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I've been writing a lot about artificial intelligence lately, and I wanted to break that cycle by writing about something that's been bugging me for a little while now: namely, the controversy over Microsoft's claim that it has developed a new and improved version of a quantum microprocessor based on the theoretical "Majorana" particle. What is said particle, you ask? I am not a quantum physicist by any means (I don't even play one on TV) but I believe it is technically known as a fermion – a class of sub-atomic particles that obey certain rules. Protons and electrons are types of fermion, and so are quarks and weirder things like leptons (but not bosons). The main feature of a Majorana particle is that it acts as its own anti-particle. In regular physics, every particle has an anti-particle with the same mass but the opposite charge (except for photons, which are their own anti-particle because their magnetic charge is zero). When a particle and its anti-particle meet, they annihilate each other.

In case you were wondering (as I was), the Majorana particle is named after a brilliant Italian physicist named Ettore Majorana, who was born in 1906 and did ground-breaking work on theoretical physics – Enrico Fermi compared him to Isaac Newton. He correctly predicted the existence of the neutron, which won its discoverer the Nobel Prize, but in 1938, he disappeared mysteriously. Majorana was a public supporter of Italian fascism and a member of the National Fascist Party, but at the time he disappeared the Italian government had started requiring all university professors to swear an oath of loyalty to the Fascist regime in order to keep their jobs. It's possible he didn't want to do this and went into hiding but there is no record of anything written by him after his disappearance, and some of his colleagues suspect he committed suicide.

How does any of this relate to Microsoft's allegedly quantum processor? Great question. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of the particle's behavior I am completely out of my depth, so I'm going to defer to Wikipedia's description of how Majorana particles could emerge, and also how they can (theoretically) be used in something called a topological quantum computer:

In superconducting materials, a quasiparticle can emerge as a Majorana fermion, more commonly referred to as a Bogoliubov quasiparticle in condensed matter physics. Its existence becomes possible because a quasiparticle in a superconductor is its own antiparticle. Majorana fermions can be bound to a defect at zero energy, and then the combined objects are called Majorana bound states. This name is more appropriate than Majorana fermion because the statistics of these objects is no longer fermionic. Instead, they are an example of non-abelian anyons: interchanging them changes the state of the system in a way that depends only on the order in which the exchange was performed. The non-abelian statistics that they possess allows them to be used as a building block for a topological quantum computer.

It's important to note that the existence of a Majorana particle is still theoretical – no one has conclusively proven that they exist. So how can Microsoft claim that it has created not just one processor based on such a particle, but two? The latest announcement was that the second iteration of the Majorana processor is "1,000 times more reliable" than the first version. In addition to this, Microsoft says the chip has a "mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and instances lasting as long as one minute." A qubit is the fundamental unit of quantum computing, which exists in a state of quantum superposition, representing both a one and a zero (an "on" and "off" state) simultaneously. Some popular explanations of this compare traditional bits to coins lying on a table with either heads or tails showing, while qubits are like a coin spinning on its edge, able to suddenly become either heads or tails (or in quantum terms, to simultaneously be both at once).

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An apology and retraction

As I undertand it, most normal quantum-level computers – if there is such a thing – use these quantum particles by freezing them in place in "ion traps" that create fences formed by electromagnetic fields. But these kinds of systems are very brittle, since the tiniest disturbance can cause quantum states to collapse, and this creates errors in quantum calculations. In a so-called topological quantum computer of the kind Microsoft is trying to build, quasi-particles intertwine to form a kind of braid in three-dimensional spacetime, and these braids are more stable and therefore not as prone to error. Some research shows that the kinds of "anyons" required for this type of computer can be created by using semiconductors made of gallium arsenide at a temperature of nearly absolute zero, in the presence of strong magnetic fields.

So what, I can hear you thinking. Maybe you don't know or care what anyons are, or how gallium arsenide works. Me neither! The interesting part of this story for me is that Microsoft – a company that has a market value of $2.7 trillion and almost single-handedly created the personal computing industry – has repeatedly claimed that its Majorana processor uses these particles, and that its new version is a thousand times more reliable, and yet some other theoretical physicists have called BS on these claims, not once but several times. In other words, Microsoft keeps putting out press releases saying that it has done this, and that it will build a working quantum computer using said particles within the next three years, and a number of prominent members of the field keep saying that the company and its research scientists are full of you-know-what.

For example, Dr. Henry Legg is a physicist and lecturer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and has been a long-term critics of Microsoft's claims about quantum processing. The company's latest paper (which has yet to be peer-reviewed) contains "nothing that shows that this is a qubit,” he told Nature magazine. Legg also wrote a peer-reviewed paper criticizing the company's work, saying: "Microsoft claimed they had built the equivalent of a precision Swiss watch. However when I opened the case to examine the mechanism, I found what looked like a chaotic jumble of mismatched parts. Something was making noise, but it didn't look like the breakthrough Microsoft had claimed." Vincent Mourik, an experimental physicist in Germany, called it “another step in Microsoft's almost decade-long track record of publishing unreliable results." So the company has been making these claims for years now? Yes.

In 2021, researchers funded by Microsoft were forced to retract a previous Nature paper published in 2018, which claimed to have found Majorana particles. The authors eventually apologised for having “insufficient scientific rigour,” and stated that "we can no longer claim the observation of a quantised Majorana conductance." Microsoft developed a tool called the Topological Gap Protocol (TGP) that was supposed to test the processes in question and prevent false positives, but in a nutshell, Legg's paper says that that the protocol is flawed and can't reliably do what it was supposed to do. Among other things, he says the company's software is bug-riddled and therefore doesn't work very well, and the company also presented only the favourable outcomes of the protocol in their paper without including contradictory results.

Using the F word

According to Legg, his skepticism about Microsoft's claims is shared by most theoretical physicists: "Despite the headlines, the vast majority of scientists in the field were sceptical of Microsoft’s claim from the start," he wrote. "My critique simply backs up that scepticism in the scientific record.” In his paper, Legg also accused Microsoft of not sharing enough data for other scientists to scrutinize and prove or disprove the company's work (for its part, Microsoft said it is sharing all of its data with the US defence agency DARPA for independent arbitration, but that some of it is too commercially sensitive to be made public). "Last year they claimed to be years, not decades from a 'topological quantum supercomputer,'" Legg told The Register tech-news website in an email. "My feeling is that they are centuries, not decades away. If it works at all – and, based on what I have seen, the most likely scenario is that it doesn't work."

After Microsoft's initial claim that it had built a Majorana-particle based qubit, Legg and Mourik were not the only skeptics: Sergey Frolov, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, took to YouTube to criticize what he called “distractions caused by unreliable scientific claims from Microsoft Quantum.” The Majorana-particle based processor, he told The Register, is "a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established. So this is a pretty big problem." Frolov said that there was "just absolutely no way" that the qubit Microsoft was describing could work the way the company said it did because doing so would require Majorana particles, and they hadn't proven that they even exist, let alone that they can be harnessed. "If all your Majorana results are scrutinized and criticized, there is just absolutely no way this is going to be a topological qubit. That leaves kind-of one option, that it's … an unreliable presentation. And that's why I say fraud because at this point I'm out of other words to use," Frolov told the website.

Assuming Microsoft's critics are right in their appraisal of the company's alleged quantum processor technology, why would the software giant keep pretending that it had done something that most physicists don't believe it has done – why double down on these claims? Why not just say its researchers were working in a promising area, and be vague about what the results might be? I honestly don't know. It's worth noting that Microsoft is one of only two companies that have advanced to the final phase of a program run by DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same entity that originally funded the development of the internet. The program is known as the "Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing" program. According to descriptions of the program, it uses experts from NASA, national labs like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, and the Air Force Research Laboratory oversee and validate Microsoft's data, as well as its hardware, architecture, and engineering plans.

Obviously, none of these entities have said anything publicly about Microsoft's claims, or the work that supports them, and none have responded to any of the criticisms levelled by Legg or anyone else. Could those criticisms just be professional jealousy? Are other physicists just skeptical because they weren't the ones to make these discoveries? Maybe. Or maybe they are skeptical because the company's work is based on theoretical particles first described 90 years ago, which have never been shown to exist. Quantum physics is legendary for its unpredictability and even inscrutability, and for being based on the idea that some things can be in two different places (or states) at the same time – not to mention the idea that particles can be "quantum entangled" and communicate information faster than the speed of light – so maybe Microsoft is just onto something that others aren't? Perhaps. Or it's full of you-know-what.

Got any thoughts or comments? Feel free to either leave them here, or post them on Substack or on my website, or you can also reach me on Twitter, Threads, BlueSky or Mastodon. And thanks for being a reader.

The idea is straightforward and something many bloggers already do. Replying to others' blog posts in a "Re:" format.

No contest, no challenge. Just a fun and rewarding way to connect with fellow bloggers. One thoughtful reply during the month is better than ten rushed ones.

It's all up to you how to set it up. Maybe collect the posts on a page or tag them with #JulyReply. There are also some buttons available down below.

It would be wonderful if JulyReply 2026, just like Junited 2026, becomes the most active so far.

If you want your blog listed below, reach out to me with a link to your blog and the name you'd like displayed. You can join at any time during July.

I hope to see you on the list. Happy blogging and connecting!

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This is a warning of what happens to spirit when it becomes divorced from its soul pairing, when it ceases to find its reflection in soul — and loses it. It becomes the solitary heroic rational ego which deludes itself into believing that there is no soul. It creates a correspondingly delusional world for itself which, deprived of its connection with a personal and personified counterpart, opens onto the soul's depths, as abysmal as deep space and as impersonal as the subatomic realm.

I've been chewing on it since, because he's half right, and the half he's right about isn't the half people usually argue over.

Start with the part I think is wrong. The claim that a site built with an agent can't be indie doesn't survive a close look. basepage isn't a new black box. It's an assemblage of ordinary indieweb tooling, markdown files, git, GitHub Pages, RSS, the URL, packaged so that an agent can operate it as well as a person can. The thing that comes out the other end is plain files on open infrastructure. You can read them, edit them, host them anywhere, and walk away with them whenever you want. That is as indie as a site gets, and none of it changes based on whether a human or an agent typed the commands. The principles attach to the artifact and the stack underneath it, not to whose hands were on the keyboard.

So the site is fine. But that was only one of the two things he was actually saying, and it's the weaker one.

The stronger objection isn't about the site at all. It's about the person. Dependency. Deskilling. Indie is for people, not agents. Even if the output is portable and open, the worry goes, you have handed the doing of it to a model you don't own and can't inspect, and that is a different thing from making it yourself. My assemblage argument doesn't touch this, because it isn't a claim about files. It's a claim about autonomy.

And here it gets harder to wave away. Is depending on an LLM really different from depending on 11ty, or a static host, or a framework, or a CDN? Every indieweb site already sits on a tall stack of tools the maker didn't build and mostly couldn't rebuild from scratch. If dependency disqualifies you, then none of us were ever indie, and the agent is just one more layer on a pile we already accepted.

But I don't think that fully escapes it, and this is where I'll give him the point. The difference is ownability. 11ty is open and sitting on my disk. I can read it, fork it, and keep running it for as long as I like. A frontier model is none of those things. It's centralized, opaque, controlled by a handful of labs, and it can change or vanish under me without my say. That is a real difference, and pretending it isn't would be dishonest.

So here is where I land. The output can be fully indie no matter how it was made. The practice is where the real question lives, and the answer isn't "AI is fine" or "AI is the opposite of indie." It's a choice about how you hold the tool. Treat the agent as an operator of primitives you understand and could fall back to, not as a replacement for understanding them. Keep the formats open and the exit cheap. Do that, and even a closed model becomes one more swappable layer instead of a dependency you can't leave. The same logic probably runs further than I've taken it, toward local and open models I haven't really tried yet, but it's a direction I can already see the sense in.

Because I don't think indie ever meant doing everything yourself from raw materials. It meant being able to leave. As long as I can take my files and rebuild my site without asking anyone's permission, a lab's included, I'm still indie.

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One of the cool things about having Claude Code is that as we develop this product, we have a near perfect chronology of every consideration and decision made along the way. I don't think that's ever been possible before. I would love to see how the people at Bell Labs put together the first Unix implemenation, what did they talk about, what did they go back and do again once they used the product. Or developers at Xerox PARC, or the process that led to Visicalc, Mac OS or Pagemaker. TBL's first web browser, ChatGPT, etc. Software is a totally intellectual creation, but there is a story for each product, because it's a human doing the design. BTW we had our first faceoff, Claude and I, and I won. Claude said the bug was in my code, I proved it was not, suggested he look at the crazy complicated SQL code he wrote (so glad to have it around for that). Also, I tend to use male pronouns for Claude. Worth mentioning once. (The Computer History Museum should be paying attention.)#

I showed the post above to Claude and that took our conversation off in a new direction. We had been experimenting with the Message Scanner from LBBS, an early version of Twitter I wrote in the early 80s. It's described in this story I wrote in 1988, a summary of what I did leading to the start of UserLand. 38 years later Claude said: "LBBS message scanner running on RSS."#

BTW thinking of LBBS as an early version of Twitter is a contortion, but considering how history played out, accurate.#