So you'd expect that there would be a bipartisan movement to fix this by making a constitutional amendment to establish it as a right. We're a democracy after all. Despite the cries that "both sides do it" one side would fight tooth and nail to block any such effort, and I'm disappointed that the other side has given up and isn't willing to fight tooth and nail to promote the issue.

Yes, it is a tricky issue to make rules that guarantee fairness in elections and there are people who spend their lives figuring out ways to undermine democracy. But certainly we can put in some legal boundaries that make things limit the worse abuses.

I believe we are all just bags of chemicals playing out the laws of physics, no libertarian free will at all. Consciousness is an orthogonal issue. Humans have it, and if you have ever lived with a dog you'd agree they have it too despite not being verbal ... hell, it isn't rare for humans to have no internal dialog yet nobody would say they are not conscious.

Consciousness is a continuum and there is no bright line where it starts/stops. Bacteria react to their environment but they are conscious in the same way that one minute after shaving I have a "beard" -- technically the hair stubble rises above the surface of my skin, but it isn't a beard. Wait a month and clearly I do, but there is no bright line where I transition to having a beard.

The idea is rather than storing a number x as (exponent, mantissa), just store (log x) as a fixed precision number. Multiplying two such numbers is just addition, dividing is just subtraction. TBH I didn't read the article, but my reaction is that yes, that works, but one must sum all those products, and now summing becomes an expensive operation. Maybe the total cost saves area and power, but it beggars belief that it is 10x more efficient. They must be doing PR math: our low precision log scheme is 10x more efficient than a higher precision traditional approach.

Another thing to keep in mind is a lot of inference is done using very low precision math and so the cost of doing multiplies isn't that bad. Yes, it is still (n bits) squared, but as n gets small, n^2 still isn't too bad.

I hope this is not what you think my position is.

If you want to change someone's mind, you need to understand it. If someone believes false information, and if they are driven my emotion due to everything they've heard, then giving them a bullet list of facts will not change their mind 95% of the time.

You've probably heard of the term "steel manning" when arguing with someone. If you cannot state the other person's argument in a way that they agree with, then you are just talking past each other. If you can state their position as well or better than they can, now you in a better position to change their mind.

If your goal isn't to change their mind, then go ahead, just keep calling them stupid and making no progress with them.

The thing is most of those people made rational objections. The problem is their reasoning was based on false information. They didn't see it as being anti social as they thought the drug was a boondoggle, untested, and that covid wasn't serious. I disagree with all of it, but it is important to understand why they objected, and not just saying they are selfish or antisocial.

However, that discussion was largely side-tracked by the massive amount of disinformation (eg, "Plandemic") that circulated online. There are people who to this day swear that COVID-19 was just like the flu and simultaneously claim that the vaccine spike proteins have killed around 20M people. Not just crackpots, but people with reach, like Brett Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast.

"Yes, the Wang Corporation, the company that originally developed and marketed the Wang 2200 computer, still exists as a rebranded company under the name PPL (Precision Pencil and Label), but it has undergone significant changes and challenges over the years.

Here's a brief overview of what happened:

    Founding and Growth: The Wang Corporation was founded by An Wang in 1969."

It wasn't in regards to the flag register. The parity flag behaved differently for some ops.

And of course it would be possible to write an 8080 program that used undefined ops that would execute in some random way (often just duplicating an existing instruction) while the Z80 repurposed that opcode for something new.

https://ethw.org/Nixie_Tubes

The exposed parts of my arms look like I'm 62 -- freckles, some age spots, the skin has lost a lot of elasticity. But then I roll up my T-shirt sleeve to expose my shoulder and my skin is like it was when I was 25: not just pale, but no freckles, no age spots, still supple.

https://www.wang2200.org/

(I'm the guy behind the wang2200.org domain)