gdavisson

Classical brute force is embarrassingly parallel, but Grover's algorithm (the quantum version) isn't. To the extent you parallelize it, you lose the quantum advantage, which means that to speed it up by a factor of N, you need N^2 processors. The article discusses this in detail, and calculates that "This means we’ll need 140 trillion quantum circuits of 724 logical qubits each operating in parallel for 10 years to break AES-128 with Grover’s."

Except that sometimes chasing these unicorn entitles leads to... finding the unicorn entities.

That's basically what happened with the neutrino. Neutrinos were originally proposed in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli to solve apparent violations of energy and momentum conservation in beta decay. He suggested that the missing energy and momentum were being carried off by some additional -- undetected and mostly undetectable -- particle. For a while, it looked like these proposed ghost particles might never be detectable, but Fred Reines finally managed it... in 1956, 26 years later.

So don't write off unicorn particles. Sometimes they're real, even if you have trouble detecting them.

Brackets are used in shell wildcard ("glob") expressions. For example, if you try to use "[bar]" as a command, the shell will first look for files named "b", "a", and "r" in the current directory, and if it finds any it'll use the first one as the command name and any others as arguments to it.

But as far as I can see, using a close-bracket as the first character in a command is safe, since it cannot be treated as part of such a pattern. Open-bracket (without a matching close-bracket) would work in many shells, but will get you a "bad pattern" error in zsh.

True, but since everyone in the study -- both those with and without diagnosed COVID-19 infections -- had been subject to this, it shouldn't affect the results. Essentially, they're comparing people who were just trapped indoors vs those who were trapped indoors and also had diagnosed COVID-19 infections (and they also broke the infected group down by severity of infection, what variant was prevalent when they were infected, etc).

Photons are their own antiparticle, so this is not an issue.

I (vaguely) remember playing games with terminal echoback on physical terminals back in the early-mid 1980s when I was in college. This was on a VAX/VMS system.

Someone (I don't remember who did what here) discovered that they could get `SHOW SYSTEM` (roughly analogous to unix `ps` command) to display their name in reverse video by adding escape sequences to their process name. So a bunch of us started experimenting to see what else we could embed in there.

Most of the terminals attached to the VAX were Zenith Z-19s, which mostly emulated DEC VT-52s but with some added features. One of those added features was an enablable 25th line (in addition to the regular 24x80 display) that functioned as a sort of status line. We found we could enable that, write something into it, then use the "transmit 25th line" escape sequence to send its contents back to the VAX. I remember having to work around limitations like it sending an escape sequence before the 25th line (which confused VMS), and I think it didn't send a carriage return at the end... or something like that.

I don't think we ever got it to do anything terribly interesting, but it was fun to play with. And then IIRC a VMS update blocked control characters in the `SHOW SYSTEM` listing.

That's what I do. I have one account ("Apple ID") for iCloud, and a separate one for music and App Store purchases.

A couple of caveats, though: Apple encourages using the same account for everything, and their interfaces try to autopilot you into that setup. You have to pay attention, and find & choose the "I'll set it up myself" options. Also, Apple uses email addresses as the name/identifier for Apple IDs, so to set up multiple IDs, you need multiple email addresses. iCloud includes an optional email account, do it's easy to use that for the iCloud account yourself and your personal email address for the other.

Which reminds me: don't tie your personal stuff (iCloud, purchases, whatever) to an Apple ID under your company email address. If it's stuff you should keep after leaving your current job, it should be under an Apple ID that's tied to an email address you'll still have after leaving the job. On the other hand, for things that're part of the job (e.g. apps purchased by the company for the job), it should be under an Apple ID "owned by" the company and tied to a company-controlled email address.

I find that the `pbpaste | something | pbcopy` idiom is common enough that it's worth having a shell function for it:

  pbfilter() {
      if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
          pbpaste | "$@" | pbcopy
      else
          pbpaste | pbcopy
      fi
  }       

Then you can use something like `pbfilter json_pp` or `pbfilter base64 -d` or `pbfilter sed 's/this/that/'` or whatever.

This version also can also act as a plain-text-only filter. If you just use `pbfilter` with no argument, it'll remove any formatting from the text in the pasteboard, leaving just straight plain text.

It does have a some limitations, though: you can't use it with an alias, or pipeline, or anything complex like that. The filter command must be a single regular command (or function) and its arguments.