For the past year and a half, the US administration have plunged the country in a rule of law twilight zone: the rule of law still exists, and there are still independent jurisdictions to enforce it, but the administration decided they didn't care, and they just overcome any court dismissal of their orders with a new illegal order that courts will have to push back a few month later.
Which means that, in practice, the US isn't governed by the rule of law anymore, but by the whim of the Czar's court.
The future of the US depends on these people being held accountable by the next administration, and structural reforms to make their abuses harder to do again in the future.
This won't happen. Mostly because the next administration that is a counter to this current administration won't happen. The electoral process in the US is effectively cooked.
That's the big worry now. We've got to wait to find out if we still have a democracy or not. They're trying to stop us from being able to vote them out of power. Even if they're unsuccessful it just means we have a chance to put things right, but the democrats are the party of the status quo and I haven't really seen them stepping up and promising accountability.
Being held accountable in the next administration is pretty much the opposite of what a democratic society needs. It's a never ending cycle. Let the court system handle this.
Not GP, but in this context I would interpret the next administration[^1] holding the current administration to account as a willingness to use the court system to prosecute actual crimes committed while in office[^2].
That is by no means a given.
[^1]: Assuming there is one.
[^2]: That is, not petulantly prosecuting those deemed to have slighted you.
SCOTUS has already given POTUS immunity in any form other than impeachment followed by a conviction. The problem with that is that just removes POTUS from office. It does nothing to punish for those crimes that were deemed worthy enough of being impeached/convicted. SCOTUS said that POTUS cannot be held accountable for things done as official acts of office. So Congress cannot hold POTUS criminally accountable, but removed from office to stop the criminal acts. Once POTUS becomes a citizen they are free. At this point, I can only see where the newly sworn POTUS would use their new pardon power to end the question as well.
However, all of this is very far away from the legality of quantum computing
> SCOTUS has already given POTUS immunity in any form other than impeachment followed by a conviction.
That's not exactly accurate and that nuanced difference may be the key to holding the executive branch accountable, now that we're in this disastrous state of the world.
The courts are either ignoring the problem, supporting the problem, or just being ignored. They courts themselves have no power to enforce their rulings. The ones that would enforce the courts decisions are doing what the Trump tells them to.
The problem is, the current admin has shown how pliable the courts are. And, this weakens them, in that, there is less of a belief of impartiality.
Conjoin that with AI able to generate billions of videos, saying anything anyone wants, and you have a real issue. 99.99% of the population can't tell or even realises much of what they watch on youtube is AI, and... it will get less distinguishable, to the point that no one, at all, will be able to tell.
Not you, I, or anyone at all.
There are already endless AI personalities on youtube, each building followers. If I wanted to upset the apple cart, I'd spawn 1000 or more "people", each with a different appearance and manner of speaking. All would dance to my tune, and all would be the most honest, trustworthy source possible.
Until, of course, I wanted to upset the apple cart. Then I'd ensure that all these personalities, insisted that all the court decisions post-office, are lies, mistruths, and designed to punish and harm and "take out the right's power".
Imagine if you have someone you've watched for 2 years. On hundreds of points, they've been blisteringly honest, never lying, always truthful. Then?
On this one thing, they manipulate you.
Who do you trust? The most honest person you've ever seen, or the impartiality of the courts?
This is the sort of long game you can play with fake personalities. No disloyalty. No breaking ranks. No bad days, or mistakes.
I've fought for a free internet. I've fought for the right to anonymous posting. To be a voice, without an identity. But? That time is over, or we won't have a democracy. I've pivoted 180, I cannot see a democratic society with this level of manipulation continuing.
Yup. There is no authority that is going to swoop in and hold them accountable, there is no legal recourse to be had from any court currently in existence. No one is going to save us but ourselves.
The previous admin also ruled via executive order. It said it would find ways to do things even if struck down by the SCOTUS such as the school loan forgiveness, firearms controls, speech suppression via “embeds” etc.
I recall this precedent was set previously under Biden (likely sooner).
Biden admin lost CDC eviction prohibitions case and immediately enacted new slightly different prohibition and Biden defended the effort as it would take time to be stopped.
“Whether that option will pass constitutional measure with this administration, I can’t tell you. I don’t know,” Biden said. “There are a few scholars who say it will, and others who say it’s not likely to. But, at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are in fact behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”
Bernie Sanders warned right when the second Trump admin started that the country was effectively an olygarchy https://youtu.be/79KDKWEOJ1s. I wrote https://xd1.dev/2025/09/not-buying-american-anymore that made Frontpage here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277346 discussing the consequences of an irresponsible admin through the lenses of consumer rights. It's nice that now we are seeing more widespread acceptance of the fact that US isn't behaving like a democracy anymore, even though it's a bit too little too late
>That technology overlaps only partially, at best, with what’s used in quantum processors.
Dunno, how can you say that for sure when we don't actually know how to make a practical quantum processor? The bigger issue is that we are scaling up manufacturing of approaches that have not been made to work.
I remember a meeting where the project manager pointed out that we were due to send some test boards to a customer. I pointed out that we didn't have a design yet. The PM then asked why we couldn't send them some boards anyway. I suggested that since the boards wouldn't work that we could just cut out some green cardboard and add some component shapes with a magic marker thus saving significant time and effort.
It turned out that I was not as funny as I thought I was...
The funding isn't going towards some hypothetical future practical quantum processor, it is going towards existing approaches that we know have different technology, manufacturing processes, and most importantly different applications than the Chips Act was targeting. Funding quantum computing research might be a good thing, but it doesn't make us any less dependent on foreign silicon manufacturing for the countless uses of computer chips across existing industry, which was the purpose of the Chips Act.
Hahaha, hilarious. I could also tell a story or two like that.
I have to say, though, I have no idea what the management is thinking when they hire such clueless PMs. Even worse, I have seen clueless product owners who had no idea about the domain we were in. I guess a recent example could be Ive designing the Luce.
Maybe I am just envious. Maybe I just wish I could BS my way through life like these characters do.
There's nothing to envy. They're a hired punching bag to put distance between you and the management.
In most cases, even the PM doesn't know this. They were specifically selected to not think too deeply. Anything you say that is brutally correct and they take the wrong way is received as mean and arrogant. Those incidents give management some ammunition if they ever want to get rid of you.
I suppose it’d be in the details. Like, are they locked into that investment, or is it something with checkpoints and milestones that let them bail out after a year and a few mil? What’s the ownership structure of any new ip? Etc.
It’s easy to drop a story like this, get a win for investing in the future, and then quietly disassemble it as soon as the cameras turn away.
Or, it would be easy, if this administration didn’t consider laws beneath them.
Its all made up computation to fit the problem exactly. No real progress has been made in decades.
"Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed using sleight-of-hand numbers that have been selected to make them very easy to factorise using a physics experiment and, by extension, a VIC-20, an abacus, and a dog."
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/07/cheating-on-q...
This is just not true. There has been tremendous progress in the field. Starting with google’s experiment in 2019 on showing quantum advantage - admittedly on a useless problem, but quantum advantage nevertheless, to fault tolerant encodings by the Harvard group to recent demonstrations of a road toward advantage in generative models by goggle, to name a few. It’s still far away from running Shor’s algorithm to factor relevant numbers and break RSA and the like, but even there dramatic progress is being made, see, e.g., https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665
> "could argue that it has been harmed by the diversion of the funds to a different field. But that argument would likely take so long to sort out in court that all the money would have been spent by then."
So if I steal from someone and spend it fast enough, I wouldn't be responsible anymore and can get away with it? That's how that sounded to me.
there is not yet a single approach to quantum computing that is provably scalable. so called experts may quibble, the uninformed (or financially aligned) will bloviate, bluster, and talking point us to death. but it's sadly just true. we're closer to useful fusion power than useful QC.
This is a novel for a book. In a race where the rules are broken by some participants, how secure are your own systems when your opponent can access invisible technology long before the others? This should make you think.
disclosure: I have large (to me) investments in quantum.
---
The US needs to keep leading innovations. We have permanently lost the ability to manufacture. For China (and the world) to stay dependent on us, we need to continue pumping out technologies.
Ukraine / Iran / Afghanistan / Vietnam has proved having the biggest baddest military is not that valuable.
They like the payment, and yelling about it while actually not doing anything about it means they get the benefits (as long as their constituents buy it!) while not having to do the actual hard work on take on real risk.
When it blows up, they can even say ‘I told you so!’, often while profiting from it insider trading wise.
Quantum itself is the most scummy, grift-filled industry. Every quantum company is riding the AI/semiconductor hype wave with basically zero revenue prospects or long-term application of the tech. Companies trading at 200x earnings, IONQs CEO claiming to the “next NVIDIA”/“base case is Cisco’s market cap” — just ridiculous.
Is the theme that any direction US tech advances in results in a persistent campaign of negative hit pieces aimed at trying to halt/destroy any achievements? Written by "journalists"/publishers that have never, and will never, say a single negative thing about china? Sure seems like that's the theme.
My understanding for the money to be "illegally allocated", the court system would have to declare it so.
The article do not mention any lawsuits that overturn the allocation, just a couple senators disagreeing with the interpretation of the law. The senate does not interpret the law, but the judicial branch.
> But a member of the US Congress is now arguing that those deals are illegal, as Congress did not allocate the money for this purpose—instead, it was meant to support public research in semiconductors.
That is the theme. Illegal use of public money. It’s called crony capitalism.
That is basically the theme. You've figured out the actual grift. The crazy thing is how these same magazines will promote actual fake industries like crypto, while demonizing industries that produce actual results like AI. The goal seems to be to get Americans to invest assets into currencies likely already controlled by foreign entities while discouraging them from developing their own potentially revolutionary technology.
I read once that if we really wanted to be secure, we would have a crypto library that was open source, AND all changes needed to be signed off by more than one of NSA, Mossad, FSB, China's agency, etc. This way if there is a bug they find, any agency has to assume other agencies have also found the bug.
A suspicious amount of betting here - from the top of the current administration, down to semi-regular people like that US soldier who profited from his special knowledge recently:
For the past year and a half, the US administration have plunged the country in a rule of law twilight zone: the rule of law still exists, and there are still independent jurisdictions to enforce it, but the administration decided they didn't care, and they just overcome any court dismissal of their orders with a new illegal order that courts will have to push back a few month later.
Which means that, in practice, the US isn't governed by the rule of law anymore, but by the whim of the Czar's court.
The future of the US depends on these people being held accountable by the next administration, and structural reforms to make their abuses harder to do again in the future.
This won't happen. Mostly because the next administration that is a counter to this current administration won't happen. The electoral process in the US is effectively cooked.
That's the big worry now. We've got to wait to find out if we still have a democracy or not. They're trying to stop us from being able to vote them out of power. Even if they're unsuccessful it just means we have a chance to put things right, but the democrats are the party of the status quo and I haven't really seen them stepping up and promising accountability.
Great incentive for a president to do whatever he pleases then just attempt a coup.
Being held accountable in the next administration is pretty much the opposite of what a democratic society needs. It's a never ending cycle. Let the court system handle this.
Not GP, but in this context I would interpret the next administration[^1] holding the current administration to account as a willingness to use the court system to prosecute actual crimes committed while in office[^2].
That is by no means a given.
[^1]: Assuming there is one.
[^2]: That is, not petulantly prosecuting those deemed to have slighted you.
SCOTUS has already given POTUS immunity in any form other than impeachment followed by a conviction. The problem with that is that just removes POTUS from office. It does nothing to punish for those crimes that were deemed worthy enough of being impeached/convicted. SCOTUS said that POTUS cannot be held accountable for things done as official acts of office. So Congress cannot hold POTUS criminally accountable, but removed from office to stop the criminal acts. Once POTUS becomes a citizen they are free. At this point, I can only see where the newly sworn POTUS would use their new pardon power to end the question as well.
However, all of this is very far away from the legality of quantum computing
> SCOTUS has already given POTUS immunity in any form other than impeachment followed by a conviction.
That's not exactly accurate and that nuanced difference may be the key to holding the executive branch accountable, now that we're in this disastrous state of the world.
The courts are either ignoring the problem, supporting the problem, or just being ignored. They courts themselves have no power to enforce their rulings. The ones that would enforce the courts decisions are doing what the Trump tells them to.
Courts can only handle cases that are brought.
The problem is, the current admin has shown how pliable the courts are. And, this weakens them, in that, there is less of a belief of impartiality.
Conjoin that with AI able to generate billions of videos, saying anything anyone wants, and you have a real issue. 99.99% of the population can't tell or even realises much of what they watch on youtube is AI, and... it will get less distinguishable, to the point that no one, at all, will be able to tell.
Not you, I, or anyone at all.
There are already endless AI personalities on youtube, each building followers. If I wanted to upset the apple cart, I'd spawn 1000 or more "people", each with a different appearance and manner of speaking. All would dance to my tune, and all would be the most honest, trustworthy source possible.
Until, of course, I wanted to upset the apple cart. Then I'd ensure that all these personalities, insisted that all the court decisions post-office, are lies, mistruths, and designed to punish and harm and "take out the right's power".
Imagine if you have someone you've watched for 2 years. On hundreds of points, they've been blisteringly honest, never lying, always truthful. Then?
On this one thing, they manipulate you.
Who do you trust? The most honest person you've ever seen, or the impartiality of the courts?
This is the sort of long game you can play with fake personalities. No disloyalty. No breaking ranks. No bad days, or mistakes.
I've fought for a free internet. I've fought for the right to anonymous posting. To be a voice, without an identity. But? That time is over, or we won't have a democracy. I've pivoted 180, I cannot see a democratic society with this level of manipulation continuing.
Yup. There is no authority that is going to swoop in and hold them accountable, there is no legal recourse to be had from any court currently in existence. No one is going to save us but ourselves.
The previous admin also ruled via executive order. It said it would find ways to do things even if struck down by the SCOTUS such as the school loan forgiveness, firearms controls, speech suppression via “embeds” etc.
I recall this precedent was set previously under Biden (likely sooner).
Biden admin lost CDC eviction prohibitions case and immediately enacted new slightly different prohibition and Biden defended the effort as it would take time to be stopped.
“Whether that option will pass constitutional measure with this administration, I can’t tell you. I don’t know,” Biden said. “There are a few scholars who say it will, and others who say it’s not likely to. But, at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are in fact behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/housing/566230-biden-buys...
Bernie Sanders warned right when the second Trump admin started that the country was effectively an olygarchy https://youtu.be/79KDKWEOJ1s. I wrote https://xd1.dev/2025/09/not-buying-american-anymore that made Frontpage here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277346 discussing the consequences of an irresponsible admin through the lenses of consumer rights. It's nice that now we are seeing more widespread acceptance of the fact that US isn't behaving like a democracy anymore, even though it's a bit too little too late
>That technology overlaps only partially, at best, with what’s used in quantum processors.
Dunno, how can you say that for sure when we don't actually know how to make a practical quantum processor? The bigger issue is that we are scaling up manufacturing of approaches that have not been made to work.
I remember a meeting where the project manager pointed out that we were due to send some test boards to a customer. I pointed out that we didn't have a design yet. The PM then asked why we couldn't send them some boards anyway. I suggested that since the boards wouldn't work that we could just cut out some green cardboard and add some component shapes with a magic marker thus saving significant time and effort.
It turned out that I was not as funny as I thought I was...
The funding isn't going towards some hypothetical future practical quantum processor, it is going towards existing approaches that we know have different technology, manufacturing processes, and most importantly different applications than the Chips Act was targeting. Funding quantum computing research might be a good thing, but it doesn't make us any less dependent on foreign silicon manufacturing for the countless uses of computer chips across existing industry, which was the purpose of the Chips Act.
Hahaha, hilarious. I could also tell a story or two like that.
I have to say, though, I have no idea what the management is thinking when they hire such clueless PMs. Even worse, I have seen clueless product owners who had no idea about the domain we were in. I guess a recent example could be Ive designing the Luce.
Maybe I am just envious. Maybe I just wish I could BS my way through life like these characters do.
There's nothing to envy. They're a hired punching bag to put distance between you and the management.
In most cases, even the PM doesn't know this. They were specifically selected to not think too deeply. Anything you say that is brutally correct and they take the wrong way is received as mean and arrogant. Those incidents give management some ammunition if they ever want to get rid of you.
The issue at hand is what the money is being spent on today.
They're trying to break cryptography, so indeed those practices are illegal.
Is it legal is such a pre-2025 question
I don’t know enough about the state of quantum computing but this sounds like IBM dumping dead end research onto taxpayers
Then why are they also investing $1 billion in the same company as the taxpayers?
Because the company is going to buy $2 billion worth of services from IBM.
I suppose it’d be in the details. Like, are they locked into that investment, or is it something with checkpoints and milestones that let them bail out after a year and a few mil? What’s the ownership structure of any new ip? Etc.
It’s easy to drop a story like this, get a win for investing in the future, and then quietly disassemble it as soon as the cameras turn away.
Or, it would be easy, if this administration didn’t consider laws beneath them.
Divestment costs
Its all made up computation to fit the problem exactly. No real progress has been made in decades.
"Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed using sleight-of-hand numbers that have been selected to make them very easy to factorise using a physics experiment and, by extension, a VIC-20, an abacus, and a dog." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/07/cheating-on-q...
This is just not true. There has been tremendous progress in the field. Starting with google’s experiment in 2019 on showing quantum advantage - admittedly on a useless problem, but quantum advantage nevertheless, to fault tolerant encodings by the Harvard group to recent demonstrations of a road toward advantage in generative models by goggle, to name a few. It’s still far away from running Shor’s algorithm to factor relevant numbers and break RSA and the like, but even there dramatic progress is being made, see, e.g., https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665
What can quantum computing do right now?
> "could argue that it has been harmed by the diversion of the funds to a different field. But that argument would likely take so long to sort out in court that all the money would have been spent by then."
So if I steal from someone and spend it fast enough, I wouldn't be responsible anymore and can get away with it? That's how that sounded to me.
Yes, that is basically how the justice system works. If you have enough money and lawyers you can avoid practically any consequences.
Something about it being the banks problem if I owe them a billion
If I understand legal terminology correctly*, this is what a "preliminary injunction" is for.
* eh. I'm not a lawyer.
The principle of ‘Standing’, however, means that you also cannot sue unless you can show actual harm to yourself.
Yes, these contradict each other somewhat.
there is not yet a single approach to quantum computing that is provably scalable. so called experts may quibble, the uninformed (or financially aligned) will bloviate, bluster, and talking point us to death. but it's sadly just true. we're closer to useful fusion power than useful QC.
This is a novel for a book. In a race where the rules are broken by some participants, how secure are your own systems when your opponent can access invisible technology long before the others? This should make you think.
It’s literally classic prisoners dilemma?
Hint: it doesn’t give warm fuzzies.
My first reaction, without RTFA, is: hasn't stopped them before, why would not being legal stop US big tech now?
disclosure: I have large (to me) investments in quantum.
---
The US needs to keep leading innovations. We have permanently lost the ability to manufacture. For China (and the world) to stay dependent on us, we need to continue pumping out technologies.
Ukraine / Iran / Afghanistan / Vietnam has proved having the biggest baddest military is not that valuable.
Trump Jr. is one of the government money recipients via 1789 capital (which had already profited from the groq insider sale last year):
https://www.startribune.com/donald-trump-quantum-computing-i...
Trump Jr the guy selling drones to the Middle East after his father started a war? What a standup guy!
The Trump family is a fully integrated business. Start a war, sell weapons. Negotiating peace deals and looking for investors at the same time.
Sue the government and be in charge of the agency you sue.
Downvoting and flagging facts? Here is another one:
Trump Jr just married the daughter of an Epstein banker.
That's Sir Mountain Dew Trump Jr to you.
> At this point, however, it’s not obvious how to stop the deal.
Impeachment, but congress has bent over so much that they can taste their shoes.
They like the payment, and yelling about it while actually not doing anything about it means they get the benefits (as long as their constituents buy it!) while not having to do the actual hard work on take on real risk.
When it blows up, they can even say ‘I told you so!’, often while profiting from it insider trading wise.
Quantum itself is the most scummy, grift-filled industry. Every quantum company is riding the AI/semiconductor hype wave with basically zero revenue prospects or long-term application of the tech. Companies trading at 200x earnings, IONQs CEO claiming to the “next NVIDIA”/“base case is Cisco’s market cap” — just ridiculous.
If you have enough money, you can say whatever bullshit and the pilot fish around you will clap.
I think we're all seeing a theme.
Is the theme that any direction US tech advances in results in a persistent campaign of negative hit pieces aimed at trying to halt/destroy any achievements? Written by "journalists"/publishers that have never, and will never, say a single negative thing about china? Sure seems like that's the theme.
What does your tangent about feelings have to do with the fact that the money is illegally allocated? That is the theme OC is pointing out.
My understanding for the money to be "illegally allocated", the court system would have to declare it so.
The article do not mention any lawsuits that overturn the allocation, just a couple senators disagreeing with the interpretation of the law. The senate does not interpret the law, but the judicial branch.
> But a member of the US Congress is now arguing that those deals are illegal, as Congress did not allocate the money for this purpose—instead, it was meant to support public research in semiconductors.
That is the theme. Illegal use of public money. It’s called crony capitalism.
That is basically the theme. You've figured out the actual grift. The crazy thing is how these same magazines will promote actual fake industries like crypto, while demonizing industries that produce actual results like AI. The goal seems to be to get Americans to invest assets into currencies likely already controlled by foreign entities while discouraging them from developing their own potentially revolutionary technology.
Um sorry have you heard about the gutting of the NSF?
Yeah that sucks balls but America's private capital markets are still robust.
Plenty of that on Ars Technica, even by the same author. Baseless silly whataboutism as usual.
Take a deep breath and get your meds updated.
Can you actually make an argument instead of just vague posting?
waves at most executive decisions of this administration
my favorite conspiracy theory - the govt has already cracked all the RSA codes but they keep funding QM to show that we're still secure.
I read once that if we really wanted to be secure, we would have a crypto library that was open source, AND all changes needed to be signed off by more than one of NSA, Mossad, FSB, China's agency, etc. This way if there is a bug they find, any agency has to assume other agencies have also found the bug.
That's so good it'll happen the third day after never. Neat idea though
A suspicious amount of betting here - from the top of the current administration, down to semi-regular people like that US soldier who profited from his special knowledge recently:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-clas...
400.000$
So if these are all the Trump-voters then I am no longer surprised. It's an ongoing cash grab on different levels - the big guns play on top.