Comment by Strilanc

That paper is hilarious, and is correct that there's plenty of shit to make fun of... but there's also progress. I recommend watching Sam Jacques' talk from PQCrypto 2025 [0]. It would be silly to delay PQC adoption because of focusing on the irrelevant bad papers.

In the past ten years, on the theory side, the expected cost of cryptographically relevant quantum factoring has dropped by 1000x [1][2]. On the hardware side, fault tolerance demonstrations have gone from repetition code error rates of 1% error per round [3] to 0.00000001% error per round [fig3a of 4], with full quantum codes being demonstrated with an error rate of 0.2% [fig1d of 4] via a 2x reduction in error each time distance is increased by 2.

If you want to track progress in quantum computing, follow the gradual spinup of fault tolerance. Noise is the main thing blocking factoring of larger and larger numbers. Once the quality problem is turned into a quantity problem, then those benchmarks can start moving.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJxENYdsB6c

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.0928

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15917

[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.7403

[4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687