Oh boy, do I have some stories. I've worked with many companies that actually still do this today. You'd be amazed at what someone can do with VFP and Citrix - or maybe horrified.
The only Citrix Metaframe (and later Windows Terminal Server) machines I ever deployed in Real Life were because of shared-file database-based applications.
Just antidotal but I don't know how many times I've had to help developers fix their vibe coded code to account for concurrency problems. LLMs don't seem to be very good at picking up on this today unless you call it out.
Quantization compresses the model’s parameters and you lose precision in the process. My understanding from the article was that precision wasn't lost - 'It actually had higher resolution than Extended-precision floating point math!'. The point of quantization is to make the model smaller to fit into available ram. I think the OP is referring to computation which is a different beast.
You may be conflating distillation, which may be a fault of other people getting it wrong. Going from floating to fixed point doesn't change precision or size. It changes representation. For example, if all your values are between 0 and 1 or -1 and 1, you're not using the entire range of a standard IEEE float. If you instead use Q31 format, you get basically 31 instead of 23 bits of mantissa. So it's an increase in precision if and only if you can basically stretch your sub-range that you were using over a larger range of bit representations. You have to think of the total number of values. 32 bit is 4 billion. 80 bit extended precision is a lot more than that. But he didn't say I think what his fixed point bit width was. That's what matters.
Now maybe you don't need to represent 1/2^32 in precision. Maybe you just need to know to 1/8th. That's where you can quantize to a lower precision to save space.
But if you start with 32 bit float and quantize to 32 bit fixed, I struggle to think how that saves storage.
I wasn't conflating distillation. You are basically repeating what I said - you're describing quantization. The OP was talking about changing the computation. The article says the 8- and 16-bit integer approach actually had higher resolution than the floating-point approach. You said we already had quantization to do this but quantization isn't what the OP was describing.
"especially people already intelligent/capable enough to immigrate anywhere else that doesn't have these issues or stay in their own country" Isn't that the point? Come here legally or don't come at all.
"That's higher than any other president by a massive amount" - Any modern president. Abraham Lincoln had a 2859.40% increase. Martin Van Buren had a 1458.32% increase. We've had quite a few over 200%.
I'm pretty ignorant about these kinds of things so how does this work? If Valve can specify the court to be used couldn't the company always choose something like Alaska or Hawaii where it would be difficult to show up?
The key to mass arbitration filing is that it's the lawyers doing it, and they're the ones showing up wherever in place of the people who have signed agreements with them. Said lawyers are essentially gambling that the target company will give up and allow normal legal maneuevers, because doing arbitration en masse is actually really expensive for the company mandating arbitration.
FWIW I’ve started to see new arbitration agreements pop up that specifically try to disallow this strategy by using verbiage like “ only the consumer is allowed to file this claim” and even “lawyers who would handle more than 20 of these claims are not allowed to file them”. I have no clue of the legality of such clauses but I have seen them in the wild in the last few months
24 billion dollars for 184,000 homeless people (United States Department of Housing and Urban Development estimate). That's 135k per person. Where is the money going if not the homeless industrial complex?
Why not keep everything transparent and make lobbying illegal? I know neither secret voting or making lobbying illegal will ever happen but it seems like you're just putting a bandaid on an issue without regard for the consequences. People that vote for representatives like to know how they vote. Why even have the theater of a transparent vote that does nothing?
I don't think we need to do it for every number. Account number, for example, could still be HTML. Balance could be converted, though.
The harder we make it for scammers, the worse it is for them. I'm not claiming this is fool proof - scammers might be able to generate a png on the fly and inject that as the image like solrdev mentioned in another comment. They would still need to match background colors or possibly jump through some other hoops. The more work we make them do, the more likely the are to mess up. It also makes it more obvious to the person being scammed.
In terms of deleting the image and inserting text instead, I've tried it and it's hard to make it look good quickly. You also see instant feedback of the missing element and then the text coming in. It's a cue that something isn't quite right.
One sees this argument a lot in security circles, mostly by people with little to no training. This idea that "every little bit helps, so let's toss in some obfuscation ".
Security doesn't work like that. Mostly because (as in this case) the obfuscation is trivial to bypass. I simply replace your set of pngs with my html text.
It's probably worth understanding that professional scammers are not deterred by these trivial speed bumps.
The way to defeat scammers is to train those you know to accept that every one who phones you is a scammer. Every email you get is a scam. Trust nothing. Believe no one. The more they protest the more scammey they are.
And just for kicks, if you make any mistakes, if you do anything without consulting me first, I'm putting you in a home! (I wouldn't, but the point is made.)
Pngs on the bank page or not won't make my mom safe. Rabid terror of being scammed will.
I don't think this is completely unheard of, FWIW. For a few years, one of the big banks (maybe BofA? can't remember for sure) was actually doing this (rendering text as images) for account numbers, not balances.
Personally I found it quite annoying, both because (philosophically) it's just security theater that doesn't actually protect anything, and (pragmatically), like the other poster said, it made copying & pasting more difficult. It also broke page zoom (I'm old and need to enlarge all the fonts to read). But such a feature did exist.
