Consider 3,124,203,346 (or ↗643,302,421,3). Suppose we don’t just care about the rough magnitude, but about its exact value.
Is there a real situation where someone would actualy care about this? It seems like a big part of why this wasn’t fixed is that in practice, magnitudes matter a lot more than exact values. I’d argue the right way to write this number in most cases is to drop all of the digits except one and write it as “3 billion”.
(After spending way too much time thinking about LLM math, I’m convinced that doing math is generally simpler if you reverse the numbers, but doing really long mental math isn’t something humans really need to do often)
Is there a real situation where someone would actualy care about this? It seems like a big part of why this wasn’t fixed is that in practice, magnitudes matter a lot more than exact values. I’d argue the right way to write this number in most cases is to drop all of the digits except one and write it as “3 billion”.
(After spending way too much time thinking about LLM math, I’m convinced that doing math is generally simpler if you reverse the numbers, but doing really long mental math isn’t something humans really need to do often)