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Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

At 600DPI that's over a marathon in each dimension.

I do wonder if there are any DOS vectors that need to be considered if such a large image can be defined in relatively small byte space.

I was going to work out how many A4 pages that was to print, but google's magic calculator that worked really well has been replaced by Gemini which produces this trash:

    Number of A4 pages=0.0625 square meters per A4 page * 784 square miles   =13,200 A4 pages.

No Gemini, you can't equate meters and miles, even if they do both abbreviate to 'm' sometimes.

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"Google's magic calculator" was probably just a wrapper to GNU Units [0], which produces:

  $ units
  You have: (1073741823/(600/inch))**2 / A4paper  
  You want:  
         Definition: 3.312752e+10

Equivalent tools: Qalc, Numbat

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36994418

It couldn't have been a wrapper - it understood a tiny tiny fraction of the things that Gnu units does.

> I do wonder if there are any DOS vectors that need to be considered if such a large image can be defined in relatively small byte space.

You can already DOS with SVG images. Usually, the browser tab crashes before worse things happen. Most sites therefore do not allow SVG uploads, except GitHub for some reason.

svg is also just kind of annoying to deal with, because the image may or may not even have a size, and if it does, it can be specified in a bunch of different units, so it's a lot harder to get this if you want to store the size of the image or use it anywhere in your code

Wolfram alpha is the better calculator for that sort of thing.

A better Gemini also works. Google Search seems to use the most minimal of Geminis, giving it a bad rep.

Prompt: “How many A4 pages would a 1073741823×1073741824 image printed at 600dpi be?”

Gemini Pro: “It would require approximately 33.1 billion (33,127,520,230) A4 pages to print that image.

To put that into perspective, the image would cover an area of 2,066 square kilometers […].

The Math

1. Image Dimensions: 1,073,741,823 × 1,073,741,824 pixels.

2. Physical Size: At 600 DPI, the image measures roughly 45.45 km wide by 45.45 km tall.

3. A4 Area: A single sheet of A4 paper (210 mm * 297 mm) covers approximately 0.06237 m².

4. Result: 2,066,163,436 m² / 0.06237 m² ≈ 33,127,520,230 pages.”

Alternatively, rink (https://rinkcalc.app/) :

> (1073741823 / (600/inch))**2 / A4paper

approx. 3.312752e10 (dimensionless)

Grok 4.1 beta finds the answer: approximately 33.1 billion pages.

Using a naive rectangular approximation (40x10^6m x 20x10^6m - infinite resolution at the poles), that's a map of the Earth with a resolution of 37mm per pixel at the equator. Lower resolution than I expected!

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