But Hebrew and Arabic speakers read numbers left to right (even though they read everything else right to left). So they treat the numbers as big-endian.
det
Karma: 43
More evidence in favor of big-endian: In modern Hebrew and Arabic, numbers are written in the same direction as in English: e.g.
.שטחה של המדינה הוא 22,072 קמ”ר
As a native English speaker (and marginal Hebrew reader), I read each word in that Hebrew sentence right-to-left and then read the number left-to-right.
I never considered the possibility that native Hebrew speakers might read the number from right to left, in a little-endian way. But my guess is (contra lsusr) nobody does this: when my keyboard is in Hebrew-entry mode, it still writes numbers left-to-right.[1]
This indicates that even when you give little-endian an advantage, in practice big-endian still wins out.
- ^
I also tested in Arabic-entry mode, and it does the same even when using the Eastern Arabic numerals, e.g ١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩.
It’s hard to Google for this, but this indicates that modern Arabic also treats numbers as left-to-right big-endian [I just verified with an Arabic speaker that this is indeed the case]. It’s possible this was different historically, but I’m having a hard time Googling to find out either way.
- ^
SMTM has a follow-up post that goes into how confusing citrus classifications are.
In particular:
The British called all citrus “lime” or “lemon” interchangeably (like you say).
Lemons can be green and limes can be yellow, so you can’t clearly distinguish based on color.
We still use the word “lime” for a bunch of different kinds of citrus, so we’re not that much better.
I was surprised by this number (I would have guessed total power consumption was a much lower fraction of total solar energy), so I just ran some quick numbers and it basically checks out.
This document claims that “Averaged over an entire year, approximately 342 watts of solar energy fall upon every square meter of Earth. This is a tremendous amount of energy—44 quadrillion (4.4 x 10^16) watts of power to be exact.”
Our World in Data says total energy consumption in 2022 was 179,000 terawatt-hours
Plugging this in and doing some dimensional analysis, it looks like the earth uses about 2000x the current energy consumption, which is the same OOM.
A NOAA site claims it’s more like 10,000x:
173,000 terawatts of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That’s more than 10,000 times the world’s total energy use.
But plugging this number in with the OWiD value for 2022 gives about 8500x multiplier (I think the “more than 10000x” claim was true at the time it was made though). So maybe it’s an OOM off, but for a loose claim using round numbers it seems close enough for me.
[edit: Just realized that Richard121 quotes some of the same figures above for total energy use and solar irradiance—embarrassingly, I hadn’t read his comment before posting this, I just saw kave’s claim while scrolling and wanted to check it out. Good that we seem to have the same numbers though!]
This isn’t clear to me: does every option that involves someone being forcibly mandated to do something qualify as a catastrophe? Conceptually, there seems to be a lot of room between the two.
I understand the analogy in Katja’s post as being: even in a great post-AGI world, everyone is forced to move to a post-AGI world. That world has higher GDP/capita, but it doesn’t necessarily contain the specific things people value about their current lives.
Just listing all the positive aspects of living in NYC (even if they’re very positive) might not remove all hesitation: I know my local community, my local parks, the beloved local festival that happens in August.
If all diseases have been cured in NYC and I’m hesitant because I’ll miss out on the festival, I’m probably not adequately taking the benefits into account. But if you tell me not to worry at all about moving to NYC, you’re also not taking all the costs into account / aren’t talking in a way that will connect with me.