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by dvh 3843 days ago
> "A mainstream media article about quantum computer that starts with a reference to D-Wave can be safely ignored"

marcosdumay, HN, 1 hour ago

2 comments

That quote is correct, but you need to understand the context: Scott Aaronson is pretty much the entire reason why you can safely ignore any article about D-Wave, because he's the one doing the legwork to debunk their BS. So articles from/about him are exempt.
I think there's an obvious exception for MIT's news, especially when talking to Aaronson who has loudly been challenging D-Wave's quantum claims for years.
My general rule is to ignore anything that comes from MIT news as low quality anyway, so no conflict there.
Now that someone has said this I realise I've been doing the same for quite some time. It looks like a PR department with a university attached. Edit: it's not so much that it's usually just low quality, it's the offputting way they always state "MIT researchers prove that...", and whenever I dig into the area it's clear there's an active research community with leading figures in less fashionable universities that get no mention from the MIT press corps. The other top US universities don't seem to do this, at least nowhere near as much as MIT. Then again, maybe it's the general press and public who have bought into MIT fetishism and they're the reason these stories get picked up so often. (Saying all that, Aaronson is pretty awesome though)
Found the Caltech guy.