this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Microblog Memes

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[–] BilboBargains@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I remember being puzzled by this and many other numbers that kept cropping up. 32, 64, 128, 256, 1024, 2048... Why do programmers and electronic engineers hate round numbers? The other set of numbers that was mysterious was timber and sheet materials. They cut them to 1220 x 2440mm and thicknesses of 18 and 25mm. Are programmers and the timber merchants part of some diabolical conspiracy?

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Powers of two are the roundest of numbers.

[–] cook_pass_babtridge@feddit.uk 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They're not round, they're square!

[–] Malfeasant@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Only every other one...

[–] 007ace@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

Slow Clap Well done!

[–] BilboBargains@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Much later in my career I came to appreciate the beauty of this system and the link with hexadecimal. I had to debug a network transmitted CRC that was endian flipped and in that process learned that in the Galois Field of two, 1+1=0 which feels delightfully nonsensical to a luddite.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They just do it to look cool in front of their developer friends.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Pretty much this...

Once upon a time, sure, you might have used an 8 bit char to store an array index and incur a 256 limit for actual reasons....

But nowadays, you do it because 256 is a "cool techy limit". Developers are almost all dealing with at least 32 bit values, and the actual constraints driving smaller values generally have nothing to do with some power of two limitation.