE gates on an array of superconducting qubits to experimentally observe an eigenstate-ordered DTC. We demonstrate the characteristic spatiotemporal response of a DTC for generic initial states. Our work employs a time-reversal protocol that discriminates external decoherence from intrinsic thermalization, and leverages quantum typicality to circumvent the exponential cost of densely sampling the eigenspectrum. In addition, we locate the phase transition out of the DTC with an experimental finite-size analysis. These results establish a scalable approach to study non-equilibrium phases of matter on current quantum processors.
• First ‘Time Crystal’ Built Using Google’s Quantum Computer
• Time crystals could be the miracle quantum computing needs
• The end of open source? — I think the “hypocrite commits” contretemps is symptomatic, on every side, of related trends that threaten the entire extended open-source ecosystem and its users. That ecosystem has long wrestled with problems of scale, complexity and free and open-source software’s (FOSS) increasingly critical importance to every kind of human undertaking.
• Facebook allegedly tried to buy Pegasus spyware to track iPhone users — The Facebook representatives stated that Facebook was concerned that its method for gathering user data through Onavo Protect was less effective on Apple devices than on Android devices,” Hulio said in his declaration.