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Cake day: February 14th, 2024

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  • I was born in the late 80s, grew up in the 90s and 2000s, and it’s both fascinating and terrifying to me how much of what I thought was just “standard” stuff was influenced by marketing 50-100 years before I was even born. Santa Clause as a jolly old man with rosy cheeks and a snow white beard wasn’t a big thing until Coca-Cola made it part of their advertising in the 30s. The bacon with breakfast thing was the result of a food packaging company in the 1920s hiring a man named Edward Bernays to help them sell more bacon. Bernays was allegedly so good at marketing/manipulation that people like Hitler and Goebbels kept copies of his books. Orange juice became a thing because orange producers in Florida in the early 1900s made too many oranges for the market (in an attempt to beat out California as the country’s orange production state), and juicing them was considered a better alternative to reducing production.









  • You’ve got an estimated 10 years or so before quantum computers can crack all current encryption by using Shor’s algorithm.

    One of the most important quantum computing algorithms, known as Shor’s algorithm, would allow a large-scale quantum computer to quickly break essentially all of the encryption systems that are currently used to secure internet traffic against interception. Today’s quantum computers are nowhere near large enough to execute Shor’s algorithm in a practical setting, and the expert consensus is that these cryptanalytically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) will not be developed until at least the 2030s.