• SirSamuel@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    So i kinda went on a thought rabbit hole here

    1. I like jokes like this, in part because they only work in written form. Because if they were using base 10 they’d say “You’re a ten”, but base 2 would be “You’re a one zero” (or one oh)

    2. Wait, do people actually say “ten” when expressing two in binary? Do they actually say “one, ten, eleven, one hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and ten…”?

    3. Have I been expressing binary incorrectly?

    4. Am I overthinking this?

    5. Honestly though, my favorite written pun is “Religions are more interested in profits than prophets”

    Anyway, puns are fun. How do you say binary numbers?

    • amda@feddit.nl
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      1 month ago

      People don’t usually change the name of the number when working in different basis so you would in fact just say “ten”. If the actual representation was important you would say “one, zero, one, zero”. I don’t think people would say one thousand and ten as the word thousand is more about the actual number than the string “1000”.

      You can use other round quantity when working on other basis, like a dozen or a gross in base twelve.

      • wieson@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        Yeah but ten is the name for the concept of this many: iiiiiiiiii. Not for the symbols 1 and 0 in that order.

        So if I said “that’s ten”, I would be looking at “1010”

        If I were to send a “0010” over an interface as a test for example, I would say: “now I’m sending two. Are you recieving two?”

    • Ketram
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      1 month ago

      Probably overthinking it (i hope). I usually say each binary digit individually, e.g. “one zero” for 10. Just makes more sense to me at least.

  • Asafum@feddit.nl
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    1 month ago

    There are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don’t.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Yeah, always bothered me that we don’t refer to them by their highest digit. That would make them unambiguous.

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          But are there many scenarios where you don’t already need that anyways, just for writing out the digits of a number in the given base?

          I mean, I can imagine a scenario where you might talk about base 420 on a theoretical level, without explicitly counting up until 418, 419, 420 (as e.g. Ϡ, Ϣ, 10). But honestly, you could even still refer to that as “Base 419” and it would still be fairly obvious what you mean, since you are using multiple digits rather than just one. I guess, you could also write it as “Base 4199” (so with a subscript 9 to represent what we normally call “Base 10”), if you want to be precise about it.

  • nonentity@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    Every number system is base 10.

    Binary is base 1+1.
    Ternary is base 2+1.
    Octal is base 7+1.
    Decimal is base 9+1.
    Duodecimal is base B+1.
    Hexadecimal is base F+1.

  • 843563115848z@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    I’m old. This started being a joke, to my knowledge, in the mid-1980s. I’m sure it predates that timeframe. Still a great joke though.