3 ms·
I find it a bit amusing that we treat as gospel the use of in-band signaling to try to cram a half-assed error propagation into the value we're trying to convey
by hansvm 6y ago
I find it a bit amusing that we treat as gospel the use of in-band signaling to try to cram a half-assed error propagation into the value we're trying to convey. It's not a terrible system, but there's nothing inherently better about throwing away a modest amount of information about both a value and its error than throwing away a negligible amount of information about a value and a majority of what we know about its error.
- lopmotr 6y agoYea it's not nature's way, just a convention. But it's an intuitive convention because it's easy to assume that digits which are shown are correct and digits which aren't shown are unknown. The alternative - throwing away the majority of information about the error would make lots of numbers pretty useless. Is 130 F really 100 F with too many digits?