I don’t want to criticize people who seem to like the situation… Instead I’ll focus on people who are trying to do something other than be a number, even as they are subsumed by the new reality of number supremacy.
Kill Math
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
Mathematicians still don’t know the fastest way to multiply numbers
A 23-year-old student overturned an ancient conjecture about one of math’s simplest operations
Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply | Quanta Magazine
By chopping up large numbers into smaller ones, researchers have rewritten a fundamental mathematical speed limit.
Startups’ Trillion-Dollar Numbers Game | Backchannel
Techies love making outrageous promises—but they’re pushing the limits of plausibility.
» A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 1: Just Lookin’ for a Hit The Digital Antiquarian
There was some discussion about it: “Wow, gosh, it’d sure be nice if we were making more money and selling more copies so we could do crazy games of the type we want, as opposed to having to worry about how we’re going to sell more.” Hey, I’d love it if the public was more into what I like to do and a little less into slightly more straightforward things. But I totally get that they’re into straightforward things. I don’t have any divine right to have someone hand me millions of dollars to make a game of whatever I want to do. At some fundamental level, everyone has a wallet, and they vote with it.
Grade 3 » Operations & Algebraic Thinking » Represent and solve problems involving multiplication and division. » 1 | Common Core State Standards Initiative
Interpret products of whole numbers, e.g., interpret 5 × 7 as the total number of objects in 5 groups of 7 objects each. For example, describe a context in which a total number of objects can be expressed as 5 × 7.
Commas in big numbers everywhere: An OpenType adventure
My job involves a lot of staring at large numbers, mostly latencies innanoseconds, and picking out magnitudes like microseconds. I noticedmyself constantly c...
Narcissistic number
In number theory, a narcissistic number[1][2] (also known as a pluperfect digital invariant (PPDI),[3] an Armstrong number[4] (after Michael F. Armstrong)[5] or a plus perfect number)[6] in a given number base b {\displaystyle b} is a number that is the sum of its own digits each raised to the power of the number of digits.
Misperception of Exponential Growth: Are People Aware of Their Errors?
Previous research shows that individuals make systematic errors when judging exponential growth, which has harmful effects for their financial well-being. This study analyzes how far individuals are aware of their errors and how these errors are shaped by arithmetic and conceptual problems. Whereas arithmetic problems could be overcome using computational assistance like a pocket calculator, this is not the case for conceptual problems, a term we use to subsume other error drivers like a general misunderstanding of exponential growth or overwhelming task complexity. In an incentivized experiment, we find that participants strongly overestimate the accuracy of their intuitive judgment. At the same time, their willingness to pay for arithmetic assistance is too high on average, often much above the actual benefits a calculator provides. Using a multitier system of task complexity we can show that the willingness to pay for arithmetic assistance is hardly related to its benefits, indicating that participants do not really understand how the interplay of arithmetic and conceptual problems shape their errors in exponential growth tasks. Our findings are relevant for policymaking and financial advisory practice and can help to design effective approaches to mitigate the detrimental effects of misperceived exponential growth.
Opinion | What the Rich Won’t Tell You (Published 2017)
“There’s nobody who knows how much we spend. You’re the only person I ever said those numbers to out loud.”
What Does ‘6-7’ Mean? Maybe Tweens Don’t Want You to Know.
Everyone wants to understand the generation below them. Can young people rebuff those efforts by being completely absurd?
Stop the AI Build-Out, Start the Fight
Across the country, working-class communities are rising up against Big Tech’s data center boom. A moratorium isn’t the end goal — it’s the only leverage we have to force real democratic control over artificial intelligence.
when everyone has a different explanation of why the bad numbers are not that bad or why the small number is still very important, the simplest explanation is that the bad number is actually just indeed very bad
Christopher Mims
So I guess either Bluesky becomes a nonprofit or we all start sharing our Threads handles on here…?
I know we care about numbers, and it's not that they're not worth looking at, but maybe Bluesky not having explosive growth is good for the Atmosphere that's building beyond it, and patience is more important than the first attempt gathering every community possible in its early years. Long game.
Anuj Ahooja
The open social web is the long game
