Unprofessional ramblings.
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Oh to hear one's name sung out, carried on a beautiful voice. How I long to hear "it's my Tyson-baby!" cry out from the other room, or a wistful "Oh Mr Jones" flow down a London alleyway. Just once more. Life stalls and atrophies without the nourishment of a "Tybabybich!". Its ceaseless thorns are pruned only by a "hi Tysie-boy", and the wounds soothed with "how's it going Ty-man?". A hole is left unfilled for every "TyTy" and "T-dawg" heard nevermore. 


Promise me, dear reader, to sing aloud every loved name that happens through your doorway. Of each, permute. Transfigure. And drum it until they feel the stamp on their very soul. Let each take a piece of you away with them to replay in the nighttime when nostalgia collects its dues. But know the gift is bittersweet; the infinite variations of every name echo long beyond the last time each is spoken. They feed an insatiable hunger.


Oh to hear that voice again speak that name, in its original affection, key and candor. Just once more!

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I am on a lakeside bench in a cold night. She drapes her legs over mine. I recite embarassing excerpts from a self-unaware journal, but the story is known to us both. She kisses me, I think, or I her, or perhaps not for one more day. Soon we will wake to trumpets, and soon alone.



It won't be so, she says. But the poem might be anyway written, if I so wish it. I do, so it is. And it becomes so. She's tearily in my doorway now. It takes some years to throw away her empty perfume bottle, but I manage it.



I am in a castle, of sorts. She bursts into the room with penned words we had been too afraid to say aloud. Words which had long outgrown their teenage frivolity and matured into paralysis. But I'm even older now. How could I ever say them again?

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Some years ago I read, and became engrossed by, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The story became glued in my mind, somehow cemented by the entirely different story of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. The decadent and depraved lives of the former's aesthetes were juxtaposed* with the grandiose ambitions of the latter's miserable artists. Where Wilde's hedonists self-indulged and contented themselves with shallow quasi-philosophical rhetoric in unending dinner parties, Kaufman's obsessive playwright self-flagellated and devoted themselves to an overzealous masterpiece. Yet they all sought out terrific ecstasies and terrible suffering, and aspired to romantic, idealised cadences of life. I convinced myself these were in some way the same characters, and the same cautionary tale about self-affirmation and intellectual masturbation**.


It was once my intention to compare these works in a sprawling, insufferable and likely unreadable essay, enumerating the values commandeered for my own life, and the lessons reappropriated and perverted to enhance my nihilism. Mercifully, I have since lost the necessary energy and wit - if ever I had it. Below are remnant excerpts in vague groups which hint at the abandoned thesis. Some will demonstrate Wilde's beautiful prose and charming digestions of the human condition. And some will be very upsetting.


* who could use such a term without embarrassment?


** It will be clear that consuming these media so soon of one another has irrevocably damaged my person, as have no doubt the relevant ruminations with the likes of Anna Moloney and Luke Luttmann.

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To my beautiful peers and fellow wage slaves,


With sincere heartbreak, I must conclude my time at Quantum Motion.


When I began, Quantum Motion was nothing more than an online bookseller operating out of the garage of Simon, John and James' (no relation to the New Testament) shared Washington condominium. A failed lawsuit with an up-and-coming online retailer saw a reluctant pivot to Silicon quantum computing, and a promise to deliver a septillion-qubit device by October 2025. Today's corporate superpower is barely recognisable, spanning both hemispheres and all four corners of this wide, flat Earth.


Alas, my own journey in Quantum Motion has come to an end - I cannot take back what I said about the lunch-meal vending machine, nor the company's aggressive foray into nuclear arms manufacture. My desk is cleared and the stain I was developing on the Caledonian Road office carpet has been wiped clean, though I was generously allowed to take home my electrons and charge-traps.


It has been a pleasure to extrude your layout files and mesh your devices. I have since taken up a position at NVIDIA in New York City, strategising on how best to waste our final energy budget pursuing impossible machines in the looming shadow of impending climate catastrophe. Do not hesitate to reach out should you need your devices classically simulated, or your ideologies baselessly, depravedly ridiculed. 


May your qubits be ever plentiful, and your Silicon impurities fleeting and weak-willed.

Your faithful servant,

Tybaby.


PS: Pen me at [redacted]@gmail.com, and mail only your most inappropriate corporate criticisms to [redacted]@nvidia.com.

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Some notes and forum posts from my teaching of QP2 at EPFL. These cover the topics of tensor products, the Born rule, the Bloch sphere, density matrices, reduced states, coherence vs purity, the spectral theorem, basis representations, the variational principle, and some linear algebra. I've collated those containing an explanation I may wish to later refer back to, or some equivalence I wish to remember, or evidence of a zeal for teaching which might motivate an eventual escape from corporate America.

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Dearest twin,

No doubt the grave news - that our fateful parallel journeys have encountered their thirtieth winters - has by now reached you. I fear these claims are more than mere hearsay: my wretched digits have already begun to curl, and the skin of my cheeks has sallowed and withered. My once youthful complexion, widely celebrated and oft affectionately remarked upon by friends and strangers alike, has languished and conceded to a jaundiced imposter. So too does my back weary; with muscles atrophied and bones stricken with decay, my very form has crumpled from its erst proud standing which had attracted the admiration of so many well-wishers, and the romance of very many bedmates. As my eyelids shrivel and my voice wanes, and the stupor of old age besots my once fierce and meritorious mind, the memories of my innumerable victories and inimitable achievements, which so multitudinously bestrew the history of my juvenile conquests, fade to obscured fragments of dwindled former greatness. My now corrupted soul, defiled by the pernicious vagaries of a wanton, dissolute existence, and debased, having become depraved; perverted; indecorously apes the unblemished spirit moulded in perfect (by some accounts, exceeding) replication of an almighty God who, bewildered by the divine creation of so virtuous and celestial a mortal manifestation, vowed nevermore to build men of such magnificent and terribly tremendous a temperament. My feet also ache.

I hope you are well.

Yours truly,

Tyson

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Some talks about classical simulation of quantum computers, given at Quantum Emulation 2024 in the British Library, London. Please forgive the temporary echo and constantly changing microphone and sound quality, as well as front tooth recently chipped in Switzerland, and the misremembrance of my name by my own company. 
Here is a shaky live-coding demonstration of QuESTlink in Mathematica, given on the same day. Such endeavours never work out.
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​Anyone unlucky enough to be around me through the last 6 years will know that a profound (erm) dissatisfaction with the Oxford University student experience is my worst-kept secret. My collection of frustrating anecdotes has hit critical mass and spilled over into a satirical student survival guide. It is bound to offend, so wear your thickest skin.

To view the guide, click Read More in the bottom right.
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This is an academic rant about a recent provocative paper unlikely to interest the typical audience of my unprofessional blog. It's uploaded here so it can be linked when inevitable future papers show as profound a negligence in their presentation. Shitpost-seekers, seek elsewhere!
To view, click Read More​ in the bottom right.
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I was an undeserving invited speaker at the Quantum Innovation 2022 symposium, presenting unpublished research on classically simulating noisy quantum variational algorithms. This was miraculously the first successfully recorded talk of my PhD, yet frustratingly, the first I gave at 7am (4pm in Tokyo) after staying up all night. Watching below for some delirious slurring.