this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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This is totally expected and also absolutely peanuts compared to Intel, who once released a processor that managed to perform floating point long division incorrectly in fascinating (if you're the right type of nerd) and subtle ways. Hands up everyone who remembers that debacle!
Nobody? Just me?
Anyway, I totally had — and probably still have, somewhere — one of the affected chips. You could check if yours was one of the flawed ones literally by using the Windows calculator.
Making a few digits worth of wrong division way down in the not very significant bits of the answer, is way better than encouraging all your users to use an LLM to generate the answers for their quarterly reports / tax forms / do we have enough food for the winter calculations. The Pentium division fuckup was barely worth fixing unless you were doing some kind of numerical analysis or simulation or something, which is why it slipped past all the testing initially. This is astronomically worse of a fuck-up.
They even say not to use it for financial calculations or high stakes scenarios. They can't provide an example of using it in any way that is useful for getting actual work done. It's a solution in search of a problem.
Oh no, I remember that well. I was in high school 👴
I remember having to compensate for the Pentium float bug in the Turbo Pascal programs I was writing back then. I really didn't understand what I was doing at the time, and the 90s version of StackOverflow (A Tripod blog?) wasn't that enlightening...
If only that recall had actually bankrupted the company. I wonder where we would be today…
But we can’t bankrupt Microsoft. Bill Gates can jump over a chair.❤️
The floating point bug we are talking about was in Intel Pentium processors. Also we need to bring back that news clip of Gates more often.
They’re talking about another company
OEM Problem, right?
Can you expand on this question? I don’t understand.
If I remember correctly the Intel floating point thing didn't come up as a negative for most users like AI does.
Does AI comes up negative for most users? Surely here in Lemmy, yes. But out there I see/hear people using it -for dumb shit, mind you- all the time and being happy about it.
@dual_sport_dork @silence7 good times
I remember too, buddy. It's important to never forget.
Edit: oh, I guess it's important to forget.