A photo of a cake with 8 candles in a row. The first and fifth candle from the right are lit. The caption reads “Happy 17th Birthday”
Instructions unclear… Am vampire now.
Very optimistic to have an 8th candle
The candles are only available in packs of 8. It’s the smallest addressable unit of wax in many cake architectures
Last birthday party I was at I just wanted a nibble of cake but they told me I had to take one or more bites.
I usually just gather a nibble by picking up a couple crumbs… I’ll see myself out.
I’d have a few words with them, kick them right up their rear endian
Maybe this is a signed cake, so one can celebrate negative birthdays of people who aren’t born yet. 🤔
Light all the candles as an announcement that you’re gonna start having kids and hope she’ll get pregnant in exactly three months. Not in 2, not in 4, but in 3 precisely.
You win Lemmy, I need this one explained.
Because if you add 1 to 1111111 it will overflow and give 0000000 so you have to have the baby in 1 year exactly
Ahh, because of the 9 month gestation. 9+3=12
I thought this was about some kind of obscure subnormal float convention or something.
Longer explanation:
Because most computers use two’s complement to make negative numbers. To produce -x, you take x, flip all the bits, and then add 1. Conveniently, this process works both ways, so if you have an
intwith a positive MSB, i.e.1*******, that’s a negative number, and if you invert and add 1, you get the positive number.So if you take
11111111, and apply this process, you get00000001, which equals 1. Thus,11111111= -1Secondly, the gestation period of humans is 9 months, and there are 12 months in a year.
So if you have binary candles and all of them lit, that can suggest, which it does in my previous comment, that you’re celebrating a child’s -1st birthday.
Although a processor might be nominally capable of accessing a bus of a certain width, it does not mean that all address or data lines need be connected.
That’s the sign bit. The cake is in two’s complement
Old man’s last words on his 256th birthday: “Unhandled IntegerU8OverflowException, terminating application.”
Why do I confuse Halloween and Christmas? Because Oct 31 is the same as Dec 25
Octal 31 = 3 x 81 + 1 x 80 = 24 + 1 = Decimal 25
- The Yuki language in California has an octal system because the speakers count using the spaces between their fingers rather than the fingers themselves.[2]
- The Pamean languages in Mexico also have an octal system, because some of their speakers “count the knuckles of the closed fist for each hand (excluding the thumb), so that two hands equals eight.”[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octal
Just curious since you seem knowledgeable, is there a connection between those societies? Or is it just chance they both choose 8?
I am not knowledgeable about this, I just checked the Wikipedia page to confirm my understanding of the joke and found these very interesting historical uses.
Ha🤣, that’s great (once I was already thinking in binary/non-Dec numerals)
There is another joke there regarding the movie nightmare before Christmas but I’m not smart enough to figure it out.
I only buy ipv6 cakes, so I’m good.
You probably know, but someone is going to point out an ipv4 address is four bytes.
33 was a special year for me because it’s the same forwards and backwards both in decimal and binary
1 is asswell :3
If 1 is asswell, then 2 is assgood, and 3 is the beginning of an orgy.
00100001
Am I being dumb? How ist that the same forward and backwards?
If you drop leading zeros as you would in decimal
Damn. I AM dumb.
I’d actually quite like an overflowing cake thank you very much
thinking of getting older than 255?
How about 4294967295?
with 8 bit? true, with 32 bit you might have a chance to see the sun die, but… there are just 8 candles
I did this once, but just had holes instead of unlit candles. I only had like 3 or 4 of them, and nobody’s got time to go buy candles when everyone’s about to sing happy birthday.
Heh I’ve been making my wife do this since my 32nd birthday.
She still doesn’t understand binary and thinks I’m a nerd when I try to explain it to her.
Maybe this year, when it’s 1+8+32, things will click.
We’re low on candles, great idea!
Happy 136th birthday
Little-endian for the win!
Even in little endian you don’t have trailing zeroes
I’m not seeing any trailing zeros if that is in little endian, you start little end first and it isn’t limited to a silly 8-bits, it can be used to represent numbers far larger than 255 if continued (though then it wouldn’t be representative of a byte and half the joke would be lost).
If you read from the right (as is implied by calling the result 17), there are 3 trailing zeroes:
These would usually be omitted when writing like this. The fact they are not makes this 136
I think you missed the point, that I was making, albeit poorly (little endian still requires leading zeros when not transmitting in a byte format, otherwise you don’t know if the first on signal is for 1, 256, 1024, etc.) it’s all good though
How would 3 leading zeros in a byte help coming to the conclusion that this is supposed to be 17?
I’m generally curious, sice theoretical informatics is already a good few years behind me :D
In a normal byte format it wouldn’t help, the byte standard breaks off bits into 8 bit chunks and calls them bytes (I’m not trying to explain basics, just putting it there for background), little-endian excels at using the least number of bits to express larger numbers in a stream. If you wanted to send any number from 0-255 you only need 1 byte, for 256-512 you need two bytes (or 16 bits), in little-endian it can be represented in just 9 bits, or up to 1024 in 10 bits, etc.
Doesn’t matter for much to many people, but when the number gets big enough you can save a lot of bandwidth.
I was just thinking about what you’d see from the other side of the table.
I read 136 🤣
Look, an OpenRISC user.
Related: I once got onto my feed a post of a tale of someone who had a child on his 19th birthday, so for his 20th birthday, and the child’s 1st, they had two balloons celebrating their 20th birthdays.
I never saw if the next year they celebrated a 21st birthday.
Because of the Hayflick limit, 7 candles should be enough… but only for now, hopefully.
That’s because humanity dates back to the teletype era, before bytes. It was decided that saving candles was more important than having the extra century of lifespan.
Now, by convention, the leftmost candle being unlit indicates it’s a standard human and not a member of another species-alphabet, possibly requiring multiple cakes.
(On a serious note, aging is not necessarily thought to be as simple as just the Hayflick limit)
I use that style of birthday candle, but I only place as many bits as needed.
The year before adding a bit then has all candles lit, the next has only one lit
Though the new bits don’t come very often. My last was 31 to 32, my next will be 63 to 64, I don’t like my chances to see one after that
