• SirSamuel@lemmy.world
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    5 days 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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      5 days 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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        5 days 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@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 days 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.

    • letsgo@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      You’re not overthinking it at all and have hit upon an important point. The problem with “ten” is that it’s too easily confused with 1010_2 or 0x0A_16. One-zero base 2 is unambiguous. Also one, ten, eleven etc would get very unwieldy very quickly, and as it already gets unwieldy very quickly even when just quoting digits, that’s why we have hex and octal.