Try a full reboot. If that doesn’t work, throw your laptop in the nearest body of water and leave it for 24 hours, then send to IT.

It’s all about how it’s managed by IT. A dedicated enough IT department can ruin an Apple computer, though usually not to the same degree. (I also had the Great Reuters Trackpad Freakout of 2024 yesterday..)

But the company is hopeful that it has found an approach that it will work. And that's why Google did not give a headline number of logical qubits, which they said would land between 10-20 with the current chip. But Google said it's more focused on finding an approach that will scale.

The key breakthrough was finding an array arrangement of qubits such that Google can continuously scale up the number of qubits and drive error rates down. Google say sit still has several orders of magnitude reduction to go before its next milestone.

Today, Google said it has made another breakthrough in quantum computing, solving a problem in a few minutes that would take somewhere between a billion years and longer than the age of the universe on a classical machine - www.reuters.com/technology/g...

I’m at the IEDM conference in San Francisco today and tomorrow - if you want to talk process tech, come find me!

Wow, that sucks! I should probably be more paranoid!

Oh no, that is awful! How did it happen? At a gig?

My biggest ever regret was selling the first really nice guitar I ever owned - an American Standard Strat in Lake Placid Blue - to help fund a Les Paul Classic during a heavy metal phase.

This is a story a lot of reporters have been chasing:

Starting in 2015, a massive cyberespionage campaign targeted some of America's most prominent environmentalists.

Now, we can reveal that the FBI has been probing whether a longtime Exxon lobbyist was involved.

www.reuters.com/business/ene...

We have yet to see the last of the major grants, so we also do not yet know who else will get a haircut to adjust for this DoD contract. TSMC did not. Will Samsung? Will smaller firms get shaved? (end)

So Intel had been in line for $8.5 billion in grants. Instead, it ended up w/ a $7.86 billion grant, and a $3 billion DoD contract. We know very little about that contract (it's classified) so we don't know how comparable it is to the CHIPS Act money, or what Intel's costs will be to fulfill it.

@politico.com did a lot of reporting on how nearly 10% of money that was supposed to revitalize the U.S. chip industry got re-routed to a defense project - it was essentially at Intel's behest, according to Politico's reporting -

www.politico.com/news/2024/05...

...so a danger in having specialized "defense only" factories is they'll either go out of date very quickly compared to commercial fabs, and/or be incredibly expensive. I'm not here to settle that debate, but I will point out that it was controversial to see a defense program funded by CHIPS Act.

...or specialized facilities that only do defense work. As most folks in the chip industry will tell you, the demand from the defense sector is just not that large compared to the broader industry, and if you'll recall, the chip industry is all about scale....

This was framed in some quarters as a stumble for Intel, but I've been wondering whether it was instead a masterstroke of political engineering. There's been a long-running debate about whether it's better to build a defense supply chain from commercial fabs...

This shave off was expected, and was in part due to Intel winning a large contract with the Defense Department for $3 billion that came out of the same pot of federal money - www.reuters.com/technology/i...

Earlier today, the US government finalized its cash grant award to Intel, which came it at $7.86 billion, a lower figure than the preliminary announcement of $8.5 billion:

www.reuters.com/technology/u...

And here's a demo (with what sounds like an AI generated Jensen Huang voiceover?) - www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj1S...

Nvidia has demonstrated a model that can generate new sounds and music from a range of inputs - including existing audio: www.reuters.com/technology/a...

Nvidia is still forecasting growth, but it's lower than some had hoped, mostly because of supply issues - story with @chernandburn.bsky.social and Arsheeya Bajwa over at @reuters.com - www.reuters.com/technology/a...

tap tap....this on? Hi, Stephen here, covering semiconductors and technology for Reuters.