alt Hacker NewsYeah the number sounds a lot less impressive if you say that you only get 2^61.44 integers out of 2^64. In other words, a 4% entropy loss.
Information quantities are more meaningfully expressed in number of bits.
Yeah the number sounds a lot less impressive if you say that you only get 2^61.44 integers out of 2^64. In other words, a 4% entropy loss.
Information quantities are more meaningfully expressed in number of bits.
Exactly. Being precise about logarithmic vs linear utilizations is key here. I tried making a similar point about the inefficiency of IEEE-754 redundant NaN encodings here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05621
Having ~a quadrillion redundant bitstrings all mapping to NaN sounds pretty bad, but logarithmic/information utilization-wise, this is actually not too bad.