Cracking the Top Fifty!

I’ve now been blogging for nearly twenty years—through five presidential administrations, my own moves from Waterloo to MIT to UT Austin, my work on algebrization and BosonSampling and BQP vs. PH and quantum money and shadow tomography, the publication of Quantum Computing Since Democritus, my courtship and marriage and the birth of my two kids, a global pandemic, the rise of super-powerful AI and the terrifying downfall of the liberal world order.

Yet all that time, through more than a thousand blog posts on quantum computing, complexity theory, philosophy, the state of the world, and everything else, I chased a form of recognition for my blogging that remained elusive.

Until now.

This week I received the following email:

I emailed regarding your blog Shtetl-Optimized Blog which was selected by FeedSpot as one of the Top 50 Quantum Computing Blogs on the web.

https://bloggers.feedspot.com/quantum_computing_blogs

We recommend adding your website link and other social media handles to get more visibility in our list, get better ranking and get discovered by brands for collaboration.

We’ve also created a badge for you to highlight this recognition. You can proudly display it on your website or share it with your followers on social media.

We’d be thankful if you can help us spread the word by briefly mentioning Top 50 Quantum Computing Blogs in any of your upcoming posts.

Please let me know if you can do the needful.

You read that correctly: Shtetl-Optimized is now officially one of the top 50 quantum computing blogs on the web. You can click the link to find the other 49.

---

Maybe it’s not unrelated to this new notoriety that, over the past few months, I’ve gotten a massively higher-than-usual volume of emailed solutions to the P vs. NP problem, as well as the other Clay Millennium Problems (sometimes all seven problems at once), as well as quantum gravity and life, the universe, and everything. I now get at least six or seven confident such emails per day.

While I don’t spend much time on this flood of scientific breakthroughs (how could I?), I’d like to note one detail that’s new. Many of the emails now include transcripts where ChatGPT fills in the details of the emailer’s theories for them—unironically, as though that ought to clinch the case. Who said generative AI wasn’t poised to change the world? Indeed, I’ll probably need to start relying on LLMs myself to keep up with the flood of fan mail, hate mail, crank mail, and advice-seeking mail.

Anyway, thanks for reading everyone! I look forward to another twenty years of Shtetl-Optimized, if my own health and the health of the world cooperate.