Good article. Definitely helped fill me in on this stuff, although I still have too many questions about how the underlying physics work to feel like I understand it.

This article contains the sentence, "A good predictor for whether you even slightly understood that last sentence is whether or not your mind just got blown hard." It blew my mind, but mostly because I'm just amazed that there are people who are capable of engineering this kind of chaos into something useful. Not sure if that's what he meant.

I would really like to get a handle on all this, but I'm thinking now that I would have to retire to do so.

Maybe relevant: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=208

I get that these kind of posts can seem interesting to the software engineers that are predominant on HN, but these kind of articles are ultimately "popular science" articles. They only give the illusion of understanding.

I'm tired of people trying to find or make shortcuts to advanced topics. If you want to truly understanding something, put in the work. Shor's actual paper for this is only 25 pages. You need a strong background in advanced linear algebra and quantum theory to understand it. If you don't know quantum theory and linear algebra, you are fundamentally incapable of understanding Shor's algorithm. It's like trying to understand how compound interest works in finance without understanding what multiplication is. There's no point, you shouldn't even try. It's wasted time, and anyone who says otherwise is missing the point.

If you're serious about wanting to understand advanced topics, put in the damn work. Stop trying to find or make shortcuts. Shortcuts only produce a bunch of know-it-all armchair scientists that think they understand something just because they read a blog post about it. People spend their entire lives studying these topics. Are you so presumptuous?

Don't get me wrong, analogies and novel perspectives can be invaluable learning tools. But they can never be a substitute for the fundamentals, only supplement them.

Anyway, I apologize for the rant. The author is clearly interested in QI and has put a lot of effort into his articles. That is to be applauded. But I caution anyone reading this, or any other article on QI, to be aware of the fact that he or she is reading a shortcut and should not believe that he or she has actually understood Shor's algorithm.