Well, it is essentially the same-but-modernized party as that which held eastern Germany under the boot of communism for for some 45+ years. They took the route taken by so many communist parties after the dissolution of the Soviet Union by changing their name, here from SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) via PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) to Die Linke (The Left) so that certainly is something to keep in mind. This is the party which built a wall to keep people from leaving their supposed workers and farmers paradise, shooting those who tried to cross over. It may be filled with young women with odd hair colors instead of stodgy old men but the ideology hasn't changed a whit and is ready to add a few more millions to its death toll.
It is patently absurd that communism is still considered as a legitimate ideology while it should be placed right next to Nazism in the "never again" category. It is responsible for more death and suffering than the latter but those edgy students - who don't seem to learn much at all there in academia - don't seem to know or care.
Look, it's a nice sounding narrative with a sprinkle of truth, but it proves a lot less than it sounds like it does.
There were specific reasons historical communism had such a large death toll, and it traces back mostly to the policies that were introduced and the decisions the political elite made.
So I think it's fair to compare actual policies, and not to judge on the basis of whether someone calls themselves a communist, or whether that label gets applied to them.
To my knowledge, Die Linke is not a revolutionary party, doesn't want to force through breakneck industrialization at any cost, and doesn't deny foundational agricultural science. It's also one of the few parties defending the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (public access to government records) against the current government's push to gut it.
Oh good lord, the utter majority of the Left Party today weren't even alive in the GDR period (and of those that were, a good bunch got yeeted to the BSW). And on top of that, all the other parties have gobbled up their East German Blockparteien as well and we don't label them collaborators either, nor do we call the CDU and especially CSU a Nazi party despite many former NSDAP members ending up there post WW2 (or a ton of them forming the AfD a decade ago).
Obviously after 36 years many people of Die Linke were not alive when the wall fell. But it’s still the same party as the SED, just a different name.
The CDU and the CSU have nothing to do with the NSDAP.
At some point in time in Germany 30% of the population were either part of the NSDAP or the Nazi Army. Luckily most of them were not war criminals and move on with their lives. And yes, some of them ended in the CDU/CSU but also of the SED/Die Linke.
Just to give you an example, around 10-15% of the DDR state officials had held NSDAP membership pre-1945.
Does that make the DDR a successor of the Nazi Regime? Obviously not. The same about the CDU/CSU.
But Die Linke is still the same party as the SED. Same organization, which just voted themselves into different names.
Usually IEEE floats have an implied 1 in the front. So for the standard represented numbers, there's some minimum number 1.bbbbbb.. * 2^-N. This allows 1bit more precision than is actually stored.
between any two numbers, there's basically the same epsilon difference, but from the smallest number to zero it's bigger.
A subnormal number breaks that convention, it just becomes 0.bbbbb... * 2^-N. As the numbers get smaller, the relative difference between the numbers gets larger. That also means their precision is smaller than the normal floats.
Why not just use an 8-bit LUT to encode the 256 most common ternary vectors with 6 components. That means of the possible 729 possible such vectors, you can only represent 256 different ones. You have to do more aggressive rounding, but at least the scheme is very simple to decompress and stream.
I think the weights are iid distributed, so all 729 patterns will be roughly equally likely. That doesn't make this a bad idea though -- it just means there's no point trying to select the most common 256 to keep, since any 256 will be roughly as good.
In the article it said that in ternary, the majority of weights are 0. The components may be independent, but any group of weights won't be evenly distributed across all probable occurences.
Good point, I was wrong. Groups of weights having more zeros will be more likely, so should be favoured. Due to independence there won't be any meaningful difference in frequencies between two groups of weights that have the same number of zeros, but that doesn't invalidate the above.
It is indeed very strange and annoying. And I don't remember it being so bad ten years ago (although I had to use witcher for alt-tabbing - which actually worked well, unlike AltTab now). Since Linux, and both OG Mac Os, I am used to having multiple Desktops, in total multiple windows of the same applications (browsers, pdf reader, office, file browser). Mac Os is completely hostile towards doing multiple tasks at the same time, and compartmentalizing them into desktops -- you keep getting thrown around to random windows on random desktops (example if you close a window), it's super difficult to find your windows, it's just crazy. You're afraid of ever moving away from a window.
I think this paradim is also what's makes the Mac OS feel snappy. If basically having multiple windows for one software open is "holding it wrong", the OS is pushing you into one application, one window paradigm. As long as you do that, everything is pretty quick. But don't dare open two browser windows, or even worse, two windows of a word processor. The performance will degrade (and you'll keep searching for your windows...)
I don't know, while I miss the super+right click drag to resize window and super+left click drag to move window from KDE on my work machine, I also kinda miss the smoothness of macOS's handling of many windows and desktops utilizing the trackpad on my gaming desktop. The swipe up and down/ctrl+arrow up and down to juggle windows within the desktop, and then left/right to move between desktops even makes their at first awkward handling of fullscreening apps feel right and efficient. What I really miss in KDE though is multiple virtual desktops per display I can switch independently per display. Actually makes me enjoy using multiple monitors slightly slightly more on macOS. What I sadly can't see happening is a merging of KDE, macOS, and the superior i3, as there would be too few few safe shortcut combinations available for programs to rely on.
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