Surprisingly sparse on <i>actual information</i> considering all this humble-bragging (actually, not even so humble) about how he was teaching peasants to catch fish for 20 years, to be forced yet again to hand it out with his own bare hands! Well, he didn't hand out much.<p>The post reiterates some facts from the original statement, which are pretty vague for most, I believe. The only useful clarification is that simulation results are indeed unverifiable, lol (as some might have suspected, but still nice to have a definitive confirmation from somebody who is supposedly an expert on this).<p>Then it addresses the cringeworthy "Everettian multiverse" statement discussion. Granted, it indeed was one of the most discussed things on the previous thread, but I have honestly assumed that it's so obviously moot that one can simply ignore it. Everyone knows that at least one of top-3 threads on HN comments must be either a lame joke or some sort of bikeshedding argument.<p>And that's pretty much it. "This blogger said this usual generic words, that reporter asked for an interview, but I declined, also, kudos to Google team for amazing work, it's unclear if it's any good, but it surely isn't bad!" Uh, ok, thanks for the clarification, man.<p>I get it that this post was written in a hurry, but given all that "fish-handing" stuff and all these commenters in this very thread complaining about how they don't know the difference between "trapped-ion or neutral-atom" qubits (as if this distinction was the very essence of the post, which author paid much more attention to than to his responses to NYT journalists) it just doesn't deliver.<p>...So, what did I expect? Well, I didn't expect anything, but let's state the obvious. Google's benchmark was to produce some very specific (and unverifiable) random distribution (which, BTW, he <i>kinda</i> says, but waaay less clearly than it could have been said). Obviously, nobody cares about that. Everyone cares about when they will be able to run Shor's algorithm on Google's Chip, and factor primes and deprecate RSA into oblivion. <i>Obviously</i>. Some may wonder why it's not possible to do it on that Willow thing, others may suspect that it may have something to do with the fact they need a ton of "physical" qubits to emulate logical qubits because of error-correction. Also, it is widely advertised, that the very thing that is special about Willow is vastly better (and somehow "more promising to scale") error-correction. So, what people really want from a generous and skillful fisherman is obviously some critical, appropriately-speculative, ELI5-style analysis of the updated state of the art. What does Willow have, what does it need to become practical, what are some realistic projections on when we can get there. Where is all of that? Where is the fucking fish?!