Alt. Profile @Th4tGuyII

  • 0 Posts
  • 53 Comments
Joined 19 days ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2024

help-circle




  • Again, if you started writing 0.999… on a piece of paper, it would never suddenly become 1, it would always be 0.999… - you know that to be true without even trying it.

    The difference is virtually nonexistent, and that is what makes them mathematically equal, but there is a difference, otherwise there wouldn’t be an infinitely long string of 9s between the two.


  • Any real world implementation of maths (such as the length of an object) would definitely be constricted to real world parameters, and the lowest length you can go to is the Planck length.

    But that point wasn’t just to talk about a plank of wood, it was to show how little difference the infinite 9s in 0.999… make.


  • It is mathematically equal to one, but it isn’t physically one. If you wrote out 0.999… out to infinity, it’d never just suddenly round up to 1.

    But the point I was trying to make is that I agree with the interpretation of the meme in that the above distinction literally doesn’t matter - you could use either in a calculation and the answer wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) change.

    That’s pretty much the point I was trying to make in proving how little the difference makes in reality - that the universe wouldn’t let you explore the infinity between the two, so at some point you would have to round to 1m, or go to a number 1x planck length below 1m.


  • 0.999… / 3 = 0.333… 1 / 3 = 0.333… Ergo 1 = 0.999…

    (Or see algebraic proof by @[email protected])

    If the difference between two numbers is so infinitesimally small they are in essence mathematically equal, then I see no reason to not address then as such.

    If you tried to make a plank of wood 0.999…m long (and had the tools to do so), you’d soon find out the universe won’t let you arbitrarily go on to infinity. You’d find that when you got to the planck length, you’d have to either round up the previous digit, resolving to 1, or stop at the last 9.


  • I agree on them being safe - when rules are properly adhered to, they’re extremely safe, similarly to air travel. People only suspect their safety because when they do fail, they tend to fail spectacularly, again similar to air travel.

    Having said that, they may be efficient to operate, but they are by no means efficient to build. They cost a lot of resources, and have a 10 year lead time - plus you need to worry about the cost of waste storage and decommissioning.

    So sure, nuclear is better than fossil fuels, but you’re just kicking the nonrenewable can down the road.

    That time and resources would be far better spent on renewables, because that where humanity is gonna have to go long-term no matter how well any other alternatives work.






  • Exactly!

    Applicants are expected to dedicated hours of their time to writing their application and performing background research - both of which are becoming increasingly more tedious over time - so the least a company could bloody do is show some basic respect by paying an actual human being to come interview you!




  • The TL;DR for the article is that the headline isn’t exactly true. At this moment in time their PPU can potentially double a CPU’s performance - the 100x claim comes with the caveat of “further software optimisation”.


    Tbh, I’m sceptical of the caveat. It feels like me telling someone I can only draw a stickman right now, but I could paint the Mona Lisa with some training.

    Of course that could happen, but it’s not very likely to - so I’ll believe it when I see it.

    Having said that they’re not wrong about CPU bottlenecks and the slowed rate of CPU performance improvements - so a doubling of performance would be huge in this current market.