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Update (Sep 1): Thanks for the comments, everyone! As you can see, I further revised this blog’s header based on the feedback and on further reflection.

The Right could only kill me and everyone I know.
The Left is scarier; it could convince me that it was my fault!

(In case you missed it on the blog’s revised header, right below “Quantum computers aren’t just nondeterministic Turing machines” and “Hold the November US election by mail.” I added an exclamation point at the end to suggest a slightly comic delivery.)

Update: A friend expressed concern that, because my new motto appears to “blame both sides,” it might generate confusion about my sympathies or what I want to happen in November. So to eliminate all ambiguity: I hereby announce that I will match all reader donations made in the next 72 hours to either the Biden-Harris campaign or the Lincoln Project, up to a limit of $2,000. Honor system; just tell me in the comments what you donated.

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1. Good news, everyone! Following years of requests, this blog finally supports rich HTML and basic TeX in comments. Also, the German spam that used to plague the blog (when JavaScript was disabled) is gone. For all this, I owe deep gratitude to a reader and volunteer named Filip Dimitrovski.
   
2. Filip refused to accept any payment for fixing this blog. Instead, he asked only one favor: namely, that I use my platform to raise public awareness about the plight of the MAOI antidepressant Nardil. Filip tells me that, while tens of thousands of people desperately need Nardil—no other antidepressant ever worked for them—it’s become increasingly unavailable because the pharma companies can no longer make money on it. He points me to a SlateStarCodex post from 2015 that explains the problem in more detail (anyone else miss SlateStarCodex?). More recent links about the worsening crisis here, here, and here.
   
3. Here’s a fantastic interview of Bill Gates by Steven Levy, about the coronavirus debacle in the US. Gates, who’s always been notoriously and strategically nonpartisan, is more explicit than I’ve ever seen him before in explaining how the Trump administration’s world-historic incompetence led to where we are.
   
4. Speaking of which, here’s another excellent article, this one in The American Interest, about the results of “wargames” trying to simulate what happens in the extremely likely event that Trump contests a loss of the November election. Notably, the article sets out six steps that could be taken over the next few months to decrease the chance of a crisis next to which all the previous crises of 2020 will pale.
   
5. A reader asked me to share a link to an algorithm competition, related to cryptographic “proofs of time,” that ends on August 31. Apparently, my having shared a link to a predecessor of this competition—at the request of friend-of-the-blog Bram Cohen—played a big role in attracting good entries.
   
6. Huge congratulations to my former PhD student Shalev Ben-David, as well as Eric Blais, for co-winning the FOCS’2020 Best Paper Award—along with two other papers—for highly unconventional work about a new minimax theorem for randomized algorithms. (Ben-David and Blais also have a second FOCS paper, which applies their award paper to get the first tight composition theorem for randomized query complexity. Here’s the full list of FOCS papers—lots of great stuff, for a conference that of course won’t physically convene!) Anyway, a central idea in Ben-David and Blais’s new work is to use proper scoring rules to measure the performance of randomized algorithms—algorithms that now make statements like “I’m 90% sure that this is a yes-input,” rather than just outputting a 1-bit guess. Notably, Shalev tells me that he learned about proper scoring rules by reading rationalist blogs. So next time you lament your untold hours sacrificed to that pastime, remind yourself of where it once led!
   
7. What have I been up to lately? Besides Busy Beaver, hanging out with my kids, and just trying to survive? Mostly giving a lot of Zoom lectures! For those interested, here’s a Q&A that I recently did on the past and present of quantum computing, hosted by Andris Ambainis in Latvia. It did feel a bit surreal when my “interviewer” asked me to explain how I got into quantum computing research, and my answer was basically: “well, as you know, Andris, a lot of it started when I got hold of your seminal paper back in 1999…”

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