Magic Monday - August 4, 2026

Yesterday's tech news... today! Apologies for the one-day delay: it was fun having a 300-mile drive back from a couple doctor appointments in California, but 100% worth it. Some life-saving discoveries come from the most surprising places. This week's talk might be a bit esoteric, and I'm far from a mathematician, but hopefully it's interesting nonetheless.

I Trust You've All Done Your Math Homework or: Why Your M1 Mac Might Not Cut It Anymore

Over two years ago, I recall Howard Oakley wrote about bfloat16, a way of representing non-integer (floating point) numbers that was developed as part of Google Brain to help with AI workload efficiency. It was first integrated into Apple's M2 line of CPUs, and Oakley's breakdown of floating point math is far better than anything I could articulate. When it comes to Apple Intelligence, there's a whole lot of math mathing, and the reasons for the newly announced support floor are more subtle than originally believed.