Comment by sheiyei
4 days ago
Extremely theoretically, and the article is very sensational.
The paper is half a year old, and hasn't made a splash; if this were significant news, I would expect to be able to find more coverage on it.
I did find this more nuanced take here: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/02/04/how-to-p...
I haven't seen much of Quanta "Magazine", but I feel all of it has been stuff like this?
Quanta is a pretty popular, popular science outlet. It tends to be closer to the theory than (capital P, S) Popular Science magazine, but ultimately much of what they publish is digested to a degree for lay consumption.
They had an article just the other day about a more optimal sphere packing that was up my alley as a technical (programmer) person with a casual interest in broader pure math.
They do sensationalize a bit as a side effect of their process though, no argument there.
The nuanced take was also discussed here at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939312
usually they are very thorough (for a magazine targeting curious well-motivated, but of course still a virtually completely laymen audience), but it seems recently their volume has increased whil quality stayed constant :)
Quanta is “pop science” for smart lay people who might also read, for instance, the New Yorker.