taeric

Right. My point is that I wish more people would reach instead for a fixed point lat/lng library. It would almost certainly be easier to reason with for most people. Similar for most people doing financial math should probably use something other than IEEE floats.

And again, IEEE numbers are amazingly well done for what they are. Which is largely the digital version of scientific notation that is using base-2.

I am a little confused. My assertion is that most languages don't offer fixed point trig functions. Am I wrong on that assertion?

If you have the trig functions already implemented for the fixed point you are doing, what you are saying makes perfect sense to me. But I swear I get challenged on that point every time it comes up, as nobody has a fixed point trig library. (Well, that seems to be the assertion.)

Funny, though I think the main measure most people actually pay attention to is how complicated your code is to do the distance functions.

Agreed. But I'm assuming we are in the minority on this one? Bad assumption?

Kudos on providing the numbers. I wasn't confident in the numbers that I remembered and with how pipelined everything is, I didn't know how much to lean on them. Not exactly my standard workflow to care about this level of speed.

My gut would still be that it is typically a wash for most everyone as far as speeds go? If default libraries supported it more directly, I would think it would largely be a win for a lot of reasoning. In particular, silly stuff like 1e32 + 1e1 would not be nearly as surprising to most people. And the entire class of bugs around stuff like doing something until it reaches 0.9 would almost certainly go away if we guaranteed precision to a set number decimal places.

Alas, default libraries do not support this, though. So the above is admittedly wishful thinking on my end. And I could as easily describe a world where people insist on arbitrary numbers of fixed point values and how that would be its own set of landmines.

If you don't have to do trig, I'd be surprised if you aren't faster by default, oddly. Indeed, if you are just adding and subtracting, it is just a number. If you are doing multiplication, it is a multiply and shift. So long as you don't try and support massive numbers of different fixed sizes, that shift is almost certainly still cheaper than float hardware. (Indeed, a lot of multiplications wouldn't even need the shift...)

Again, I do not mean this as a criticism of floats. For simulations and for numbers where you do have to support completely arbitrary values, there is a reason floats are a thing.

Fair that relying on decimal is an interesting choice. My gut is that it would help with a lot of reasoning for folks.

This comes up all of the time with stuff like lat/lng values. People are convinced you have to use doubles because of the inaccuracy of floats. Completely skipping over the fact that you could have fixed point accuracy to 6 decimal digits with the same number of bits as a float. You just reduce your max/min value that you can represent. Which, for lat/lng, you are already heavily bounded.

I think it is fair to argue that basic libraries don't support trig on common fixed point sizes. But that is ultimately my lament. Floats are amazing for what they need to do. For what many people need, though, it feels overkill because it is overkill.

This depends entirely on the sizes needed. For a surprising number of things people would use fixed point for, I would be surprised if you couldn't get good speed with surprisingly little effort.

I wish there was more explicit support for fixed point decimal out there.

The post not long ago about how far the built in autocomplete has come got me to trim down a bit of my config. Seeing that treesit stuff is getting folded in, I may make another effort at trimming down.

It is crazy nice how invisible the native compilation became.

I'd wager I probably violently agree with that. The collapse of the fourth estate from people that were willing to hold government accountable to people that are chasing ratings and payouts has been an unmitigated disaster.

We don't disagree? But this is part of the problem of many complaints. The cost of entry into any system is non-zero. That people with more resources are involved is not at all a surprise.

Which is why I have my "twist" there that this is not necessarily bad. I'm fine letting people dream. I'm fine with people having general complaints. I have to be fine with people being wrong, as it happens whether I'm fine with it or not.

What is getting dodgy is how many people accidentally find themselves hijacked in the delay that is inherent in understanding systems to think that they can win with a culture war.

A big hidden in plain site facet of this, is few are willing to put forth the work within the existing system.

That is, going to town halls, writing senators, and running for office are all standard parts of the system people are complaining about. And they are offering the complaints, largely, as stand in complaints for whole hosts of problems that they actually think are there.

So, agreed, few are willing to ignore their general nebulous complaints and get into the system to work with it. They dream that there will be some magic shift of everything away from their complaints.

My only twist is I think this is ok, as long as people stay grounded in the rest of their life. It is perfectly fine to dream. Is mostly fine to complain. No need to dirty the water where people are getting things done, though.

Principals were always a liability. It is literally a key point in countless interactions. Is why "holding hostage" works. They are literally playing against a principal.

Similarly, lying has never been a virtue. But, joining people to your lie has always been a powerful way of gaining support.

I honestly don't know when or how things changed. My gut is, oddly, that the stakes all just changed. Used to be, you could literally retire to a homestead and you were living on your own. That just does not exist at all in the same way, anymore.

I could similarly ask what happened to journalists? Or the politician that cared about their stated principals.

The reality isn't even that they went away, necessarily. Or that it was all a lie. There were always exceptions and it always took some level of good faith between our different institutions to keep them working well. At some point, that good faith interaction got hijacked and it has quickly spread as a rot to all things.

I think this is just a misunderstanding of how most technology has always worked?

Consider what is happening in most construction sites. The heavy work is absolutely from the technology on site. But without people there to oversee it and keep it working, it would fail.

And that is almost certainly true at any industrial site. Indeed, look up videos of high tech looms. A large portion of the technology added to them are so that the operators can locate the fault and fix it.

Fair that I can be surprised/wrong.

I have no doubt such locations exist. I would not at all present this as a common outcome in the US. Certainly not due to zoning.

What? This depends entirely on where you are. And for far more people, I would expect they can far more easily walk to a grocery store than they can any sort of industrial thing.

Aren't layers a form of stateful control?

I'm assuming you still live in the same place? My understanding the last time I took a dive on this is that the numbers are going down, but not in any way that is going to see them gone. You will need to go to where they are, though. And, alas, the PNW is not a place to find them.

Largely agreed, though I think you are likely underestimating how hard this is to detect. In particular, it is true that many bots can be hosted in data centers, but it is somewhat trivial to launder that traffic through other sources. Malware, in particular, is what I have in mind. Maybe I'm wrong and that has largely gone away?

There is also a bit of mixed incentives. Yes, it is the ad platform that is getting abused. But it is also the ad platform that is charging people based on abused practices.

And it isn't like this is completely made up. Just look at how facebook killed a lot of ton of people during the "pivot to video" programs. I don't know all of the details, as I was thankfully not in any of the involved industries, but my understanding is it is fairly well documented.

Edit: I changed an "isn't" to "is." I think I was trying to reword at one point, but left it in a way that is opposite what I meant.

For ad views, the concern is specifically that people pay for clicks and views. That that can be so heavily influenced by bot traffic greatly undermines their value.

Same general idea goes for any of the algorithmic driven platforms. The algorithms are ostensibly intended to surface organically discovered things by watching how people interact with things. That they are so susceptible to distortion through bot farms should be a lot more acknowledged than it is. People trust them far more than they should.

There is also a general cost of running things concern. It isn't like it is completely free to execute on bot traffic.

An odd example, as fireflies are still pretty big in the places they have always been, aren't they? I know when I get to visit my childhood states, they are still there. Similar for cicadas and other bugs of my youth that I didn't realize were far more local than I expected.

I confess a sad assumption that bot traffic is far higher than we have admitted for a long time. Though, maybe we would see different stats specifically to social media sights to astroturf like counts? Certainly feels that we have known for a long time that bots were larger in ad viewing than ad companies wanted to admit.

If it helps, I have found the attitude that writing is mostly for the writer to be healthy in continuing the practice. And it largely tracks with how I feel I have had better understanding of things I have documented than those I have not.

To be fair, it isn't that different from why we have imaginary numbers. Or why the reals are calls reals.

Which. Yeah, has been a pretty bad thing for people in understanding those. :(

Right, but if one of my teams, red or blue, was just saying "the other teams could be flawed", I would probably push for a new makeup for that team?

Acute would imply that we should flat out stop. Chronic would imply looking for plans to work on it. Acute and chronic would imply that we should both stop and take action to address damages.

What harms from AI are people ignoring?

This feels incoherent. I'm game to agree that there were and are poor decisions being made. But are you proposing that we could have stopped all progress until these vague concerns were addressed?

For some of the concerns, like language understanding, I can't bring myself to think that many of the experts out there were doing any better than these models can do today. Quite the contrary.

And do you think that that would not have been counter to the concern over diversity of teams working on it?

Or concerns over bias going away by having the US attempt to abstain? Good luck with that. It sucks, but China and Russia should stand as stark examples that it turns out you can take strong control over the internet.