Hey everyone, so you might have seen my vlog on holiday on a cruise last week and I thought I would do a special video showing you the cruise library. You need to go outside in the back, set your forecast, we'll be right back. So they have a special library here on the cruise and I thought we could have a little look at it and see what kind of books they have, what kind of selection they have because I was thinking of doing a vlog where I read the books from here instead on the holiday but then I thought they might not have a good selection so let's have a look and see what they have. And see if there's anything that kind of is popular on Booktube.  Okay, okay. Well, the lighting may have changed a bit because we filmed the intro and then we found out that the doors were locked. The door is closed! So we had to go away and a guy told us it was like a gin tasting thing in his day so we've come back in the afternoon and he very kindly unlocked the doors for us so we can look and see what books are in here now. So I thought we could have a little look and see what are you... Oh my god, I spoke a lot of languages. See what the different books are, see if there's anything... Oh! The style is seen. I approve. Appropriate. One of my favourite books. You know what's the most exciting thing about winning? It's when you win. I love that feeling. I basically want to see if there's any that I've read, any that are on my TBR and any that I've heard good things about but aren't on my TBR because you kind of expect it all to be like what the older population want to read. From a quick glance it feels like they have a good selection. Lock Every Door by Riley Sager. One of the first to as I've read. That's a good cruise book I think. A good cruise one. Him and Ruth Ware I feel like are just the best like solid thriller authors. There was a book I saw. I had a little cheeky peek. And it was a book I saw that I couldn't believe they had. But now I can't see it. They had the Dragon Republic by I of Quang. Which is the second in the Poppy War. They didn't have the Poppy War. So I feel bad if anyone picks up the Dragon Republic. In the box. Yeah but I saw it here all week. And now it's not here. I always love this cover. They have two new release thrillers. So these have both come out this year that I want to read. I could have totally done a vlog reading books from here. I can't believe what a good selection they have. The code is by the author of the appeal. You like her style of covers don't you? I think that's a great cover. Yeah it's cool. It might be the best I've seen actually. This one's all to do with coding. The first one was all emails. Whereas I think a lot of this is like audio files and coding. Your software slays by the way. And then this one I'm not really sure what it's about. But it's a new release mystery. Mystery's always good for a cruise I think. They've got a really good selection you know. I'm actually surprised. Let's go and see. Yeah. There's a colour card. They're all in red to be honest because most of them are fiction. They have another one. This is a really new release mystery as well. The Apollo murders. I almost got this. This is by an astronaut. What did he do? That's quite cool. One of the most seasoned and accomplished astronauts in the world. What is that guy? He used to make the songs on the spaceship. Oh. I almost got this. It's the YouTube man. I don't know him. He was famous for singing David Bowie in space in about 2016 I think. Oh. I'm impressed by how many 2022 releases they have. I wouldn't expect that. Oh the furies? Isn't this YA? Yeah it's just like a YA about girls and private schools and stuff like that. See that's the kind of book. That's a good setting. I feel like if I were to come on a cruise I wouldn't actually end up picking the books like a Twyford Code or whatever that I own because that's the point. But I think I'd pick up books like this that I've just heard on the grapevine about and I'd kind of pick up stuff on a whim. If I had them on the vlog I probably maybe would have picked that up.  The Dragon Republic. Why do they have this? Why they're still here? It's a bit of a mystery. Why don't they have the second in the series? But I have not seen the Poppy War anywhere. They don't have it. But they have this. Oh the Grace year? Oh! I'm just giving it one of them. The Grace year is one I've heard things about? Is this the one? Yes. This is one where girls at 16 are banished into the forest and they have to survive for a year. Isn't that crazy? A little bit cliche but okay. Tom, turn it around so you don't approve. Nah. You can see me in the mirror. He doesn't approve. Oh it's got pine, Meg's pine. Oh Tom likes pine. He likes to cover. Did you ever read it? No I haven't read it yet. Isn't it about like some sort of cabin in the woods? No it's about this dad and daughter who like to pick up a woman who's like stumbling by the side of the road and then she disappears. It turns out to be like a Fingermajiggy. Fingermajiggy. They have a CJ Tudor, another really great thriller author. I've read two CJ Tudors and they've both been four stars. I think that's a really strong line up then. Yeah. They've got a lot of books you'd like here. I know. It is a really strong line up. They've got a Miss Ruth Ware. The turn of the key, classic. The turn of the key. The first book I remember making reading. The first thriller book I've read and the first vlog I ever did on my channel. That's a great, that's a good cruise. I'm reading Ruth Ware on the cruise and I think she's a great cruise. Let's have a look, let's have a look at our queen. Tell me what she looks like. Bro this is exactly what I imagined her look like. It's fabulous. I can see where the gays love her. I'm reading The Woman in Cabin 10. Who is going to be brave enough to pick up this in a week? It's the Bible. How many pages? God knows. Hey look, I'll do it. 700, okay, look, I'll do it.  I'm mean. And she's good at Geoguessa. And like Sam. I feel very attacked. Relax. See again, this is like the second in a series. Why do they have loads of second in series? Again, this is like the third in a series, third in a series I think. That's a whopper. Joe Wolf Hall. Yeah. This is the third in that book. Three in a Mantel. Yeah. Right, we're into not fiction now. Okay. So I probably won't know any of this. I didn't see the Parage in a second. But Tom, vegan style. Oh that's what I've always wanted to read. How to be anti-racist. I have the audiobook. I've had the audiobook for ages. Anti-racist. Yeah. It's a cool front cover though. It is. I always wanted to read it. That might have been another one I picked up since I have the audiobook. I think I recognise the author's name. Let's see. What else did I write? Founding director of the Anto-racist research. Yes, I've read that. I've read Stamped. Oh yes, you've read Stamped. Yes, that's where I go. Tom, in the mirror. Tom approved this time. I think I did. Oh, Roaring Girls. This is one I've always seen about, and I think I have the audiobook on the script. The forgotten feminist of British history. Well that sounds quite cool. So I think this is non-fiction. Yeah, that would be my choice. I think that's the book I would choose to read. These are the different women. Marie Estelle, yeah. This would be a good pick. I have the audiobook on script. This, The Furies and the Gracia, might have been the ones, or maybe the other people by CJ Tudor would probably have been the ones I would have picked had I read from this on the holiday. Murder by the book. What is that? That looks like non-fiction. What? This sounds interesting. Early in the mornings of May 1840, in a Mayfair street, a footman answered the door to a panic-stricken maid from the nearby house. Her elderly master, Lord William Russell, was lying in bed with his throat cut so deeply that his head was almost severed. The whole of London, from Monarch to Street Urchin, was gripped by the gory details of the Russell murder. Wow, and this is like telling the story of the murder case, and it's non-fiction. That sounds interesting too. I like the cover as well. Yeah, really pretty, but a bit like an appeal. Kind of. And there's pictures. She loves pictures. She loves pictures. Whoa! He's scurred. That's quite dramatic. We've got quite a lot of Nor Roberts. Shout out to Mara, who's like read every Nor Roberts book ever. I've never read one, but I do want to give Nor Roberts a go at some point. Oh! Look what they have. The Christie Affair by Nina Drugamont. This is a fictionalization of when Agatha Christie went missing for 11 days, and it was good. It's like a full-star. It's not really a mystery. I would say it's more like fiction inspired by that event. But it was good, and it's written from the perspective of Agatha Christie's husband's mistress. Dead in Devon. Dead in Devon.   You decompose really rapidly. Oh, they have the Kingdom of Copper. Isn't this a... Is this the first? This isn't the... This is the second or third one as well. I can't complain. Actually, I can. This is the second one in the series. They have a thing about the second ones in the series. Czech Rabbati? Or Czech Rabboti? Yeah, S.A. Czech Rabboti. This is like a fantasy series. But why do they have all second ones? Okay, so I think that's us done, but I hope you enjoyed having a little look at what was in the crew's library. I think they had a much better selection than I thought they would have. There's so many releases, so many books that are like pop-man booktube, like The Dragon Republic, like Janice Hallett. They had a really good selection, I think. So let me know what you would have read. If you had come on the cruise and had the library to pick what you read, what would you have picked up and read? I'd be really interested to know. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you very soon in another video. Bye! Okay, okay.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we are going to discuss the following question and the question says that two data sets are shown below. Which of these data sets consist of data at the interval level and at the ratio level? Give reasons. We know that data at the interval level of measurement can be ordered and meaningful differences between data entries can be calculated and data at the ratio level of measurement are similar to data at the interval level. A ratio of two data values can be formed so that one data value can be meaningfully expressed as a multiple of another. With this key idea we move on to the solution. In this question both of the data sets contain quantitative data. Now consider the years of the Chicago team football series victories. It makes sense to find differences between specific years. For example, the year difference between the Chicago team first and last series victories will be given by 2000-1920 which is equal to 80 years. But it does not make sense to say that one year is a multiple of another. So these data are at the interval level. However in the second table using the home run total you can find differences and write ratios. From the data you can see that Texas hit 62 more home runs than Chicago hit. We can see that their difference is of 62 runs. Also here we see that Oakland hit about two times as many home runs as Boston hit. So these data are at the ratio level thus we can say that these data are at the interval level and here these data are at the ratio level Which is the required answer. This completes our session. Hope you enjoyed this session.


So today, we are talking about the Ludi Romani, the Roman games. And we're going to look at a bunch of art. This one here is from Quasimassimo, which the American Institute for Culture has filmed. It's one of four museums that are part of the Museo Nacional Romano. This particular piece dates to late antiquity from the property of Junius Bassus on the Esquiline Hill. And it does figure a scene from the Circus Maximus. So what is the Ludi Romani all about? Well, it is ostensibly to honor Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the king of the gods on the Capitoline Hill. We're not exactly sure who started who creates it. Was it the Tarquin? So we're going into the end of the regal period. Or as more sources like Cicero and Dionysus of Pala Carnassus say in the late Republican slash Augustan period, it was for the victory that the Romans won against the Latins in 496 BC. Now, what does it take place? That's another great question for the historians. As we look at the sources, it's not September 4th to the 19th from the Getco. It's just one day. But when something is successful, when something works, well, continue in that vein. So over time, through greater wealth, through continued success, you add more days to that festival. And not just this Ludi Romani festival, but other festivals in the Roman calendar are going to be having days added to them over time. And the last day is going to be added after the death of Julius Caesar. And that's because his statue is added in the procession. He is now a god upon his death. And so his statue will join the procession of the gods. And we'll talk about which gods are being shown around in this performance, in this celebration, ostensibly in honor of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. But it's a typical thing. When we look at the Roman calendar, there's an idea. It's inserted into the calendar. And then over time, you simply add to that celebration. Because you have greater funds, you have more victories to celebrate, you have more cash on hand. And of course, you have a way of appeasing and winning over the crowd initially for elections and so forth. So it's not actually annual. We think it to the fourth century. And at that point, you have specific ediles that are going to be selected to run those particular games. So again, it's all about Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Here's this temple on the left from one of the panels of a series of reliefs that are attributed to a victory arch of Marcus Aurelius. Here he is making a sacrifice. And in the background, it is, in fact, the pediment, the best preserved pediment representation we have of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There's a coin from about 78 BC depicting the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Again, we're spending a lot of time talking about this because we also want to enter into the physical spaces of ancient Rome. So here we are on the right, looking at a map of the Capitoline Hill. And what figures prominently is the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus or Jupiter that lives on the Capitoline Hill. And that is where the procession will start that will eventually culminate in the Circus Maximus. And then that is where the bulk of the activities honoring Jupiter will be held. You also see, just off the area of the temple of Giove Capitolino, you actually have the Clevis Capitolinas, which is the road that leads you down into the form. And we will walk through this procession route just shortly. But who are our sources? We have a number of ancient sources. I mentioned Cicero earlier. I mentioned Dionysus of Hela Carnassus. He's writing in the Augustan age, what he actually cites, quotes a particular earlier source we don't really have anymore. And that is Quintus Fabius Pictor, who's writing there at the third century BC. So here, 200 BC. The third century BC, a very ancient and prominent source that Dionysus of Hela Carnassus dips into. He is writing in Greek. Quintus Fabius Pictor, a Roman, also wrote in Greek. He was a great early historian for us and a great source for Dionysus of Hela Carnassus. And he's the great source, really, of what we are talking about in the ensuing slides. That is what took place in terms of the games, honoring Jupiter, Optimus Maximus, and the procession. Because before you start any event in the Colosseum, so the amphitheaters, in the circus, there is a procession. And it's all, you could say, modeled after or referring to a number of Greek processions, but also the triumphal procession of the victorious general, snaking his way with his procession, his goods as spoils of war through the city of Rome. But here are our ancient sources, an Augustan source, and a much earlier Republican source. OK, so these are the places that we will cover. So you start off on the Capitoline Hill, and you're going to make your way into the forum, and you're going to make your way over to the Circus Maximus. Now, who's actually in the procession? We'll talk about that later. Right now, I just want to talk about the actual processional route that, by the imperial period, can be modified and changed. It will evolve over time. The triumphal procession evolves over time. The pompa, the procession of the Ludi Romani will also evolve and change over time and basically expand into the campus marshes. But you can see here we have a lot of videos that are already at your disposal. The Capitoline Hill, the Clevis Capitolinas, Roman Forum, we have several. The Temple of the Castlers is one of the individual monuments that we filmed inside the Roman Forum. The Vigis Tuscus is the road that connects you from the forum to the Circus Maximus, screening along the base of the Palatine Hill, and finally culminating in the Circus Maximus where we have another video. So we start at the Capitoline Hill. There's the large Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in the imperial period. We leave the sanctuary of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Of course, there are many other temples around here. And go down the slope of the Capitoline Hill on this road, the Clevis Capitolinas. As you go down, you see to your right, the impressive, still impressive remains of the Temple of Saturn. Here it is again. You're gonna make your way through that road that we see there in the distance. That's then another word. You're going down the Clevis Capitolinas around the Temple of Saturn and then down straight the road to your left is the Piazza of the Forum. To the right, the remains of the Basilica Giulia about the size of a football field. And when you get to those three columns of the Temple of the Castlers, you hang a right. There is where the Vigis Tuscus starts. Vigis Tuscus gets his name from the Etruscans that lived in that area, like an Etruscan quarter. And here we have again a plan of the Roman Forum itself. You can see at the bottom of the plan, all the colonnades of the massive Basilica Giulia. And then you have the Temple, which is represented on the right by a Piazza print. And then you're gonna turn and write in that space between the Basilica Giulia and the Temple of the Castlers. And you're gonna start your Vigis Tuscus procession. So we're gonna talk about who's in the procession shortly, but just imagine already, a lot of people, a lot of animals, a lot of guys on horseback are gonna be going through relatively speaking, tight spaces, but how impressive it would have been to see that procession going from the Capitoline Hill down to Clevis Capitolinas and through the Roman Forum then on the Vigis Tuscus. And you see three arrows that are connecting you along the route of the Vigis Tuscus. And at the bottom right of the screen, it says Circus Maximus. So you finally get your way into the Circus Maximus. You can see to the left of the screen, the Capitoline Hill, the Capitolium. You make your way into the Forum and then down the Vigis Tuscus into the Circus Maximus. Here is the Circus Maximus. Today as it stands with the medieval tower in it. And on the right, one of the impressive coins in the time of Trajan, who really does build and give us the Circus Maximus built to its greatest and most magnificent state. And that's some of the brick remains that you see in the photo. On the left of the Circus Maximus today, which you can visit as a site. It's very impressive to go to that archeological site of the Commune of Rome. And we have actually a video also of the archeological site visit on the Circus Maximus on ancientromelive.org. Okay, it's the events that take place principally in the Circus Maximus, our chariot races with chariots pulled by two horses, three horses and four horses. The Lusus Troyae is something that doesn't always happen, but by the time of Vigisus, it becomes pretty standardized, and we're harkening back to that idea that the Romans are descended from Aeneas, who escapes the destruction of Troy. There are boxing matches, there are dancing competitions, and there are even theatrical performances by the fourth century BC. Of course, those dramatic performances will be held in other places where the venues are of theaters. Finally, by the time of Pompey, the great, then Augustus, those theaters are becoming permanent. Also the theater of Balbus. But we do want to think that it's more than just one venue. Although this is, in the Circus Maximus, the main venue for the procession and the experiences. Now, look at some of the images of charioteers. We can go immediately to Plaza Massimo, which is part of Museo Nacional de Romano, where we have filmed a fantastic video, and these charioteers, here's one of them, dressed in blues, of the blue team, comes from a private villa, Villa di Decano, in Rome. Here's another famous fragment relief of chariote racing. You can just get a sense of the violence and the drama and the movement, and this is also from Plaza Massimo, part of Museo Nacional de Romano. Now, what is the procession actually all about? This pompa chivcensis. You've got Roman youth, so you've got to start off with the creme de la creme, the youth, the people that are just about to become men, on horseback if they can afford it, otherwise on foot, so they'll be infantrymen, and that is just part of a lavish procession to say, here are our young men that are eventually going to be fighting for you, and eventually write the connection with Jupiter Optimus Maximus, who leads and protects the Roman state. The charioteers that will be performing, the athletes that will be competing, the dance groups that will be performing and competing, musician groups. The chorus is about people that dress up like satyrs in Silene, and they are going to be lampooning a lot of the dancer and musician groups. So there's some fun there, and of course when you think of satyrs in Silene, maybe you think of Dionysus, maybe you think about Greek traditions, and of course, yes, what the Romans eventually have, what we see, what we have described by Dionysus and Alcarnassus, are indeed indebted to a lot of Greek traditions and processions. There'll be bowls of perfume, they're gonna be burning incense, a lot of pageantry, of course you are honoring Jupiter Optimus Maximus. You're also honoring lots of other gods. Gods are carried on litters called Fircula and displayed on couches of Puglinar in the surface itself. Who are the gods? Three main groups. The standard pantheon led by Jupiter. The older gods, kind of the precursors to the 12 gods like Saturn, Ops, Thenus, the tonic of the Parkae, Minosinae, okay? And then find the gods of the underworld. Persephone, Lucina, the Nymphs, Muses, Seasons, the Graces, Lieber, Demigods. Okay, a lot of people are involved here. It gets to be quite crowded. Then you have separate chariots or wagons that will also pull the exuviai which are basically attributes themselves of those deities. So a thunderbolt or a mural crown or a lion or some sort of attribute that is sacred as well as the actual cult statues that go first. So the procession is massive. You can think about the numbers. You can think about the long train of people, individuals. And finally, of course, the gods themselves are participating. What does a pharaecula look like? I'll give you this one example. This one comes from Praneste, the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia which is also tied to the cult of Fortuna of Anciam on the coast. And so you have two cult statues, two different variation representations of the Fortuna of those two cities which you can see here. The knobs at the bottom of the below their torsos would be, there is a representation in marble of the kind of poles that would have been attached to the cult statues and then lifted up by men and then placed here on, in this case here, a marble stone couch. So we have a great example of a pharaecula with actual representations of the gods themselves, two deities from Anciam and Praneste, both in Lazio. So that's really what I wanted to say about this incredible moment in time, in antiquity and of course, what we have here is a perpetuation of that kind of idea when we look at society beyond the Romans, we look around the world, we look at the way in which we have pageantry, build up to the start of a sports season, we have the procession of the performers before the start of the match, kind of getting everyone worked up and of course, the culmination with most people then, most of the activities will be focused on the circus matches. Of course, it's also the greatest, the largest venue of the entire city. That's why it's the best place to look at the triumphal procession as well. And there are many other games, or Puglian games, there are many other games that take place throughout the course of the year, the games of Sola, the games of Caesar, but this one here in particular is the greatest, because it is the Ludi of the Romans and who is a featured star who's being venerated, who's being lavished with attention is Jupiter Optimus Maximus, of course, king of the gods. So you want the other gods there present as well. So this has been Ancient Rome Live. You can subscribe to Ancient Rome Live by going to AncientRomeLive.org. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. We dig Rome. Very easy to follow all of our activities. Of course, you can follow us on social media, at Save Rome and at DariusRIAdigs, on Instagram, on Twitter and Facebook. And we're gonna have a great fall. We thank you for joining me and we'll see you again soon. Please subscribe so that you can be aware of all the upcoming activities in the coming fall season. Thanks a lot.


Please welcome Robert Smith, who's a passionate common disk packer and he's also the director of software engineering at Rigeti, which is one of the big quantum computing hardware players in the universal quantum computing space. And they're based in San Francisco, or actually in Berkeley, San Francisco. And he's going to talk about Taurus and open source quantum software development here. Right, cool. I'm super happy to be here. My background is very, very much in software, only in the past few years that I kind of get into the quantum business. And so being at an open source conference and seeing that quantum is here at the open source conference is really exciting for me. Before I start, I just want to understand the audience a little bit better. How many of you are not sort of professionally in quantum computing, not in academia, quantum computing in academia, or anything like that? Right, that's good. That's really great. How many, so this is my personal, just kind of what I want to know, how many of you know anything about Lisp? All right, that's pretty good, too. That's more than I would expect. Cool. A little bit about Rigeti. So we build, get the little mouse pointer out of the way, we build universal gate-based hybrid classical quantum computers. So these are machines that are not just, they don't just do quantum computations, they interact with the classical computer as well, very much in concert. Classical computer might produce results that affect the quantum computation, the quantum computer might produce results that affect a classical computation. As was said in the keynote, the quantum computers aren't really doing computations right now that exceed what a classical computer can do. But nonetheless, they do interesting computations. They're doing real computations. They're not just theoretical equations or anything like that. You can compute real things about the physical world, for instance. We're a full-stack company, so we do everything in-house more or less, all the way from the design of silicon chips, the fabrication of chips, we have our own fabrication facility, everything in between all the way to building applications on top of the chip or on top of the computer. We have a very wide range of papers published. Again, basically, any of these horizontals here, we probably have a paper in. And our flagship product is called Quantum Cloud Services. So Quantum Cloud Services is something that we just released publicly as a beta. As far as I know, it's the fastest quantum programming environment available right now. It's about 30 times faster than an HTTP-based service. This comes from a lot of different things all across the stack. And this is one of the benefits of being a full-stack company. It's not just that we got some clever hardware trick or something like that. It really took a combination of infrastructure, hardware, and software to gain these speed-ups. So as a part of this, as a part of the Quantum Cloud Services, you get your own QMI. It's a virtual machine. It comes pre-loaded with a bunch of software, including our Forrest SDK. So Forrest SDK is the software development kit that includes a very powerful arrangement of software to write, build, and execute quantum programs. This includes a compiler, a simulator, a Python API, and a set of optional libraries on top of that. So pretty early on at Regetti. I joined Regetti when it was around 20 or so people. Pretty early on at Regetti, we were very interested. I actually credited it to Will Zhang a lot, who planted the seed at the company to try to maintain openness in a lot of our ideas and a lot of our software and so on. So being in open source slash open standards isn't something that's relatively new. We've been doing it for the past three or so years. Maybe one of the big milestones was about three years ago. We released an open standard for quantum instruction language called Quill. So Quill is this assembly looking code. It's not assembly. It doesn't run natively on the machine. It requires further compilation. But it looks like an assembly code that describes hybrid classical quantum programs. And we published a standard and a little bit, to my surprise, certainly. We saw all these little libraries popping up. Somebody wrote something in Haskell, for instance, to construct Quill circuits. I, myself, out of interest wrote something in Lisp. Somebody else wrote something in OCaml. Just all these things came out. And that sort of is a testament to when you provide something that's open, that's well specified, that's well documented, gets adopted. And people are kind of interested in it. Since the release of the standard for Quill, we've had a good handful of different open source libraries. All of these are homegrown or at least adopted by us. And then beyond that, we've contributed back to any number of open source projects. One of my favorite was a tool for editing CAD files. We found a few bugs in it, contributed it back. It's nice to design these quantum circuits as within CAD and finding these things and being able to contribute back. So I'll very briefly talk about kind of the force SDK. You can kind of think of it as a sort of layered architecture, like so, at the top of your applications, the things you're building on top of the platform. This includes Grove, which contains a lot of different textbook algorithms, a lot of different things you'd find in any sort of course on quantum computing, for instance. We just released an alpha version of something called force benchmarking, which contains a lot of very, very easy to read routines for how to benchmark and classify the quality of a quantum computer.  And this is kind of the layer where you would build if you were interested in building programs for your quantum computer or for a quantum computer. Below that is PyQuil. It's a Python library that allows you to write Quil programs. It contains a lot more than that. It contains an API to talk to the machine. It contains a good API for interacting with the compiler. It contains some mathematical routines if you want to translate sort of a mathematical problem into a quantum computing problem, and so on. Below that, we have a little RPC framework, just to have everything in the stack communicate with each other. Below that is a compiler called Quil-C. This is the compiler that'll take Quil code and compile it to the native gate set of the quantum computer, the native instruction set of the machine. On the right here, you can imagine this box right here going down and down and down. That's where you actually start executing things on the machine that gets to the firmware level, that gets into the control system level, and so on. But to the left, you can replace all of that, of course, with a simulator that's going to be a lot slower than the real machine, of course, but serves as a good method for debugging and so on. So there we have something called the QVM, the quantum virtual machine, which I'll talk about in a little bit, and PyQVM, which is something built into PyQuil. It's a simulator written in Python. Henceforth, I'm going to talk about two main components here, the compiler and specifically the QVM. So the QVM, it seems like everybody in their brother and sister and dog has made a simulator these days. There's a billion of them online. Simulating a quantum computer, it's kind of a fun problem to work through. It's a thing that you need to do if you're going to be working with quantum computing at all. But there is a lot of great things that you can put into a simulator to make it more efficient, to make it more useful, to make it better for debugging, and so on. So our simulator, the one that we call kind of the QVM, is very, very high performance. If you can throw it on any machine, I mean, I think the biggest we've thrown it on is something that has like 12 terabytes of memory and four socket motherboard with something like 224 logical cores or something like that. And it'll use all of it. It's completely multithreaded. It's a good way to heat up your house if that's what you're aiming to do. It can execute the entire core language. It does all the classical, all the quantum stuff. It has lots and lots of different ways to execute programs, kind of the standard ways do something called standard pure state evolution. It kind of assumes that your computer is perfect, that it has no errors, that it's kind of living in that fairytale land. But then you have these other execution modes like the stochastic pure state evolution, full density matrix simulation if you want that, and some other things. I haven't personally found particular use for them, but stuff like the path integral formulation if you want to compute just a single amplitude of your exponentially sized state. Like I said, it can simulate perfect and imperfect quantum computers, but the thing I'm most excited about, about the simulator, is actually, as a part of the simulator, it contains a compiler that compiles the quill code into native instructions of your computer. So it's not trying to interpret the instructions, it actually compiles it all to machine code. And because of that, you get really, really fast execution, sometimes outperforming some state-of-the-art simulators written in the finest toothpick and tweezers, C code, sometimes by 2x, because it dynamically, it's able to do what a compiler does. And so I wanna show a little demonstration of that, just a real quick one. So if I run the QVM program, I'm gonna say verbose, and I'm just gonna run one of the standard benchmark modes, which computes a GHZ state, an entangled state on, say, I think the default is 26 qubits. So if you see it run, you can see each gate, these gates over here, the Hadamard at the top, see not, it's taking about 500 milliseconds on my laptop per gate, we'll let it get to the end, just so you can feel how long this stuff takes. To compare on a real actual quantum computer, each of those gates would take on the order of maybe 50 nanoseconds or so. So you see the run time at the end was about 20 seconds, and all of this was without compilation. So if I tell it to compile, what it's going to do is take the quill program that's being benchmarked here, it's gonna compile it to machine code and then run it. And so if we do that, you just see the difference is a lot, and we just got 10x speed up just by pre-compiling the circuit. I wanna move on from the simulator and talk about our compiler, which I'm even more excited about. So as far as I understand, quill C is the only truly sort of general purpose, fully automatic optimizing compiler, which means it's sort of turnkey, you can run the program, it'll compile, it doesn't need any extra information, you don't need to give it specific steps on how to compile or anything like that, you give it your program and it'll compile to a specific architecture. It was built with portability in mind. Of course, we use it at Rigetti Computing to compile for our architectures, but we were trying to build as a general purpose tool because we design different chips, we try out different gate sets, and every single time we do that, we don't wanna have to rewind and figure out how to recompile our programs and everything. I can compile any unitary gate, at least any unitary gate that feasibly fits in memory and that you have time to compile for. So two, three, four Q gates, it doesn't matter. And most interestingly, it has a lot in it we're still adding to it, of course. Lots and lots of different ways of optimizing your program. It does a lot of things that have a lot of similarity to classical compiler theory. So it does something similar to register allocation. It tries to figure out what actual physical qubits it should use given your logical qubits in the program. It does something similar to people optimization. It'll scan the sections of your code and try to compress or optimize them. Flow analysis, when you have classical portions of your program, when you have jump statements and loops and if statements and whatever, it analyzes the control flow of your program. It does all the classical stuff like dead code elimination and all of that. And then for some cases like tube qubit gates, it actually has routines for doing optimal compilation. It will compile it in the best way that mathematics has proven to be the best. Like I said, I'm a software person. I've been writing software since I was like eight years old and it's definitely one of the most interesting pieces of software that I've been able to work on in my career, me and my colleagues. So I can show a little demo of this as well. We kind of follow the standard of being very unixy with the application. So just by default, if you run it, it's gonna take input from standard in. If I make like a bell state, for instance, and end it, it compiles it by default to one of our eight qubit rings that we have. So it compiled that Hadamard and CNOT at the top to that program out there. It turned it into Z rotations, X rotations and CZ. So in this case, the default chip that it compiles to is one where CZ is the gate that can operate between edges. One of our researchers at work was a messing around with the Bernstein-Vasarani algorithm, which for those unfamiliar, contains kind of this portion of the algorithm where you have to define something called an oracle. And depending on what your goals are as a researcher, maybe you're not trying to think about exactly how to construct this oracle. Maybe you're just, I don't know, trying to get your work done and you just wanna try running it on the quantum computer. So what he did is he defined this giant matrix. That's what all these ones and zeros and all this stuff are. And then his actual program.  This giant five qubit operator and so on. And so if I cat Bernstein-Vasarani into Quilsey, and I'm gonna make it measure gate depth and all of that, it'll think about it for a second and it gives the answer. So it decomposed this five qubit gate into a bunch of gates. We can see at the bottom it compiled it into a circuit that's of depth 2,746 gates, which is way too many to execute on any current quantum computer for the record. But it starts giving it an idea of how this circuit would actually be realized on the real machine. So one point that I like to make is that I really, really believe in automatic compilation. Sometimes I feel that some folks in the field are maybe like in the 1950s or something where I know our quantum computers currently aren't these machines that can execute hundreds or thousands or millions of gates yet. Like we're still kinda poking around with gates measured between 10 and 100 qubits. We're still looking at gate depths that are measured still on both of your hands. And it is reasonable to construct programs by hand that way. But in general, to not have a tool that you can use to study the mathematics of a problem, to debug things, to even see how it decomposes into the actual native code of your machine, I think it's not good to have such a tool. I also think that computers are just exceedingly good at doing what they do. I mean, compilers these days, like GCC, Clang, all of those, they're amazing. They're incredible. If you can see what Intel's Fortran compiler does, it does amazing things. It's real testament that computers are really good at figuring things out, at calculating things. So I do have this belief that if we're able to confidently write C for small microcontrollers that contain K of RAM, then we can write Quill or some other instructions that for a quantum computer that passes through a compiler. Is Quill C perfect at this? And is it like outperforming like hand compiled circuits? No. But can Quill C compile a circuit faster than you could? Almost surely yes. Sometimes circuits take like, I don't know, three days by hand to figure out even what to do. So I wanna give a little example to show what Quill C even thinks about. So if I pass the verbose option, I'm gonna compile this Bernstein-Vasarani circuit again. But this time I'm gonna say, just tell me everything you're thinking, compiler. And this is everything, I'll of course maybe scroll after it, stops thinking, or I'll just control C it. You can see here it's going through, it's looking at different sub-sequences. Here's looking at Rx, Rz, Rx. It's going to try to collapse that in some way. And it just continues until it just tears your program apart. Lots and lots of interesting stuff. I like seeing the compiler think, because it again reminds me that it's smarter than I am. I wanna talk a little bit about what even a compiler target for a quantum computer looks like. Generally you have a graph of qubits that are connected in some way physically on a chip. Somebody actually etched metal or something into the chip to link these qubits together. So you have a graph of qubits. Each single qubit can have some operation on it, usually for superconducting qubits you're firing some microwave pulse. For example, in quill, you could have an Rx pi over two gate or an Rz, totally parametric or fixed. Each qubit pair can have operations. Some example gates are C, Z, C not, example parametric gate is C phase where you can actually give it a parameter. And then there are even gates that happen on qubit triplets or quadruplets and whatever. And one of the examples that I know is the Mollmer-Sarnsson gate for ion traps where you can actually perform a gate simultaneously on many qubits. Importantly though, it may be that depending on the design of your quantum computer, different qubits might have different operations tuned for them. So we could imagine a four qubit quantum computer. I mean, this is crazy. I don't think anybody would actually build this to be clear. Where each qubit here has some single qubit operations but each qubit pair has a different set of native operations. So what this diagram is showing is that qubit zero and one may support a C, Z operation on them. Qubit zero and two might only have a C not only in one direction, you know, and so on and so forth. And so we designed Quilsey to accommodate chip designs that may have this. And so Quilsey can compile a circuit there and like I would challenge you to try to construct a G, H, Z state on an architecture that has this.  It's probably a waste of time to make the chip too. So for FOSSTEM kind of as a testament to this we actually ported Quilsey to what we know about Google's bristle cone architecture which is 72 qubits. We ported it to IBM's, IBM QX5 chip. Again, what we could learn about it from papers online and everything. Any program that was written in Quil, any program that works in Grove, anything at all will compile to any of our chips to again, what we could find about the bristle cone chip by Google, IBM QX5 chip. But not only that, it will actually try to optimize for those architectures. It can work with the full chip or you can actually select sub graphs of that chip and it'll compile for those. And again, as far as I know, I don't really know of other compilers that are able to kind of do this job. So as a little demo, I'm actually wrote a program with this Moomer Sorensen gate.  I think this one's on, yeah, four qubits. The program down here is just doing Moomer Sorensen on four qubits. So if I cat Moomer Sorensen into Quilsey, I'm going to show the gate depth and I'm gonna compile it for our 8Q ring. It'll do something. So gate depth, this is about 319. If I do ISA bristle cone, bristle, if I can spell it right. Bristle cone. It'll think about it more and actually found a smaller gate depth, not by a lot, but a little bit. We could do it for IBM QX5. And by the way, this argument here, this ISA argument is actually parametric. You can supply it a file to describe the chip that you have instead of like baking it into the compiler. So this one, it like doubled the gate depth. It took 600 gates. I wanna show one last thing where we have some advanced features of the compiler that can even optimize it more. So the argument is enable state prep, enable state prep reductions. So again, like a normal compiler, if you're compiling C code and you pass O3 or minus F fast math or whatever, we have similar things. This argument here says compile the program and assume that we're starting an initial zero state. Typically, that's what you assume when you write a quantum program. And if you can make that assumption, it'll actually take that into account in the compilation process. It'll partially simulate it and we actually get down to a gate depth of a third of what we got before. So there are all different ways you can coax the compiler into compiling things and get more and more efficient circuits. So QVM and QLC are free to download. We just released the Windows version. For the QVM, we do have an open source alternative. Like I said, the Pi QVM, it doesn't have all of the things, but it is licensed under Apache 2. It's much slower if you're doing it for lots of qubits, but if all of your work is in Python, it's actually much faster if you're doing one or two or three qubit computations because there's no overhead communicating with this external process and so on. And there's no real alternative to QLC and maybe in that case, if you don't want to use this thing, then you can compile things by hand or use some of the more manual alternatives. So I wanted to talk a little bit about kind of from a startup perspective, open and close source software. And so it's a little bit tricky at a startup like what you should decide to do when you want to work in software, especially when the startup is small like Rigetti and when all your competition is quite large. From the perspective of open source, there's a lot of great things. Languages should definitely be open sourced. It's nice when you have a language that's open source and APIs because people can help develop them and so on. It's good when your RPC framework is open source because that means people can plug into your architecture in various ways. And open source allows us to understand what customers actually want and use more. On the other hand, for a company, again, like ours, when you develop a lot of great IP and everything, it's not something that you necessarily just want to give away. It's something that you want to kind of hold close to yourself. It's something that you can use as competitive advantage. I actually don't really want to waste time talking about it because I'm just kidding anyway. So actually, what I want to do is kind of live at Fostam. Open source, Quilsey, and, I mean, why not? Which one is this? Quilsey, is he going to make me... So, Quilsey, hopefully, should be visible to you. You know what's the license? QVM, let's... I think QVM became public. There shouldn't be the private symbol anymore. Yeah, I think it's public now. So anyway, feel free to start looking at the code. All of the code is licensed under Apache 2. There is one little front-end UI component that's AGPL. So no other licenses in there. No ULAs, no anything. It should be all free and open source. So you guys are truly the first to know. It wasn't announced or anything earlier, and you saw it with your own eyes. So I'm American, and hopefully nobody mistook my shirt for being like Colonel Sanders or something. My shirt is, in fact, John McCarthy, who was the inventor of Lisp. And early on, we wrote the QVM and initial prototype in Lisp and the compiler in Lisp. I don't think many of the innovations that we've had could have happened if we're not originally written in Lisp. We don't have teams of, you know, tens or hundreds of developers. Originally, the team was... the software team was actually like two or three people way back when the company was 20 people. And developing in Lisp was pretty time and money efficient, more or less. It's very snappy to develop. Moreover, like quantum computing is an interesting field in that not... I don't think anybody has really figured out a great expressive syntax for expressing programs, for being able to take an idea on one's mind and actually convert it into something that runs on a machine. I mean quill and chasm and all of these things are good starts, I think. They describe a machine representation of a program, but they don't necessarily make it easy to take an idea in one's mind and put it on paper. And so Lisp is a wonderful substrate for testing different syntactic abstractions, different ways of arranging characters on a screen in order to express some type of computation. The real, real, real reason, though, is that a compiler, an optimizing compiler, I don't know if anybody's hacked on, you know, an optimizing compiler before, but they're very difficult to debug. If you get a wrong answer, you put in, let's say, we were compiling that mulmer Sorensen gate, and at the end we detect it's the wrong answer. Like, where do you start to even debug something like that? And so in Lisp, in particular with Emacs and Slime, which are both also free software, you can inspect everything. You can open up everything live while the code is running. While the compiler is running, you can actually open a REPL and inspect all of the state inside the compiler, inspect what it's doing, how it's working, all of that stuff, not just verbose printing out on the screen, but actual interactivity.  Almost all of our programmers barring me and I think one other were professional Lisp programmers prior, and most people are productive within a few days.  If you want to mutate state and do all that stuff, you can absolutely do it. I have to do it for the QVM to make it efficient. So most people can learn it. And if you're interested in learning it, there's a free book. It's been out for, I don't know how long, now 10 years or so. Practical common Lisp, if all of you probably are programmers already. So if you want to check it out, great book. So if you find yourself wanting to be in super position with a beer at some point, I invented this beer plus you over root two challenge. If anybody, again, you guys are the first to know, kind of the first three people, if you solve any of the issues on GitHub, we tried to even internally keep a list of issues. If you fix a bug, if you just make any interesting contribution, I'm happy to have a beer with you. It'll be on me. I should say thanks to all of my colleagues at Rigetti, in particular. I'd like to give thanks to Eric Peterson. He's one of the principal architects of the compiler. He's also an algebraic topologist. So he thinks about like chips as like, you know, n-dimensional simplices and all this stuff that doesn't make any sense. Mark Skilbeck, Lauren Capoludo, Will Zhang, Chad Rigetti, and the rest of the team really for supporting building this effort. And for really thinking about quantum software engineering is like a thing unto itself. My email's down there. The code on GitHub is rigetti.qvm and rigetti.qlc. And we do have a Slack channel. If you go to rigetti.community, you can find the link to our Slack channel. I'm on it. A lot of other people are on it. Happy to chat about this stuff. And thank you all for listening. It was really fun. Happy to take questions. Real rubber. Yep. So two things. First of all, you said many times that Qlc is the only compiler of its kind. Not correct. Cambridge also includes chips. Project of Ticket. It's very similar to all this other thing you mentioned. It's a Python module rather than a Python module. My actual question is about the simulator. So you mentioned Qlc is a platform-interpreting factor. Yes. That's right. So the simulator is going to just simulate a Ql program. Oh, yes. So the question was, well, first there was a comment saying that I said that the compiler was only of its kind. And this gentleman said that there is some other software that provides a lot of similar features. And then the question was, is the simulator general enough to support other architectures, like the IBM QX5, for instance? The simulator kind of develops from a theory of something that we wrote in the quill paper called the quantum abstract machine. So it's a simulator for an abstract machine. It's a classical simulation. It doesn't restrict itself to any particular gate or architecture. Well, whatever gate you throw at it, it will simulate. It will not error if you say, I'm doing this gate on this architecture. Presumably, you would pass it through the compiler first before simulating it if you wanted to restrict it to the gates of that architecture. With that said, however, for instance, with our chips, we do develop noise models that are similar, at least somewhat characteristic of our chips. And you can supply that to the QVM. And it will be able to simulate that. But otherwise, there isn't any hard line restriction on the gates that it simulates. No. Yep. In terms of practical efficacy, in what fields apply the quantum computing? Yeah, so I don't think I'm the best person to answer this. I think you'll, oh yes, I keep forgetting. What fields, in terms of practical applicability, what fields is quantum computing sort of good or useful for? I don't think I'm the greatest person to answer this question. I think I definitely want to learn a lot from the people here. But my take on it is there are two things that we've definitely been focusing on, two things that seem to be popular in the field. Quantum chemistry, simulating dynamics, simulating different aspects of molecules, finding energy states or energy levels and so on. And optimization problems, usually finding the maximum or minimum of some constrained optimization problem, I would say. So that ties into logistics and what have you. But I do want to reiterate, we haven't solved the problem on a quantum computer, again that I know of, that outperforms something that we've computed classically. We've done great proof of concepts, the kind of almost the hello world of quantum computation almost seems to be computing the energy of like a dihydrogen molecule at different bond distances. It's something you can compute today, but that's also something that my laptop can compute. But those seem to be the promising areas. Yep. The algorithms that are basically, they are finding the ways how to develop the cryptography, cryptography, cryptographic functions that are resistant to quantum computers. Basically I think the first question is that I guess also there is quite a good field of application of quantum computers in cryptography. Yeah, the question is kind of what's the state of post-quantum crypto. I actually don't know anything about it. And I think we have a talk later that's going to be about it. So that's definitely something I'm interested in hearing about as well. Yep. I have a question about the quill language. Yes. You say this is a kind of assembly language. So when you have the binary, is there a one-to-one relationship with the code? Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Sure. The question is, I said quill is like an assembly-like language. Is there like an equivalent of like the end binary that would be like loaded into memory where it actually gets executed? Quill, like other sort of big air quotes, assembly quote-unquote languages, are not true assemblies. They're not languages that run native on the machine, generally not even a binary encoding runs native on the machine. In the end, these things, at least with current control systems and on microwave devices to be clear, superconducting devices that are driven by microwaves, usually in the end the quill program will be something general that has all these funny gates, like if I go back and look at this mulmer Sorenson thing, like even though it looks like assembly, that's definitely not something any superconducting computer will run. An ion trap, or some can run this natively, but not any superconducting chip. And so what happens is this passes through a compiler and you get quill back out, but this quill is now in one-to-one mapping with what your machine will run. Generally after that, you're going to pass it to another sort of translator, almost like a true assembler now, which gets turned into code that runs on your control system. Even when it gets on the control system, however, it's not going to be like one single binary that runs single-threaded.  So there is a little bit more that has to happen after this for a compilation. Yep. Well, first of all, congratulations. Yeah, thanks. And the question is when you said 30 times speed up without service, what was the metrics you had in mind? Yeah. So one of the main metrics, there are a few metrics, but one of them where the 30x thing came from was one of the popular things that we do. There was an algorithm called, sorry, the question was where did the 30x come from? I stated 30x speed up before. Where did that come from? So generally, the comparison was kind of the realm of HTTP-based services where you construct a job of some sort. You have a program that you like to run. You ship it off to some service ingesting this job. It processes it, packages up the answer, sends it back to you over the internet. And perhaps for a lot of programming and quantum computing, you either have to do that a lot because maybe you're scanning over a range of things, or your program itself is actually changing frequently. You might be generating a new circuit for every run of your program. So you might be optimizing, let's suppose you're finding the maximum of something.  Maybe it's not good, so you take a step in another direction, construct a new circuit, send it, receive it. So those types of use cases were what we were comparing to, specifically VQE and QAOA algorithms if you're familiar with those names. That's what we were comparing it to, where the speed ups come from our locality with the machine. On a QMI, you're actually running local to the chip itself. Your virtual machine is actually resident on the machine with the control system. What is it called? Reset with fast feedback or active reset is another one where we can zero the state of the machine by kind of forcing it to be zero. We can send pulses in, measure, and bring it down to the zero state as opposed to kind of stepping off the background, letting the machine kind of slowly get back. So you can really iterate your program fast. And the third thing that we introduced is something called parametric compilation where the compiler itself not only takes a fixed set of gates but can actually take a parametric description of your gates where you have unknown variables and still compile it into your native gate set. And with that, with parametric compilation, that means you don't have to compile each loop around when you hit the actual hardware. And so that's kind of where the speed ups came from. Those are the problems that we compared to. Yep. Can you use a different native gate set? So like you find my own native gate set and run it on QVM you will see? Yeah, so QVM will execute anything.  So there's no restriction there. I don't think I'll get it right. Can QVM operate with different native gate sets? QVM will run anything. Any gate set, it doesn't matter as long as it understands the actual representation of the gate. Quilsey, I would say mostly yes. Quilsey is able to operate with most of the gates that show up in literature, rotation gates, a big handful of two-cupid gates. It's relatively straightforward to extend it with more two-cupid gates. We had to do that when we were reporting it for the IBM architecture. We had to go through a process of making sure at every step along how to optimize for those gates and so on. Out of the box you can't say compile for my wacky two-cupid mulmer Sorenson and don't do any rotations, do these funky one-cupid operations or something like that. Compiler would need to be told a little bit more about that. So out of the box we won't get that. But if it falls into any of the gates that are in sort of the general superconducting regime like any of the eye swap, parametric eye swap, all of those things, it does work out of the box. Am I missing anybody? Yep. I think you partially answered. But you said that you provide a personal quantum machine in cloud services. Yes.  The question is these quantum machine images, is it all just simulator or does it have a real back-end? Actually the major point of it is the real back-end. The simulation is more of a bonus. In fact we just load a QVM onto the things and you can run the QVM just like a normal UNIX program. What you can do is run it as a service and now you can connect up to it. So the simulation is something that you kind of get for free. The real point of the QMIs is so that these virtual machines can lay resident with the quantum hardware itself and you get full 100% control. It's not being mediated. You're not in a queue, anything like that. You get sort of immediate one-to-one access with the machine. And so my question was how do you share those resources between all the machines you get access to? Yep. So the question is how do we share those resources across several machines? Just coarse-grained booking. We have a QCS command-line app which is also open-source. You can do QCS reserve and you reserve a block of time where the machine is yours and only yours. And so if it's available, you can get it. We also allow booking on what we call certain sub-lattices. I don't remember if there's a little cute image of a little lattice. You can see this guy pulling a little lattice out from the 16-Q ring. You can book smaller chunks of the machine and operate on just those. I think that's it for time, right? We might have one more question. Okay. Who else? Yep. If I understood correctly, compilation involves an optimization problem, minimizing the ticket length. So the question is, compilation involves some type of optimization problem. What heuristic does it use or what different heuristics does it use? I want to give the snarky answer and say, read the source now that it's available. But it actually uses a lot of different things. So it depends exactly what it's compiling. And so a good amount of it, I probably can't scroll back to it, a good amount of it is doing P pull rewriting. So it actually has a bunch of rewrite rules. And this is probably the easiest thing to add to the compiler. So if anybody has like a cool circuit identity that they like, they can put in the compiler and the compiler will suddenly know about it and be able to apply it automatically. So finding sequences of gates and shortening them, sometimes it just multiplies the gates out and just does an optimal 2Q compilation, for instance. If you have a bunch of 2Q gates kind of in a row, it's just going to multiply them out and then do a re-expansion on them. And then lastly, in some cases, it actually has to do like a stochastic gradient, not stochastic, just a gradient ascent or something for certain types of compilation, but definitely not enough time to get into that. Lots and lots of different optimization problems in the compiler, certainly. All right, let's thank the speaker one more time.


Look, I'm sorry guys, the title and the thumbnail got you and yes, it's true, Xbox is one. Now I know PlayStation fans are gonna come against me with fierce reverence, but let me just put it simply this way, let's take the journey on why Xbox has already won. Now, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X and X launched about a year and a couple of months ago, right? We've got a full cycle, at least a full year cycle of what these consoles can do. Now, in terms of specs and all that stuff, they're pretty much the same in match, so we don't really need to focus on that stuff, right? We know they're gonna have all those features we care about from VRL, 4K, 60, 4K 120, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, doesn't matter, right? But Sony came into the game saying, thinking we're going to sell more consoles than the Xbox because they did with the PlayStation 4 and that's a valid point. But Microsoft came in and said, we're gonna win the generation, not the console war, which what Sony was thinking, but we're going to win this generation. You're thinking, but isn't that the same thing? No, it is not. Now, let's look at some of those numbers. Now, we know so far, PlayStation has sold 18 million PS5s, which is great. That is a great number out there and Microsoft has sold 13 million Xbox Series X's and S's. So, that's also a good amount, which means we've got a five million lead from PlayStation and it could grow. Now, we know there's limitations with, of course, chip shortage and all that stuff going on. So, people can't find the consoles to buy. Here is where Microsoft was playing chess and PlayStation was playing checkers. Yeah, that's right. Microsoft focused on Xbox Game Pass sets things completely differently. Microsoft just came out and announced that they've got 25 million subscribers from Xbox Game Pass, which is roughly seven million more subscribers over what you have in terms of owners of PlayStation 5s. So, as far as Microsoft is concerned, the more you have their service, the better. And to me, that is truly impressive. It kind of sets the precedent to say, look, we don't care if you own our console, we just care that you play our games. Now, speaking of games, that is the part where PlayStation fans will run up and say, hey, ThunderEat, you're wrong, we have the games, we are the best, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Right? Yes, PlayStation has some great games and there are some games I absolutely love, like God of War, which I haven't finished, or Spider-Man, Miles Morales, which I also haven't finished and trust me, Daniel's shaking his head over there. It's like, either way, there are tons of games on the PlayStation platform on Charter, you can name that, Goose of Shishimura, that are awesome and great single-player games. But Microsoft has actually gone ahead and built a really robust game library, because this is something you PlayStation fans have yelled for years. Microsoft has no games. There's nothing to play on the Xbox. Well, they went out, they bought Bethesda and they said, everyone was like, okay, cool. That is really nice. They had tons of games from Bethesda, but a lot of people still said, look, most of those games are kind of PC-centric other than games like Doom, you know, Duke Nukem and things like that. You know, that's fine, right? That's fine. But they just announced the big elephant in the room, the acquisition of Activision and Blizzard, basically Activision and Blizzard were just one company. And that has shook the PlayStation fans in their roots. They're all shaking, they're shivering, they're going, oh my God, what's gonna happen? Well, that's what you wanted. You wanted Microsoft to give you games and Microsoft is doing that. Now, think of it this way, Microsoft has acquired a lot of game studios. Let's put the IPs aside for a second. They have a ton of game studios, a ton from Bethesda, which is just called, they have a ton in-house and now they have a ton from Activision, Blizzard, which is gonna give them a lot of games that come on that library. And all those games will show up on Xbox Game Pass. That is the key value point here. It means that Microsoft is gonna give you the ability to jump in and play anywhere. Now, what I mean by that is simply this. Look, I can kick back, relax on my couch here and play Xbox Game Pass games right here on my LG OLED in 4K glory. Or I could spin around and sit down from my PC and play it in 4K at a high resolution because I've got a graphics card that can perform pretty well, or I can play on my mobile device. So for instance, if I'm just an iOS and Apple user, now I can play the games I want to play on my iPhone with Xbox Game Pass, or you can do it also on your MacBook.  Now the other aspect to that is that, some of you are going, look, will Microsoft hold back Call of Duty? What's gonna happen with that? Look, fear not, PlayStation fans. You're still gonna have Call of Duty on there. But think about it this way. Microsoft is gonna have Call of Duty free on Game Pass with your monthly subscription, or you will pay $70 on the PlayStation. Now I can almost bet and guarantee you that Microsoft is gonna have the expansion packs and DLCs free, at least for the first one, and you have to pay for it on the PlayStation. So eventually you're gonna go, look, you know what, maybe I'll just get it on PC because it's free on Game Pass, right? See the thinking there? You don't have to cling to that box. Now, this is gonna change the whole way gaming is gonna just grow and spread in the future. We don't have to be tied down, Microsoft is saying that. Now we do know, for instance, that services like Stadia and GeForce now have apps that are available on your TV, and that's gonna be coming on Game Pass, and that's also gonna expand the reach, because again, your TVs have pretty powerful processors as well that can stream those games for you quite effectively. So I think when you look at it, like there's no way you can go away from this method. Now, some PlayStation fans will say, look, Sony has PS Now, PS Plus, that's also kinda like Game Pass, it is not. Don't lie to yourself, okay? Look, I can show you the service right now. I have both of them, and it's great for certain things, for classic PlayStation titles, I get to play some of them, I don't have access to new ones, I get cheaper prices to buy some of these games. Again, that's not Game Pass. Game Pass, I can play Halo Infinite right now. I can play Rainbow Six Extraction, which just came out, which is an Ubisoft game. Now, to put it in the best perspective, the top-selling games of 2021 list just came out, right? From NPD, and the top-selling games were Call of Duty, both Call of Duty's actually from this year and last year. We also had Battle for Blood in there, we had an Ubisoft games, all those games are available on Game Pass. I didn't have to spend a dime, so all you PlayStation console owners are paying for something you don't need to. So I'm just gonna help you guys here with this link down below. You can go ahead and get three years of Xbox Live for just $50 each for each year, bringing it up to $150, and then upgrade yourself to Xbox Game Pass for just a dollar.  I mean, that's just a great experience. And then to top it all off, the one that bugs me the most, and I think most PlayStation users don't understand. Hey, look, I was lucky to get two PlayStation, I have one at home, I have one in the office. I just set up my second one in the office, and I'm re-downloading my games. And Daniel says, hey, do you have access to the game your game saves? I was like, yeah, I should, no problem. I go ahead and check it out. No, I have to upload it from my other console, which it doesn't do automatically, I don't know why. And then re-download it on here, why? This is why Sony has lost. Now, of course, if you guys disagree with me, you can go ahead and leave your comments down below. I know this is a little bit satirical, but honestly, I believe the generation is lost for PlayStation. Sony will sell a lot of console units, Microsoft will have more subscription. And in the end, numbers pan out. So thank you very much, guys, and always enjoy your entertainment.


Within the Department of the Navy, we all readily recite our core values of honor, courage, and commitment. There's amplifying language that defines each core value. The words that help us understand commitment are, as a team, improved the quality of our work, our people, and ourselves. Foster respect up and down the chain of command. Show respect toward all people without regard to race, religion, and gender. Always strive for positive change in the personal improvement. As we finish our series on signature behaviors, number one tells us to treat every person with respect. This is so much harder than it sounds, but it is critically important and directly tied to our core values. I challenge you to measure the respect you extend to others. It will surely be a learning experience. Lead well this week.


There's only a handful of people in this world that I think can appreciate or really even just understand the beautiful relationship between the Libre man and his text editor. As a Vim user myself, I went from having no idea how to quit Vim to realizing that there's rarely ever a reason to want to quit Vim because you can do just about anything with Vim. I mean it truly is one of the most clutch programs that I have installed on my system right now. I've got it riced the way that I want it with a bunch of useful plugins installed and so you could say I'm a bit of a Vim enthusiast but of course there's other text editors out there that the Libre man might be using and some text editors that people get even more enthusiastic about like with Emax users some of them get to the point where they literally live within Emax like they'll use it to browse the web they'll use it for their email and basically their whole operating system just becomes one giant bootloader for Emax but even though I love them so much it wasn't my first text editor and GNU Linux wasn't even my first operating system like so many people out there I used Windows first and while I'm pretty sure that the first text editor I ever used was probably Notepad or possibly even an early version of Word like from Office 98 the most influential Microsoft text editor in my life was actually WordPad and here's why some of you have probably had a similar situation of this that made you appreciate WordPad so when I was going to school probably around sixth grade we started doing most of our writing assignments on the computer in fact I think the school started getting like some new computers around that time and I think like my first standardized test was around that time too like the first one that was on a computer but anyway we started doing more assignments on the computer and I really liked that because I had crappy handwriting I've always had really crappy handwriting and I think around fifth or sixth grade was also when I started playing RuneScape or RuneScape 2 you know what people would call old school RuneScape today and so that really got me learning how to type well like to actually know where the keys were without looking at it and I'm not sure how many words per minute I type but you know I got pretty good because it's got RuneScape has this whole chat feature and you know it's a very social game and most of the kids in middle school at that time I think we're still faster with like pen and paper or pencil and paper but I was the opposite right I was faster at creating text on a computer than with a pen and paper now at my school all of the computers had Microsoft Word on them right they were all Windows computers probably XP at the time and you would save your documents as like .doc files and then later on it would be .doc X files when that became the new standard and word but at first I'm pretty sure it was .doc so that's all well and good right these you know those file formats because then those files could be opened on any other school computer that had Word on it but when I got home right like if it was a project that I worked on in school then brought home I didn't have Microsoft Word on my laptop and my parents didn't have any copies that they could give me either and they certainly weren't going to go buy me a copy of Microsoft Word from middle school so the only computer that we had in the house that had Word on it was my dad's laptop but that was like an OEM copy of Word that came with the computer so there wasn't any way or at least back then at that time I didn't know if there was any way to get Microsoft Word off of his computer and onto mine I probably could have pirated it but yeah I didn't I didn't want to do that right at that age anything that I had pirated you know it was it was kind of a 50-50 shot whether or not I would end up getting a virus on my computer so the first time that I ran into this situation where I had a couple of pages of text from school that were typed out and saved to a dot doc format I was annoyed because I tried opening it up on my laptop in notepad and then I just got a bunch of gobbledygook here in the editor you know like symbols and other stuff because notepad can't handle that right like I'm pretty sure all notepad knows how to do is text files and I guess like source code files and stuff like that but you know rich text formatting and anything more complicated than that I don't think notepad is capable of dealing with so I thought I was gonna have to go into my parents room and type up you know finish typing up that document on my dad's laptop which meant I couldn't tab between typing and training combat and runescape but luckily before I stopped killing rock crabs and logged off on my computer I tried opening up the project in wordpad and I was relieved to see that it loaded without any issues and I was able to keep working on the project and even save it back into a dot doc file to continue working on it at school later now of course wordpad wasn't a true Microsoft word replacement it didn't have nearly as many formatting options you couldn't insert images into your documents I'm pretty sure it didn't have built-in spell check or grammar check but wordpad was literally my first ever comfy text editor and just like every other great piece of Microsoft software modern Microsoft has decided to kill it off because of their own greed so if we take a look on learn dot microsoft.com they have this page called deprecated features for windows clients and you know deprecating some of these features make some sense right like tls uh 1.0 and 1.1 that's really outdated and insecure so it makes sense to me for newer versions of windows to just not support it at all but there's no security issues with using an older version of wordpad or any older text editor for that matter like wordpad doesn't have security issues it doesn't take up very much space on your computer not that microsoft actually cares about software bloat in the first place and you know it doesn't matter that wordpad is no longer being updated because it doesn't need to have any updates like it does what it's supposed to do it works as a free minimalist document editor for microsoft proprietary dot doc and dot doc x files that have become the standard file format for documents in schools and offices and of course microsoft word the program that they're recommending you install instead that costs money you've got to pay for i think it's either a yearly or a monthly subscription and you got to have a microsoft account to use word and of course you can also use the online version but that requires an internet connection and a microsoft account as well there's so many hoops you have to jump through just to create a freaking document on windows like i can't imagine that wordpad would have actually taken any serious market share away from microsoft word like i really doubt microsoft was competing with themselves in that regard like it just doesn't make any sense because now for people in the future that find themselves in a bind like i was back in middle school there might not be able to figure out any solution to continue editing these proprietary file formats at home other than to buy a word now of course there are open source programs like libre office writer that actually give you even more features than wordpad does and can still read and write to dot doc in doc x formats but not everybody knows about this wonderful libre document editor or maybe they don't have internet like i said or they don't have administrator access to install a new application i mean it's honestly ridiculous that microsoft first created these proprietary formats push to make them the industry standard along with pushing to make their operating system the industry standard but now they don't even want to give you the basic tools with the operating system to process these kinds of files like how can we even call microsoft windows a usable desktop operating system anymore when you have to pay a subscription fee to do something as simple as edit a document at this point microsoft might as well just go all in on making this a gaming os like optimizing windows for games and stuff like that because of course a lot of games still only work on microsoft windows and that's got to be the only thing that's really keeping it alive at this point because calling windows a productivity os anymore is just a bad joke if you want to get some actual work done install a just works linux distro which will give you all the tools you need for editing documents and spreadsheets with only about half as much bloat and no built-in spyware