Tokens per Watt -> Tokens per TFlop (FP8)

kontextwochenzeitung.de/poli… With a legally inadequate railing, Stuttgart’s Cooperative State University broke the German stair standard. Putting it right required a structural add-on. Anyone who sees the result is left asking: why?Call it an eye-catcher. The railing added after the fact, painted red, on Stuttgart’s Lerchenstraße does not blend in.Lest the republic sink into chaos, the German Institute for Standardization does more than fix paper sizes and the permissible deviations of hot-rolled square steel. A committee of its own is devoted entirely to construction, and working group NA 005-09-86 AA has thought hard about the minimum that may be demanded of a German staircase. The result is DIN 18065, a statutory rulebook of 21,571 characters and more than 2,900 words. The rules apply to any material, but they expressly exempt retractable stairs, escalators, moving walkways and outdoor stairs in open ground, because those answer to yet another set of rules.The standard lays down uniform requirements for the walking zone and for permissible riser heights. The “measuring rules for the tread at the narrowest point of a winding bolt-stringer stair” have a subchapter to themselves. Headroom inside dwellings is covered too, so that a stair run does not plunge a flat into permanent dusk. Everything, one might think, has been thought of. No contingency in this many-sided rulebook seems to have gone unattended. And yet the finely tuned apparatus comes apart the moment it has to be built. The binding rules against botched work become the cause of the botch.Note for next time: parallel, and with a handrail on both sides.A clear case is the addition on Lerchenstraße. A stair in the building of the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University, the DHBW, needed correcting. “In order to meet the requirements for escape and rescue routes,” a spokeswoman told the editors, the university had to make a change. “We can see why the railing installed afterwards looks unusual at first glance.”The second glance does not help, nor the third. In the foyer, two floors are joined by a funnel stair that narrows like a slice of cake, with blue treads. One side runs into a wall. On the other, a black railing stops people falling off. Anyone who has actually read DIN 18065 will stop here. Quite right: a stair with a railing on only one side breaks the duty of a “handrail on both sides.”What the intervention produced is two red rails running parallel on the original stair, cutting off a large part of the tread that people used to walk on. Aesthetically it is irritating. Teaching, at least, is said to be fine. The press office volunteered, without being asked, that “the railing entails no restrictions whatsoever for university operations.” That is a low bar. A railing that made the building unusable would probably not even rank as Stuttgart’s worst building botch.Extra stairs for the city of StäffeleOddly, Stuttgart has a second contender for the strangest stair added because an escape route was no longer good enough, and which has disfigured a public building in the process. The mass of stairs and steps inside the Treffpunkt Rotebühlplatz is a deliberate design feature. Even so, in 2019, nearly thirty years after it opened, three makeshift stairs had to be stuck on from the outside. Planned as a stopgap, they were still there at the time of going to press. The escape route through the foyer was no longer adequate, especially for larger events upstairs.Why did the DHBW end up like this, and what did the extra railing cost? “Since the planning, construction and financing of the building do not fall within the remit of DHBW Stuttgart,” the press office says, “we cannot give any information on the cost of the later adaptation.” For that, one must ask the Office for Assets and Construction in Schwäbisch Gmünd. That office has a still more responsible sub-office, the University Building Office for Stuttgart and Hohenheim. There the answer on the phone is: “I don’t know whether you have the right address.” The woman remembers a project manager who once worked on the DHBW plans. He has been transferred, and is now at an office in Stuttgart. The trail ends. Once a bureaucracy has taken on a life of its own, the mess is hard to untangle.There were not enough stairs inside. The Treffpunkt Rotebühlplatz had to be patched up too.Blind obedience to the norm, meanwhile, produces order-taker stairs, handrail on both sides, for the authoritarian character. Friedrich Mielke, who founded the study of stairs and died in 2018, always warned against giving up independent thought and the habit of looking at what is in front of you. The Frankfurter Rundschau, in a profile, wrote that the mere words “DIN 18065” made him pull a disgusted face. His verdict: “The German stair standard was made for industry, not for the person climbing the stair.”In more than fifty years he examined over 10,000 stairs. His surprising conclusion was that an irregular stair is safer than a regular one. Even risers lull you into inattention, until an empty cigarette pack or a banana peel does the rest. A rulebook this strict also produces an aesthetic mush, because character needs peculiarity. More and more cities, Mielke complained, were losing their stair-face, and “truly exhilarating stairs” were hardly being built. The trend now runs the other way. This bizarre red afterthought at the DHBW in Stuttgart is truly disspiriting.

Wow this just keeps getting better: I asked it to come up with a process for ingesting PDF files with a portfolio of tools etc, and then asked it to remove two reasonable but IMHO overly privacy-protecting rules it had imposed on itself, and got this explanation:

Garbage bags left out in the evening were dumped out by scavengers at night. And that nice brand new reusable fabric bag probably consumed more resources than hundreds of single use bags. Well meaning policy backfiring hard