IAMA-Dragon-AMA

Unless I'm mistaken wouldn't an error correcting quantum computer capable of actually being a threat to our current encryption schemes require over a million q-bits. We don't scale up our current quantum computers in part because our q-bits have somewhat poor fidelity.

Unless there has been some remarkable way of scaling back the number of T-gates and the T-depth of a quantum computer like the one you'd need to crack any reasonable encryption scheme you'd see. Is there some recent paper I'm missing which cuts down on that number significantly or is this all just more speculative?

I don't want to dump on your field, quantum computing is an amazing science where a lot of progress is being made. I think the public tends to have an unrealistic expectation of the results these computers are capable of and I think part of that is the responsibility of researchers who announce the field as "making crypto obsolete". Especially since the field of Post-quantum cryptography is quite active.

I feel as if identity theft prevention, identity theft protection, and identity theft insurance are all kind of lumped under the same umbrella far to often.

In regards to the latter of these, is there anything about identity theft insurance that most people don't know about? As in situations that might not be covered despite people thinking they are insured against identity theft?

The relevant situation I'm most familiar with when it comes to predator prey relationships influencing the ecology is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone. To that end I've heard a lot of the effects described from the perspective of pure predation. I.e. more predators means fewer prey species. I've never heard anything from the perspective of prey behavior though and the idea is really interesting.

As I understand it predator prey relationships are very prone to population boom and bust cycles, has any of your research continued long enough to see distinct changes with these cycles?

How do you factor the behavior from predation from other behavioral influences secondary to it. For example fewer predators might consistently correlate with a larger squirrel population. How do you separate a squirrels changes in behavior from there being a low risk of predators and their behavior from competing with a larger population when you might not be able to observe directly one without the other?

Why does the same group on Reddit debate whether or not cereal is soup of if a hot dog is a sandwich but indisputably feels that only cheese fried with bread can be called grilled cheese? Where if you add anything else to it it must be referred to as a melt.