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Elon Musks latest cost-cutting victims: Summer interns.

Tesla Inc. is rescinding offers just weeks before internships were set to start, prompting aspiring employees to take to LinkedIn to appeal to other employers to take them in.

At 8:46am, I opened aTeslaemail for flight info. By 11:25am, my internship offer was gone,wroteMiami University student Joshua Schreiber, who said his start date was three weeks away and that he had already spent thousands on housing.

Schreiber, like many other would-be Tesla interns, are getting dangerously close to the end of the school year. They say the surprise calls from Tesla informing students that their offers no longer stand haveleft them without a lot of time to find replacement gigs for the summer.

In one instance, a current Tesla employee posted on LinkedIn, asking her own virtual network to step up and nab one of the interns that was meant to start soon at the carmaker. Please make our loss your gain!wroteDiana Rosenberg, whoworks inbattery supply at Tesla, according to her profile.

Rosenberg blamed the decision to rescind the intern offer on the massive layoffs unfolding at the carmaker.

Last month, Musk announced that Tesla had made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount by more than 10% globally. Since then,several executives have left the company as Musk has pushed for further cuts. Most of the companys 500-person Supercharger division and its newly formed marketing division have been axed, Bloomberg News has reported.

People familiar with Musks thinking have said the billionaire isdetermined to cut head count amid sagging electric vehicle sales and big expenditures for his Robotaxi dreams. They say Musk is targeting a 20% reduction, Bloomberg reported.

Revoking intern offersisnt likely to save Tesla much money. At least one of the posts was for an unpaid position, while paid internships at the automaker typically offer $18 to $28 an hour, according to data from Glassdoor.

But the decisions will have an impact in the companys hiring pipeline:More than3,000 university and community college students from around the world are hired for Tesla internships each year, according to the companys lastImpact Report.Perform meaningful work from day one, reads thecompanys intern website.

The move has also delivered a stark life lesson tothe students.

Rejection is redirection,wroteBrook Gura, a communications student at the University of Texas at Austin, who said that she got a call that her offer was yanked three weeks before her start date as part of the companys mass layoffs. While I am incredibly disappointed that I will not have the summer I intended to have, I know that this moment will only help me grow stronger as a professional.

Gura, Schreiber and Rosenberg declined to comment beyond their posts. Musk didnt respond to a request for comment.

Excerpt from:

Tesla slashes its summer internship program to cut costs, as Elon Musk fights to save his $45 billion pay plan - Fortune

This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key properties. First, it could tolerate errors that only affected individual qubits. Second, it came with a procedure for correcting errors as they occurred, preventing them from piling up and derailing a computation. Shors discovery was the first example of a quantum error-correcting code, and its two key properties are the defining features of all such codes.

The first property stems from a simple principle: Secret information is less vulnerable when its divided up. Spy networks employ a similar strategy. Each spy knows very little about the network as a whole, so the organization remains safe even if any individual is captured. But quantum error-correcting codes take this logic to the extreme. In a quantum spy network, no single spy would know anything at all, yet together theyd know a lot.

Each quantum error-correcting code is a specific recipe for distributing quantum information across many qubits in a collective superposition state. This procedure effectively transforms a cluster of physical qubits into a single virtual qubit. Repeat the process many times with a large array of qubits, and youll get many virtual qubits that you can use to perform computations.

The physical qubits that make up each virtual qubit are like those oblivious quantum spies. Measure any one of them, and youll learn nothing about the state of the virtual qubit its a part of a property called local indistinguishability. Since each physical qubit encodes no information, errors in single qubits wont ruin a computation. The information that matters is somehow everywhere, yet nowhere in particular.

You cant pin it down to any individual qubit, Cubitt said.

All quantum error-correcting codes can absorb at least one error without any effect on the encoded information, but they will all eventually succumb as errors accumulate. Thats where the second property of quantum error-correcting codes kicks in the actual error correction. This is closely related to local indistinguishability: Because errors in individual qubits dont destroy any information, its always possible to reverse any error using established procedures specific to each code.

Zhi Li, a postdoc at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, was well versed in the theory of quantum error correction. But the subject was far from his mind when he struck up a conversation with his colleague Latham Boyle. It was the fall of 2022, and the two physicists were on an evening shuttle from Waterloo to Toronto. Boyle, an expert in aperiodic tilings who lived in Toronto at the time and is now at the University of Edinburgh, was a familiar face on those shuttle rides, which often got stuck in heavy traffic.

Normally they could be very miserable, Boyle said. This was like the greatest one of all time.

Before that fateful evening, Li and Boyle knew of each others work, but their research areas didnt directly overlap, and theyd never had a one-on-one conversation. But like countless researchers in unrelated fields, Li was curious about aperiodic tilings. Its very hard to be not interested, he said.

Interest turned into fascination when Boyle mentioned a special property of aperiodic tilings: local indistinguishability. In that context, the term means something different. The same set of tiles can form infinitely many tilings that look completely different overall, but its impossible to tell any two tilings apart by examining any local area. Thats because every finite patch of any tiling, no matter how large, will show up somewhere in every other tiling.

If I plop you down in one tiling or the other and give you the rest of your life to explore, youll never be able to figure out whether I put you down in your tiling or my tiling, Boyle said.

To Li, this seemed tantalizingly similar to the definition of local indistinguishability in quantum error correction. He mentioned the connection to Boyle, who was instantly transfixed. The underlying mathematics in the two cases was quite different, but the resemblance was too intriguing to dismiss.

Li and Boyle wondered whether they could draw a more precise connection between the two definitions of local indistinguishability by building a quantum error-correcting code based on a class of aperiodic tilings. They continued talking through the entire two-hour shuttle ride, and by the time they arrived in Toronto they were sure that such a code was possible it was just a matter of constructing a formal proof.

Li and Boyle decided to start with Penrose tilings, which were simple and familiar. To transform them into a quantum error-correcting code, theyd have to first define what quantum states and errors would look like in this unusual system. That part was easy. An infinite two-dimensional plane covered with Penrose tiles, like a grid of qubits, can be described using the mathematical framework of quantum physics: The quantum states are specific tilings instead of 0s and 1s. An error simply deletes a single patch of the tiling pattern, the way certain errors in qubit arrays wipe out the state of every qubit in a small cluster.

The next step was to identify tiling configurations that wouldnt be affected by localized errors, like the virtual qubit states in ordinary quantum error-correcting codes. The solution, as in an ordinary code, was to use superpositions. A carefully chosen superposition of Penrose tilings is akin to a bathroom tile arrangement proposed by the worlds most indecisive interior decorator. Even if a piece of that jumbled blueprint is missing, it wont betray any information about the overall floor plan.

See the rest here:
Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information - Quanta Magazine

Democracy on Trial by Michael Kirk is a thorough documentary of the systematic and lengthy evolution and execution of the attempt to overthrow the government. It has deep roots in the mindset of the dictator wannabe way before he was elected. The coup attempt on January 6 was the tip of the iceberg.

Anyone who watches this 2 h 23 minute film will see the complete truth of what happened inside the White House and throughout America that lead to what we all saw that historical day. Some of the watchers may become a jurors in the Jack Smith and other trials.

What is very comforting and an inspiration of what should happen this year is how manydid the right thing all along. The film makes me optimistic that the MAGA mob will not succeed because of the courage of many Americans going forward .

It deserves an Oscar for best documentary. (Poll bellow, hopefully many watched it already)

This documentary by PBS will play a role in the political dynamics going forward. Lets do what we can to make it happen.

This 18 minute interview with Michael Kirk, before the release, gives you the why and how of his warning to all about the possible future based on the rationally explained past. It gives a clear picture of the thinking and goals behind the documentary.

Read more here:
Democracy on Trial is a masterpiece documentary at the perfect time that should go viral. - Daily Kos

Thank God for Donald Trumps war on censorship.

Go to any Trump rally and youll not only hear Christians roaring approvingly when Trump uses obscenities that are unprintable in this newspaper, but you will also see Christians young and old wearing T-shirts that say things like F--- Joe Biden. Back in the day, you could see Hillary Is A Bihct T-shirts on little Christian tykes roaming about Trump gatherings, but with the operative word spelled correctly. I actually saw a baby in a onesie recently with F--- Biden on it, but again with all the necessary letters to sufficiently offend tender hearts. I cant confirm the infants religious preference, but she was white and professing hatred for Joe Biden, so she was either a right-wing Christian or a QAnon disciple, the line between which has become as nonexistent as reality at a Trump rally.

I never expected Christians to rail against censoring obscenity so openly, but Christian children sporting F--- Biden apparel makes it more acceptable, as pervasive use of profanity dilutes its power to offend. The F--- Biden flags and yard signs commonly seen in South Dakota may not be my preferred political message, but Im all for it if it means defeating the faux-Puritan censorship so pervasive in America.

With Trumps assistance, all manner of obscenity may soon be accepted as banal in the Press & Dakotan. We may even stop targeting bans on a certain caliber of books when obscenity loses its firepower.

Excerpt from:
Letter: War On Censorship | Letters to the Editor - Yankton Daily Press

Theres a joke, playing on the quantum worlds unique properties, that goes, There are three types of people in this world: Those who understand quantum computing, those who dont understand quantum computing, and those who simultaneously do and do not understand quantum computing. All kidding aside, Weiwen Jiang sees a world in which quantum computing is in widespread use; with new funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he is taking steps toward that goal.

Jiang, an assistant professor in George Mason Universitys Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is leading two recently awarded NSF projectsworth a total $900,000for work on the development of these complex devices and on building the quantum workforce of tomorrow.

Quantum computers differ from classical computers in that they use elements of quantum mechanics to perform calculations, allowing them to operate much faster and crunch more data. While there are several operational quantum computers in useIBM and Google are among the top manufacturersthey currently are far from their promised potential and simply cannot yet make the large-scale calculations predicted of them.

Jiang said one key problem is, They are not stable. We can use them for computations, but you might get one answer today and then get an entirely different answer tomorrow.

Quantum devices are notoriously susceptible to noisespecifically, things like cosmic rays, changes in the Earth's magnetic field, radiation, and even mobile wi-fi signals. The noise contributes to the devices instability.

The $600,000 collaborative grant will fund the work of Jiang and his collaborators from Kent State University in developing an adaptor that will adjust to fluctuating noise, improving the performance of applications on quantum devices. Jiang is well versed on the topic, having recently won the Best Poster Award for System-level optimizations in improving the robustness of quantum applications on unstable quantum devices at an event at Oak Ridge National Lab.

According to Jiangs preliminary works, the deployment of the quantum applications faces several challenges, including: sustainabilityon one quantum processor, most quantum applications are sensitive to the temporal changes of quantum noise; portabilitydifferent quantum processors (even from the same vendor) with specific properties will lead to variation of model uncertainty; and transparencya lack of visualization tools can block users from tailoring their quantum applications to quantum computers for higher reliability. The NSF project will systematically provide solutions in response to these challenges.

Jiang is optimistic about the future of quantum computing: Every year, we see a lot of breakthroughs. Just a couple of months ago IBM published a paper on noise reduction. And every year, we see that the number of qubits in quantum computers increases from five in the year 2000 to over 400 on a new computer from IBM. (A qubit is the basic unit of information used in quantum computing, much like a 1 and 0 for traditional computing.)

Another grant, which Jiang shares with collaborators MingzhenTian and JessicaRosenberg in the College of Science, provides $300,000 from NSF to bolster the quantum workforce pipeline. The grant is for an end-to-end quantum system integration training program. The faculty members are developing a new course at Mason, organizing workshops at the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing in September (where Jiang is the quantum system track co-chair), and conducting tutorials at international conferences. Recently the team, led by Rosenberg, coordinated a summer immersion program at Mason for high school students. In addition, in the coming months, Jiang will be conducting seminars at a variety of minority-serving institutions in the DC region.

Jiang said the opportunities for quantum-trained engineers are robust and growing. I have collaborations locally with Leidos and MITRE, for example, and they have needs in this field. Further, we know that quantum will make a difference in everything from finance to drug discovery to machine learning and beyond.

He is encouraged about the quantum futureboth in the world and here at Mason. He stressed that as student demand grows for this technology, we need to provide the appropriate materials for our students, because were seeing a lot of strong interest in this field.

More:
Quantum Conundrums: Navigating Noise and Enhancing Expertise - George Mason University