[trsohmers]

There has been a lot of talk about lower precision and approximate computing over the past couple of years, which I hope will be recognized as a fad with John's (and to a lesser extent mine/REX Computing's) work... Why sacrifice precision/accuracy if you don't have to? Posit's are a great solution for this for a vast number of problems, and the Stanford lecture is great.

The thing about Posits in particular is, depending on the environment (e.g. es=3 for 32 bit Posits as referenced in the Beating Floating Point paper), you can actually have greater accuracy/precision and dynamic range than 64 bit IEEE floats while using fewer bits. The OP article here about CERN is doing something significantly worse, which is just using lower precision and taking the accuracy loss. While this may be acceptable in some applications, I would not want to losing any accuracy in the original data from expensive scientific experiments and using potentially inaccurate results for future calculations and assumptions.