I understand this sentiment, but it also feels like this entire reading might be contributing to the issue more than solving it. Isn't creating shorter ways of writing incomprehensively massive numbers in itself just one kind of "unwillingness to grapple with the immense," by opting to abbreviate it instead? I can't really comprehend twenty million, but I can type it out in two neat little words. At least typing out all those zeros in 20,000,000 puts it a little into perspective, right? I think even the author recognizes this, since in the previous paragraph he writes out 20,000,000 in its entirety for the emphasis. I know it's not an option for how large most of the numbers in this article are, but that just makes me wonder why the examples in this paragraph are so much smaller than the caliber of number the rest of the article aims to talk about?

How old is this article? I don't think this is close to the current fastest supercomputer, does anybody know how fast the current fastest one is?