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Reposted by Campbell McLauchlan

Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 13d

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..

e-petitions

www.aph.gov.au

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Reposted by Campbell McLauchlan

Error Correction Zoo @eczoo.bsky.social · Aug 13

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

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Aug 16

You can read our paper here! arxiv.org/abs/2508.08191

Single-Shot Decoding and Fault-tolerant Gates with Trivariate Tricycle Codes

While quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes are a low-overhead means of quantum information storage, it is valuable for quantum codes to possess fault-tolerant features beyond this resource e...

arxiv.org

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Aug 16

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.

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Feb 14

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

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Reposted by Campbell McLauchlan

Stephen Bartlett @bartlettquantum.bsky.social · Feb 9

Now with a cool logo! #Coogee2025

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Reposted by Campbell McLauchlan

Timo Hillmann @timohillmann.bsky.social · Feb 10

@mattmcewen.bsky.social kicking of #Coogee25.

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Feb 9

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!

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Jan 28

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)

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 27

This is really cool though!

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 23

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?

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 23

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?

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 23

I hear rumours about Brisbane 2032...

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 23

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

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 22

More thoughts here: www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Campbell McLauchlan's review of Collapse

4/5: "...the Soviet Union fell victim to a perfect storm and a hapless captain." The main argument of this book is that the collapse of the enormous USSR was not inevitable and was helped along treme...

www.goodreads.com

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 22

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.

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 22

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

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 22

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.

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 12

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

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 10

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.

Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 10

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.

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 10

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.

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 10

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

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 6

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

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Campbell McLauchlan @universal-soup.bsky.social · Dec 5

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