With 10 times the memory usage and 100 times the compute power, maybe you could replace floats with something that behaves more like real numbers and covers mostly the same range.
But the resulting type is still going to have its own limitations and sharp edges. Floats are not the right tool for every job but they are quite good at the jobs they are right for. Learning how they work is more useful than lamenting their existence.
With densely packed decimals (3 digits in 10 bits), you can reduce the space overhead to as little as 2.4% (1024/1000). The IEEE has even standardized various base-10 floating-point formats (e.g. decimal64). I'd suspect that with dedicated hardware, you could bring down the compute difference to 2-3x binary FP.
However I read the post I responded to as decrying all floating-point formats, regardless of base. That leaves only fixed-point (fancy integers) and rationals. To represent numbers with the same range as double precision, you'd need about 2048 bits for either alternative. And rational arithmetic is really slow due to heavy reliance on the GCD operation.
I find it easy to share photos with anyone - whether they have a Google account or not. I just select some pictures and you can easily create a link for it. (The link doesn't require a Google account to view.) I like to share images this way over texts, rather than sending the actual images.
Amazing. And as another reply said, 1B Android devices with Photos. I hadn't put these together!
When Facebook was newish and introduced the ability to tag others in photos, I got shivers. I deleted Facebook that weekend purely because of that.
No doubt a shadow profile of me, perhaps several, exists in the dark webs of Meta and Alphabet with no limits on use or retention, but I'm having no part. I'm now curious where the GDPR stands on tagging people with no accounts.
> What's wrong with a Diverse, Equitable, Inclusive world?
If you center the putative ends and ignore the means, what’s wrong with communism?
Also, even in terms of ends: I come from Asia, where most countries are homogenous. Are you suggesting that Taiwan or Japan is somehow worse because everyone is Taiwanese or Japanese? Would India and Bangladesh both benefit if we took some people from one side of the border and swapped them over to the other side? Or better yet—added a bunch of white people and Latinos? Would Aladdin or Mulan be better with a diverse cast?
What? I’m saying DEI as an abstract goal is great. The problem is that every institutional attempt to solve DEI results in blatant discrimination. So it ends up being that you can assume anyone who actually works on DEI initiatives at a corporation is doing pretty shitty things.
Make it super easy for a customer to cancel a renewal.
You might get customers that lie.
But you might get customers that think they've cancelled when they haven't, from a sketchy internet connection to a workflow in their head that's different from yours.
Or they might not have realised they're on a recurring plan.
Or that small transaction means a lot more to them than it means to most customers.
If you notice a pattern or abuse of service, do raise this immediately with your provider.
> Has anyone asked information if it wants to be free?
Asked rhetorically. Of course information can't reply, right?
There's substantial context that this quote is often dislocated from of disempowered groups. Parties are unable to negotiate when power, power of self sovereignty or awareness of choice, rests with only one.
You absolutely can ask information if it wants to be free. It is a fundamental fact of our universe that classical information is perfectly copyable and un-scarce. Information doesn't just "want" to be free, information MUST be free, and changing that reality takes EXTRA effort and work and artificial constraints.
