Author: Neil Mather

Learned a little bit about FPGAs from Alan of myStorm today. I’m a long way from clocking it all, but I think a couple of concepts sunk in… I’d like to know more about chip design and hardware, the fundamentals.

The BlackIce Mx looks super fun, an open hardware FPGA dev board. Someone was demoing the NES chips built on one, and Alan showed me an implementation of RISC-V. https://mystorm.uk/mystorm-opensource-fpga-hardware-blackice-mxusing-blackedge/

When you look at the resources required to do quantum research, or even just fabricate silicon chips for that matter, I think that along with small tech, appropriate tech, etc, there’s a need to think about guerrilla technology. The creative use of small technology to counter the misuse of more ‘advanced’ technology by those with access to orders of magnitude more resources. Ways of tackling the asymmetry. Better understanding of the terrain. Small units of organisation with mobility.
I don’t have a great grasp of what’s going on with quantum computing, but I saw a talk today about how it is advancing apace. IBM now at 53 qubits.

Given the stated potential of quantum computers, it seems worrying that they will be the playthings of wealthy states and corporations. Barclays recently used it for some financial application for example. The liberatory potential could be vast, but will it be used for those ends? Don’t want to be a crank, but I’m not feeling particularly hopeful…