My apologies for bringing insane US politics into a non-political post but I saw an example of this just today.

Apple does the thing with screens where they cycle between more shatter resistant and more scratch resistant and tout “3x more shatter/scratch resistant than the previous model”

Not Apple though. Apple just hand waves the numbers.

Don’t forget “up to…”

One of the things that stuck with me most from my BI classes was a lecture on faithful intuitive representation of data, for instance the distinction between percentages and percentage points, choosing the right charts for certain figures, why some people use logarithmic charts and why they are bad.

He also brought up the usage of y-offsets, the thing mentioned in the post. He showed similar (but a little less dramatic) charts of significant changes that looked a lot less impressive once you “zoomed out” and set the lower bound to zero.

He then made it very clear that he did not want to see any of us do that in the exam.

I encountered it later at work, where someone had generated a chart of some quality measure that had a manager perk up because it looked unstable and decidedly mediocre. You can guess the issue. The actual figures were a lot less damning, but at a glance, they looked very wrong.

False. They also stick fake numbers in there with zero regard for consistency.

That’s a difference of 100.000.000Hz, so it is totally legit to show it like this. /s

just keep adding decimal places until you see a difference

I also love meaningless things like

“3x more effective at remowing plaques” or “10x kore tougher on stains”. Yeah sure buddy it is…

very odd its not going 3.18, 3.211115, 3.222224, 3.233333 must be before the ipo announcement

It depends on what are you are trying to compare

YearFlagship ModelStandard FP32 Compute Power 2008NVIDIA GTX 280~0.9 TFLOPS

2010NVIDIA GTX 580~1.5 TFLOPS

2012NVIDIA GTX 680~3.0 TFLOPS

2014NVIDIA GTX 980~4.6 TFLOPS

2016NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti~11.3 TFLOPS

2018NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti~13.4 TFLOPS

2020NVIDIA RTX 3090~35.5 TFLOPS

2022NVIDIA RTX 4090~82.6 TFLOPS

2025NVIDIA RTX 5090~104.8 TFLOPS

I guess a good way to view it is, a stand mixer, a hand mixer and a whisk. All have purposes… but you have to be using the right tool for the right workload to get the best performance.

It isn’t better to scramble 6 eggs with a stand mixer before you put them in the pan, just use a fork. Doesn’t mean the stand mixer won’t blow the fork away when making ground beef.