AI has rediscovered https://www.davidhbailey.com/dhbsoftware/ and similar? Or are there algorithmic improvements? Without referencing established double-double work it's hard to know.
Fun fact - Google Maps does something similar to this in WebGL in order to keep accurate coordinates across a planet-sized map using only 32-bit floats.
Such trick looks interesting. But I think for many cases it would be better to use fixed-width arithmetic based on 128-bit integers. Operations for them are much cheaper if done right (and assuming compilers are smart enough to optimize them). For the Mandelbrot set one don't need huge range, maybe 4 bits of range or so, the remaining 124 bits of precision can increase quality significantly.
Could be a neat post, but it was too obviously LLM-generated for me to care about reading it deeply. I’m really fine with people using LLMs to write code and understand stuff, but at least drop a disclaimer when you’re blogging straight Claude text.