I'm sure this is some kind of fallacy, but I feel I quite often see ostensibly impressive small side projects like this written in simple plain languages like C (or here COBOL). Every similar, e.g., Rust project I see seems almost non-functional despite having 10x the SLOC.

My working theory is that simpler languages lend themselves to blueprinting ideas and getting something working even with an ugly messy codebase, whereas modern languages force you to write code that will last longer. Or maybe modern languages are just doing something wrong.

Nah. That's what the Monk is for.

I'm reading "The Big Picture" (Sean Carroll) right now.

I'd love to have a real physicist explain this, but:

When we think of what a particle IS, we often think as though it were dirt, or a billiard ball, or something. As though there were some other substance of which it's made. At least I do.

But the definition is as low as you can go. It's hard to wrap your head around that. Unless you're trained to do so, I guess.

This Quanta piece is from May and is talking about work that came out in October 2022 so if Aaronson was going to write a piece he probably already did (maybe, obviously my assumptions could be completely wrong).

But the abstract of the pre-print (https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10255) covers some of what you are asking:

"Despite the well developed mathematical description of non-Abelian anyons and numerous theoretical proposals, the experimental observation of their exchange statistics has remained elusive for decades. Controllable many-body quantum states generated on quantum processors offer another path for exploring these fundamental phenomena. While efforts on conventional solid-state platforms typically involve Hamiltonian dynamics of quasi-particles, superconducting quantum processors allow for directly manipulating the many-body wavefunction via unitary gates."

They created a collection of quasi-particles that has different statistical properties that we don't see in 3D (the Non-abelian anyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyon). So simulated or created becomes a tricky word here, the quantum processor is putting these qubits into a state that acts as a quasi-particle so they can study it directly. So no a classical computer would not be able to do this in the same way it would have to use classical bits to simulate the quasi-particle.