Who here missed https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/12/researchers-c...
Put simply: the breakthrough here (not related to the IBM news in parent link) massively cuts the physical qubits needed to do error-correcting (in the pursuit of logical qubits). What they demonstrated in this regard was vastly more efficient (more than the 1000:1 industry benchmark, though it's not apples to apples) than the current state of the art (as well as what IBM is hoping to achieve in its next generation chip). It seems to have pulled game-changing quantum computing years closer to reality.
The paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06927-3
Sorry if it's seen as off topic, my standalone submission on it didn't generate discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38705445