More like malicious lobbying and incompetence made it impossible in many places to use any other form of transportation, despite there being safer, faster, cheaper, and healthier ways to move around. Which come to think if it makes this a rather nice analogy for the current situation... :)

But no you were talking about universities... The concept of citing Wikipedia in university is wild x)

"Só para as pessoas perceberem lá em casa" is the standard phrase TV pundits use back in $home_country. Translates to something like "just so that you there sitting at home can understand". It's incredibly condescending, truly the gall of these mfs with zero credentials and maximal confidence, speaking assertively about every single topic always with the tone that implies everybody else is a moron.

I haven't watched actual TV for many years so this passes me by except on occasion, but when I see that there are people that watch hours of this garbage every day, part in the TV and part regurgitated on social media... By god it explains many things rotten with the world.

The absolute gall of saying this, on this point in in particular, with all that has happened over the past 1.5 years in the US... Gobsmacked

Hilarious to say this, given the very public and very significant failures of US foreign policy these past couple decades, not least of all the current special military operation.

It's obvious that IEEE floats have several issues: low precision, excessive dynamic range, underflow to 0 causing infinite loss of precision (ditto for overflow), denormals, non-portability, lack of a total order, redundancy of NaN bit patterns, poor scaling to low precision... I can go on! Whether you regard those as relevant or as unimportant, or perhaps as unavoidable, is your opinion. But they do exist!

To re-iterate: claiming that IEEE floats are superior to any existing or proposed alternative is a claim you can attempt to make, although I disagree with it. But claiming "IEEE floats do not have any problems whatsoever" is simply not a good-faith conversation...

> In scientific and technical computations, a constant relative error over the entire range of the numbers is optimal.

What do you possibly mean by "optimal"? For instance, inference on a neural network using a 16-bit (or even 8-bit!) posit type tailored to the distribution of the weights in that neural network can yield better results than with 32-bit floats! Obviously floats are not "optimal" in any possible conceivable situation (neither are posits "more optimal" than floats in any conceivable situation).

Even in "traditional" HPC applications, like weather modelling, experiments have shown 16-bit posits to be acceptable replacements for 32 or even 64-bit computations.

> Like I have said, for technical/scientific computing posits are much inferior to FP64

Repeating something does not make it true :) Like I have said, 32 and 16-bit posits can replace 64 and 32-bit floats in many important applications (obviously not all). HPC and ML workloads are largely memory-bound nowadays; halving the number of bits can yield a doubling of performance, roughly speaking.

> it is pretty certain that 64-bit or bigger posits will always be inferior to IEEE floating-point numbers.

> The problem is that while the IEEE floating-point numbers are either optimal or at least acceptable in almost all applications, the fact that posits might be better only in certain special applications

You assert this repeatedly as dogma, without proof x) I don't get it, do you have a dog in this race somehow? Bizarre.

In fact, the simplest way to see that this is wrong is to consider a "posit"-like format with no regime bits, but with otherwise the same structure: twos-complement representation, no underflow or overflow, deterministic rounding, a quire. This format is essentially an improved version of an IEEE float, without most of its warts, but still a constant relative error (actually constant, unlike IEEE with its subnormals!), similar hardware encode/decode implementations, etc.

They burned half a billion dollars a month of VC money at their peak to undercut taxis across the world; in quainter times this used to be called "dumping", now it's just the standard way of doing business. All the while basically flaunting the law with their whole "we're just a platform connecting people who happen to drive a car with people who happen to want to go some place, it's totally not a taxi guys". No regulations, no expensive licenses or professional certifications, no need even for a minimum wage or basic social security or insurance or any kind of protection. Amazing!

Essentially the same in spirit as Airbnb, only this latter had far more destructive consequences than screwing over taxi drivers.