I love this podcast. The solo or very physics focused episodes go over my head sometimes but they're always a fun listen. I enjoyed "Jody Azzouni on What Is and Isn't Real" where they (among other things) argue about what it means for a thing to be "real"/"exist", and extend that to mathematical concepts, fictional characters etc.
I second this. Worked at Weitek in the 80s and my first job was to write a P754 test suite in C. At that time, Sun engineers wrote a test called “paranoia” and would regularly pick holes in our FPU chip designs. Mostly they ended up taking what we had built and we were in notice they weren’t happy. Then then built their own SPARC FPU and we went to the wall.
I spent months in all the corners of P754 and can attest to it being the most carefully thought through and subtly powerful document.
At this time we built custom FPUs for non P754 such as DEC format which iirc was deliberately close to P754 but slightly twisted to maintain code incompatibility.
Anyone who thinks FPU math is deterministic has not got close to circuit design for these beasts. I suppose MAYBE that got fixed in the last 40 years, but the move to GPU leads me to suspect that determinism in all the myriad corner cases is not top of the list.
I don’t trust anything made by DHH now. He merged a PR that rewrote ttfx from rust to Claude generated asm (despite contributor objections) and then turned around and merged another that rewrote all of that into rust.
Which is to say that a normal organization would not be changing things so quickly based on the whims of a single individual.
Maybe I’d be ok to use omarchy just for fun, but could never use it seriously in any capacity.
I actually lived there for a few years, I guess I'd forgotten that the millenium bid fell through :)
Edit: By the by I do intend to visit again at some point if only to see the DEC exhibition at the town museum (if that's still on) and perhaps swing by Sweeney's pie shop (if that's still open).
Oh, and now I see from a sibling comment that there was another bid in 2022! It gives me a twinge of national pride that British rules on City-hood are so weird!
I just remember driving to the station once and just hating that whole area - loads of concrete. My experience may not apply to the rest of the place though, I grant you.
"In the end, the 2022 contest saw Reading beaten to the post by Dunfermline, Bangor, Douglas, Doncaster, Wrexham, Colchester, and nearby Milton Keynes. "
A lot of sources seem to cite Reading as 'England's largest town' but maybe that is by area, rather than population? Also depends on where you put the boundary.
That's where the problem lies. I spend too much of my life screaming into the void about UK addresses and what is and isn't a town :)
It's just about possible to create dataset of towns, cities, villages from mixing and matching and cutting up other geographies from the ONS (e.g. their Parished and Unparished data (though Unparished is its own nightmare), then the ONS Built-Up Areas dataset but... that one cuts out all the non-built parts so Milton Keynes is bunch of big blobs around the residential areas).
But if you frankenstein it, you lose all of the formal connections that define other links, and if you try to cheat via geospatial join, you will link police forces to areas they don't actually serve.
For Swindon, you're kinda stuck glueing together (going from memory here - please correct me if I'm off) the Parishes of Central Swindon, South Swindon and West Swindon. But these will overlap with some villages so it's not a true count.
And that's a natural moment to lead on to the next critical point: how're we measuring population? (I always get that Father Ted speech scene in my head thinking about this, start speaking - then twelve hours later "And now, we move on to liars")
Agreed, and it's a reasonable first reach for residential counts.
Problem is, it was last taken during 2021 - at the height of covid - and their estimates have been paying the price of it even since. Anything that touches on workday or employment they actively warn you away from, nowadays.
But then there's the elephant in the room: what if you're looking at somewhere like the City of London (the square mile one) where residential population is somewhere between 8,500 and 9,000 people?
EDIT: it slipped by me!
There is no single UK-wide census. NRS do Scotland's, last in 2022. NISRA handle Northern Ireland's census, last in 2021. And the ONS for England and Wales, last in 2021.
Well, "largest town" changes all the time anyway. Milton Keynes is "larger" than both by more than one metric, but it became a city in 2022.
The whole city status thing is a bit silly. It should definitely be based on more than population, but Milton Keynes getting it firmly established population is all it takes now.
well I (the submitter) messed up and wrote 15M in the submission title (note the cap) in error just to add to the confusion (now fixed, soz.) … I thought “best” just to repeat the article title
No worries, I take issue with the person who concocted the original title. I got here after the capital-M change and it was still confusing that they didn't mention the space that was dug out at this depth, instead paint a picture of a system of tunnels under a normal house(?)
sorry for the capital M … I have fixed in the title to 15m as in metres
that’s ~ 45 ft underground, I believe … perhaps not that impressive, but quite funny since I would hesitate to undermine my own house and surely this makes it worth less
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