alt Hacker NewsAgreed. This looks from the outside like someone read a report, got unnecessarily spooked, and now the rest of the herd is following along.
But it's also very possible that hypothetical report was genuinely concerning. We just haven't seen it or anything like it.
However I'm pretty firmly in the "quantum computing won't be doing anything useful any time soon, if ever" camp, so that definitely colors my opinions. I don't have any particular recent expertise to support that, but I did used to share an office with some serious QC people and go to their talks so... make of my words what you will.
Would anyone downvoting care to explain? I'm genuinely interested in seeing anything that suggests there's either some secret breakthrough (completely plausible, but there's no evidence that I've seen hint of) making quantum computers actually useful, or an argument that they'll be usable by (say) 2050?
Because right now my attitudes are trained by things like this https://algassert.com/post/2500 that explain just why 15 was factored in that famous run of Shor's algorithm and not, say, 21; and why 21 hasn't been factored yet and isn't likely to be any time soon....