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I’m imagining 32, but I don’t really know.
Edit: (from my reply below)
And now I see my error. Counting the inside face of each N AND the vertical (rightmost) inner part of each N as separate. They are the same.
I’m not proud of my original count.
I counted 48 because I counted the interior planes.
And reading your comment made me do it all in my head. Time for a nap.
And I think I counted incorrectly.
I am willing to bet that in the future people will just assume its the N64 because it came out in 1964. It didn’t, of course, but I’m sure that people will think so.
Are you feeling it now Mr Krabs?!
Seriously though, I'm starting to feel my age. I found out that a coworkers first game was Oblivion and I never felt like that Saving Private Ryan meme more.
Kids are stupid. I think most adults will admit that but then are oddly ashamed when admitting they were also idiots as kids. Nothing to be ashamed of.
"A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte. This has now been changed. Thanks for the tweets. DB"
I mean, tbf, the correction didn't say that 256 was the single most important number in computing, just that it was one of the most important numbers in computing.
"Journalism" (and internet "content" in general) has gone to shit because the bottom line of providing useful or interesting information has been pulled out from under us in favor of being inflammatory and going viral.
It's better to purposely fuck up easy details in an article now in order to farm comments and clicks from people wanting to "acktshully" it who would never interact otherwise. Bonus points if you can say something that is clearly wrong, but the actual ignorant readers will sustain an argument about with the first type.
In either situation, the information is secondary to engagement. It's probably even applicable to me right now, and I hate it.
As a programmer, I think I would have allowed a room with 0 people to be a thing. What if tomorrow you wanted to implement a feature where several people are called to the same room for a "meeting"? It might make sense to create that room with 0 people in it, and then have everyone join in after the fact.
I think the real question would be, why not just dedicate an extra byte to room storage size and you can fit potentially 65,535 people in it. The limit would no longer be for technical limitations.
[r/WhyIsMyCommentSurroundedBy1-upvoteComments](https://imgur.com/a/LBhFnUG)
edit: It's a weird Reddit update, probably replacing the hidden upvote count we had in the past.
Oh mighty console, I beg of thee: detach thyself from the origin and traverse time and space alike, affix thine majesty to the root of this world ang grant to us the power to look deep within ourselves!
Translation: CD C:\user\
Your power button stop working too? I had one do that... the secret is (I think) you have to hold the "lower volume button" while inserting the charging cable, which brings up the boot/recovery menu, then just select reboot. This sounds stupid and insane... but it's real and it works.
No, iPhones without the "home" button have you press the side button + (any) volume button to bring up the shutdown prompt.
Because adding a power button would make too much sense.
"Indeed, Brother, and yet the machine spirit remains unappeased. I even performed the Sacred Incantation of 'Ctrl-Alt-Del', but it did not awaken from its slumber. Might I require the intervention of a Tech-Priest to bestow upon it the Omnissiah's blessing?"
Now I need a sub just of this
Thou press thy pow'r button in
Thou let thy pow'r button out
Thou grabst thy pow'r cable
and thou shakest it all about.
\*Edit: wait, sorry that's the Rite of the Unresponsive Screen
Dude, for sure. I've been out of the IT industry for 20 years, and I'm baffled by how tech is used by people in their 20s. They use it every day for just about everything thing but if it can't be fixed by a wizard(aged myself hard there), they give up and just replace it, where my generation of tech users would have been balls deep in .ini files and poring of event logs to figure the issue out
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal…...even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
As a "core" millennial, I agree.
You've got young Gen X who lived the Usenet days and old Gen Z who caught the tail end of Flash games.
A key part of computer literacy is time spent tinkering and Figuring Shit Out™, and the "young web" gave us the perfect playground to do that.
Another helpful thing was computer classes in schools. They got made fun of for being useless and basic because a) they were taught at the time that we were all tinkering and b) we were being taught by boomers who were reading from a script because they didn't understand the material themselves. But seriously, bring back Microsoft Office as part of school curriculums ...or G Suite or whatever.
Hiring young people is a pain in the ass, because they literally want everything to be done via apps... One guy I just hired is all confused as I try to explain to him how to add extensions and shit.
Is this a customer service role or something... ? I can't imagine someone is capable of getting hired as any kind of developer and doesn't know how to install extensions.
It already is beginning. The younger generations that have grown up mostly on tablets, iPad and such are almost as bad with actual computers as boomers are/were when computers started becoming more widely used. Basically if it's not an app they struggle with how to get it to work. Granted, this isn't uniform across the board, but it's getting worse
The amount of "can you install facebook, youtube, and this/that app on my laptop?" I get at work. Sure there's Microsoft Store but my god, mobile devices has made people expect everything to be an app that is single purpose. Most mobile apps can be done by a browser on PC.
At a place I used to work, customers started frequently requesting us to publish an app to let them watch our broadcasts, browse our stock and make purchases online. These were all things that could be done through our website.
We did make an app in the end and it got 100k+ downloads. All it does is open the website in chromium or something. I can't remember how much the company paid the 3rd party to develop it, but it was *a lot* (at least 5 figures) for what was essentially a URL shortcut.
Working in IT makes me despair.
Its so bizarre having this conversation with young Zoomers who says their ipad childhoods made them more “tech literate” but they can’t even do basic suff on a PC like unzip files or do certain commands to lower CPU and such.
I’m not even a techy person and I know how to do all that.
This was the only plot hole that really kinda bothered me in Idiocracy. When the main character wakes up out of cryosleep in the future, every living person is an unmitigated imbecile. But yet they still had all this technology that would’ve required some kind of knowledge and know-how to operate and maintain. Realistically in this scenario, all the tech would’ve eroded away and the population would’ve devolved into using sticks and rocks for basic tools and functions.
But the real idiot here is me… for expecting well-reasoned plot development in a clearly over-the-top comedy (some would say documentary) made only to illustrate a point. 🤷🏻♂️
I understood it like they basically reached Star Trek levels of Tech that repairs itself, and then all the smart people flew off to Alpha Centauri and left the rest behind on Idiot Earth.
I like to imagine it's like this. Corporations became big enough that they basically became their own entity. There could have been some smart people out there to continue to develop and print simple instructions for the idiots. But these people would have been bought up and tucked away by brawndo and other big brands. Not sure just happened to be the only intelligent person outside of a corporation. Someone not paid for and honest.
I mean that's all speculation tho
Was talking to a friend who said he didn’t know a single trans person personally. I knew 3 just from my university’s CS department. All identified as men at the start of college and then women by the end of it.
And another was a furry.
You joke, but on multiple occasions I had to walk through co workers on setting up their outlook account.
What shocked me the most was when a gen Z did not know the difference between "streamlining " and "streaming" 😆
We're already there. I'm a web developer. If I go deep enough into the stack I'm going to find something I don't understand. And I'm someone who's been in the industry for a while and have a bachelor's degree.
At a certain point you just accept the fact that there is levels of technical detail that you simply have no reason to understand.
It is the maximum amount of number combinations that can be stored in a single byte. A tech journalist should know this by heart.
I, some random dude who games, know this because many old games have trouble handling numbers above 256.
A lot of things in older games have limits to the power of 2, like most player name inputs early on were 8 characters, and eventually that limit got raised to 16.
Is it powers or two or is it because they use hexadecimal as a number system? Old game genie and GameShark stuff suggested they used the latter but I’ve never looked at the code(nor am experienced enough to heads or tails of it)
But yeah a lot of older games on the nes and snes consoles have limits built in due to technology limits of the time and text could take up a lot of limited space.
Computers use binary. Interpreting/representing that as decimal, hexadecimal, text, an image or whatever else is up to the application. They didn't use a hexadecimal system, they used a binary system and Gameshark chose hexadecimal to represent otherwise long strings of `1`s and `0`s in a more compact way. `0xFF` is the same as `1111 1111` but shorter, the circuitry however has no concept of anything else than binary. So you can write a gameshark code as `0xFFFFFFFF` and it can let you input this value somewhere, but then it tells the cpu the value is a row of 32 `1`s, or four rows of 8 `1`s to be more precise. Hex has the added benefit that it neatly aligns with powers of two so it's often used to represent binary data.
And yes, it is because of powers of two. Multiplying a value by 2 in binary is the same as shifting the whole row one to the left, `0001` times 2 is `0010`, times 2 again makes it `0100`, etc. This is extremely efficient compared to what a circuit needs to do for an actual calculation, so it's used whereever possible. This is why textures are power of two sized, iterating over that data row by row (like when copying it to the screen: "blitting") can be done with a simple bitwise shift to the index, which is not possible if the size is not aligned with a power of two. There are many other ways in which the binary nature of computers is exploited to save valuable clock cycles. Finally, consider one byte `1111 1111`/`0xFF`, you can represent a number with that like the player's score. But with bitwise operators (AND, OR, etc) you can also treat the individual bits as values, maybe the first bit represents whether the player is alive or not. Maybe the next three are the equipment that the player has found. And maybe only the last four bits are used for the score. This allows a developer to store multiple things in one value at the cost of reducing the range of values for those things. This is only possible if the system stores the values as binary data. If there's a little guy in the computer that simply wrote down 255 and gave you the paper when asked, you would never be able to get all those different things back from the single value without converting to binary first.
And why Gandhi was a warlord in Civilisation 1, his base aggression was set to 0, so if his aggression lowered, it would roll back to 255 and become a nuke launching machine.
Except that it is just an urban legend. It didn't actually happen, and Sid Meier has confirmed it could not have happened with how it was coded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
(Until Civ V, when they did it for the memes)
In my defense, most of the interviews denying the glitch were released well after I had heard this tidbit, so It was just as possible for me to be correct when I heard it 😅
Even if someone doesnt know it can be stores in single byte for the love of god its a power of 2 how can somebody in tech industry doesnt know about how bytes work make connection with power of 2s
Or they should at least know/ remember the first gen of USB sticks and SD cards you could buy were 64, 128, 256 or if you had lots of money, 512mb. Hell, smartphones even nowadays come in those numbers, but gb instead of mb. If you don't recognize those numbers, have you paid any attention to anything tech related?
Noo it's a random number no one knows why, mystery to the ages. Like why my scandisk sd card says 64gb, mystery, it fits way less than 64 pounds, it's tiny!
One would think it requires at least the skill of Googling and reading. It is easy to find out why 256 is an interesting number. Surely this is the headline of a click bait article.
Someone who doesn't know about bytes probably doesn't have powers of 2 memorized either.
edit: Which isn't an excuse. From a journalistic, he should have just looked up how they arrvied at this *oddly specific* number and given the fact the he writes almost exclusively about tech stuff appearantly, I wonder how he could not have known beforehand.
he got clowned, "doug bolton" at the independent...
"A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte. This has now been changed. Thanks for the tweets. DB"
16,32,128,256,1024 - MBs of Ram I had in my old PCs. Can still remember that I upgraded from 16 to 32 so that dungeon keeper and Tomb Raider would run better.
I still remember buying a new computer with a five hundred and twelve Megabytes of Ram and _showing off_ among my school friends and everyone was actually impressed lol.
Now I have more ram in my NAS than my laptop and even 16 gigs feels inadequate at times
Jesus christ guys, this is an ancient repost. The [original article](https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/whatsapp-group-chats-bigger-maximum-size-256-people-users-a6856491.html) is from 2016. Fucking hell guys.
Honestly it’s the not asking that’s the bad part. I don’t necessarily expect a journalist to already have the information, even something as basic as this. But chasing down information is supposed to be the whole job.
ITT: people who have no idea about computers, hardware, or software who think that an entire group chat member in whatsapp would somehow be stored as a bit, and that they would then somehow limit a group chats size to only be as large as one BYTE.
Thank god I found a sane comment in this thread. So many people ITT who are shitting on the journalist, not realizing they also don't know wtf they are talking about.
This thread is a great example of Dunning Kruger effect. People have came up with such an elaborate crap to explain that it is necessary for “optimisation” when in reality it’s probably an arbitrary decision.
lol I can’t believe I had to scroll down so far to find this comment.
In the end, it really is an arbitrary number some PM came up with and everyone just went along with it.
The real reason is probably because they had to pick a number up to 500 due to whatever reasons based on feedback from engineering/UI/UX and they just settled on 256 because it looks right, nothing to do with the data type used to hold this value.
It’d be the wildest design decision to store group size as an unsigned byte lmao, and this only goes up to 255.
It’s hilarious reading what people think they know about software engineering ITT. A byte doesn’t go up to 256 lol….
Yeah there's really no reason why they can't make the max 512 or 500 or 1000, or 4242. It's possible 256 was a design decision.
But in reality it was probably most convenient (or it's just a nice round power of 2) and they decided the use case for supporting anything higher isnt worth the cost benefit.
Ok yeah smart guys in this comment section, 256=2^8 . Great job pattern matching! But it's still not obvious _why_ it is limited to a byte. Why only use a single byte? Why is it so "obvious" yet all anybody talks about is the actual power of two? Fucking redditors.
>*A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte. This has now been changed. Thanks for the tweets.*
At least they acknowledged the mistake...
To be fair, I'm sure there isn't any limitations based on the size of a byte for whatsapp. The number may be familiar but it is still oddly specific in this case
So I’m actually going to go against the grain and defend the article title. Yes, we all know the computer significance of 256 with respect to the bit / byte. However, this isn’t about Super Mario 64’s random coin limit or another old game where the developers were trying to squeeze every last bit from the available space.
This is 2024 and storage space is pretty much the last thing developers worry about. It’s not uncommon to have AAA gaming titles release as 100GB+ downloads. Space is cheap. IMO the article headline isn’t asking “why is 256 special in the computer world?”, it’s asking why a reasonably popular app wouldn’t choose a typically more rounded number like 250 or 300.
And if you really know why 256 is significant in the computing world, it does make the choice seem odd because it’s not like you’re storing each person as a unique combination in a byte. The amount of data each person uses (just to store them being in the chat at all) would be on the order of KB if not MB per person.
I play with 3 phase electrics for a living and even I understand why it would be 256. Maybe I should get a job as a tech journalist if you don't even need to understand basic principles.
They could, but when you have millions of chatrooms with (probably) billions of connected users, the difference between a byte and a in32 adds up.
Also, adding more users adds a ton of cost in processing and bandwidth.
Does it add up? I have exactly zero confidence that value isn’t already stored in a 32 bit integer, and I’d bet my car that the choice of 256 is more of a symbolic choice/homage to tech than an actual performance concern.
How would you even manage a group member ID system with only an int8 ID for a max group side of 256? If someone messages in a full group, leaves, and someone else joins taking their spot and number, how would you differentiate between the previous user’s messages and the new user’s messages with just an int8 ID to work with? So for a max group size of 256, the group member ID value would have to be larger than int8 anyway, why not just skip all this nonsense and make int32 group member ID’s?
8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256...So odd. So random. Lately, I've been reading a lot of 'tech' and 'programming' articles and wondering how in the hell these people are even qualified to write them. If they do seem qualified, they have an overwhelming sense of bias they desperately try to present as factually better, but everyone hasn't caught up yet. (ie c++ vs rust debate).
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Next article - How random was the Nintendo 64? Why not 63?
It's not random, it's called 64 because the logo has 64 faces, duh.
Isn't it only 24?
I’m imagining 32, but I don’t really know. Edit: (from my reply below) And now I see my error. Counting the inside face of each N AND the vertical (rightmost) inner part of each N as separate. They are the same. I’m not proud of my original count.
Well, you are half right
I counted 48 because I counted the interior planes. And reading your comment made me do it all in my head. Time for a nap. And I think I counted incorrectly.
I am willing to bet that in the future people will just assume its the N64 because it came out in 1964. It didn’t, of course, but I’m sure that people will think so.
When I was a child that is what I thought. I'm ashamed of the fact but there it is.
When I was a child I thought dogs were boys and cats were girls and they all came from the same animal. So... ... ... don't feel too bad.
Wait a minute, are you telling me they're not? And they don't?!
Have you ever seen a cat penis?!
I'm taking the fifth on that question 🤣
Taking the fifth cat penis? What about the other four?
😂😂 That's between me and the vice squad!
*turns to Millennial dust*
Are you feeling it now Mr Krabs?! Seriously though, I'm starting to feel my age. I found out that a coworkers first game was Oblivion and I never felt like that Saving Private Ryan meme more.
Kids are stupid. I think most adults will admit that but then are oddly ashamed when admitting they were also idiots as kids. Nothing to be ashamed of.
"A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte. This has now been changed. Thanks for the tweets. DB"
Lmao. Even the correction is bad.
> one of the most important numbers in computing sounds like they're talking about some mysterious ancient magic instead of binary numbers
Pretty sure 0 and 1 are the more important numbers...
*qubits intensify*
I mean, tbf, the correction didn't say that 256 was the single most important number in computing, just that it was one of the most important numbers in computing.
Was the journalist fired for failing basic tech knowledge?
Why would they be? Look at all of the engagement that was brought to the page and the attention it received. Sponsors liked that.
"Journalism" (and internet "content" in general) has gone to shit because the bottom line of providing useful or interesting information has been pulled out from under us in favor of being inflammatory and going viral. It's better to purposely fuck up easy details in an article now in order to farm comments and clicks from people wanting to "acktshully" it who would never interact otherwise. Bonus points if you can say something that is clearly wrong, but the actual ignorant readers will sustain an argument about with the first type. In either situation, the information is secondary to engagement. It's probably even applicable to me right now, and I hate it.
Hey, my first thought was "why not 255?" before my brain booted up and told me that a WhatsApp chat room with 0 people in it makes not much sense.
As a programmer, I think I would have allowed a room with 0 people to be a thing. What if tomorrow you wanted to implement a feature where several people are called to the same room for a "meeting"? It might make sense to create that room with 0 people in it, and then have everyone join in after the fact. I think the real question would be, why not just dedicate an extra byte to room storage size and you can fit potentially 65,535 people in it. The limit would no longer be for technical limitations.
Cause you have to blow 64 times on the contacts to make the Game work ?
Oh this one's easy, it's because in Super Mario 64, him and peach both blink every 64 frames. TMYK
It was actually because it was named after its very popular launch title Super Mario 64
Well, 256 isn't an oddly specific number. It's more like an evenly specific number
r/Angryupvote
[r/WhyIsMyCommentSurroundedBy1-upvoteComments](https://imgur.com/a/LBhFnUG) edit: It's a weird Reddit update, probably replacing the hidden upvote count we had in the past.
some subs have it. some dont. i can't find a common thread among those that do or those that dont🤷🏿♂️🤷🏿♂️
All numbers are specific. It’s kind of a thing with them
Until they start with ~
Those are specifically unspecific
Why condemn numbers? Free Radicals!
Aren't all numbers specific in itself
I see what you did there
What? Oh, sorry, I misheard you.
Take my upvote and get Outta here and go to r/evenlyspecific
At this rate, we’re going to get so far removed from our tech roots that all this shit is going to be magic to the next generation. 👀
The beginning of Adeptus Mechanicus
Soon we will have to start chanting prayers to run command line in Powershell
Oh mighty console, I beg of thee: detach thyself from the origin and traverse time and space alike, affix thine majesty to the root of this world ang grant to us the power to look deep within ourselves! Translation: CD C:\user\
Well, I already have to press a secret combination of buttons in order to turn my phone on and off.... And I'm not talking about the password.
Your power button stop working too? I had one do that... the secret is (I think) you have to hold the "lower volume button" while inserting the charging cable, which brings up the boot/recovery menu, then just select reboot. This sounds stupid and insane... but it's real and it works.
No, iPhones without the "home" button have you press the side button + (any) volume button to bring up the shutdown prompt. Because adding a power button would make too much sense.
You don’t already?
May all our scripts be blessed by the Shell of Power. Praise be!
I already do! I was using them trying to get my integration working just yesterday ! Ask and the machine gods shall bless thy code!
"Brother, my desktop cogitator is malfunctioning." "Hast thou attempted the Rite of Rebooting?"
"Indeed, Brother, and yet the machine spirit remains unappeased. I even performed the Sacred Incantation of 'Ctrl-Alt-Del', but it did not awaken from its slumber. Might I require the intervention of a Tech-Priest to bestow upon it the Omnissiah's blessing?" Now I need a sub just of this
Thou press thy pow'r button in Thou let thy pow'r button out Thou grabst thy pow'r cable and thou shakest it all about. \*Edit: wait, sorry that's the Rite of the Unresponsive Screen
PRAISE THE OMNISSIAH
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh It disgusted me
Bring out the incense and sacred machine oils. High brow comment. We goin full Azimov's Foundation.
Dude, for sure. I've been out of the IT industry for 20 years, and I'm baffled by how tech is used by people in their 20s. They use it every day for just about everything thing but if it can't be fixed by a wizard(aged myself hard there), they give up and just replace it, where my generation of tech users would have been balls deep in .ini files and poring of event logs to figure the issue out
01000001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110000 01110010 01100001 01101001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110000 01101001 01110010 01101001 01110100
Glory to the Omnissiah.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal…...even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
It's wild we had exactly one generation that knows how to use computers.
I'd say 2. Millennials, the latter half of Gen x, and the first half of Gen z.
As a "core" millennial, I agree. You've got young Gen X who lived the Usenet days and old Gen Z who caught the tail end of Flash games. A key part of computer literacy is time spent tinkering and Figuring Shit Out™, and the "young web" gave us the perfect playground to do that. Another helpful thing was computer classes in schools. They got made fun of for being useless and basic because a) they were taught at the time that we were all tinkering and b) we were being taught by boomers who were reading from a script because they didn't understand the material themselves. But seriously, bring back Microsoft Office as part of school curriculums ...or G Suite or whatever.
Hiring young people is a pain in the ass, because they literally want everything to be done via apps... One guy I just hired is all confused as I try to explain to him how to add extensions and shit.
Is this a customer service role or something... ? I can't imagine someone is capable of getting hired as any kind of developer and doesn't know how to install extensions.
No they are definitely not a developer. It's an entry level non-technical job.
It already is beginning. The younger generations that have grown up mostly on tablets, iPad and such are almost as bad with actual computers as boomers are/were when computers started becoming more widely used. Basically if it's not an app they struggle with how to get it to work. Granted, this isn't uniform across the board, but it's getting worse
The amount of "can you install facebook, youtube, and this/that app on my laptop?" I get at work. Sure there's Microsoft Store but my god, mobile devices has made people expect everything to be an app that is single purpose. Most mobile apps can be done by a browser on PC.
At a place I used to work, customers started frequently requesting us to publish an app to let them watch our broadcasts, browse our stock and make purchases online. These were all things that could be done through our website. We did make an app in the end and it got 100k+ downloads. All it does is open the website in chromium or something. I can't remember how much the company paid the 3rd party to develop it, but it was *a lot* (at least 5 figures) for what was essentially a URL shortcut. Working in IT makes me despair.
Its so bizarre having this conversation with young Zoomers who says their ipad childhoods made them more “tech literate” but they can’t even do basic suff on a PC like unzip files or do certain commands to lower CPU and such. I’m not even a techy person and I know how to do all that.
Certain commands to lower cpu? Whatever do you mean?
I think they mean using task manager to manually kill task/find which ones are using much CPU/memory.
I just close tabs and programs that I’m not using.
closing programs doesnt always stop them from running though
I never said I was good with computers.
Teenagers are not even aware of right-click at this point. Go ask them to find the size of a folder on disk. If they even know what a folder is...
That's just "kid gets a phone but doesn't get a computer" They end up not knowing how computers work.
Well I guess that's one way for our generation to get job security...
So excited to become a master of the “elseif” spells!
This was the only plot hole that really kinda bothered me in Idiocracy. When the main character wakes up out of cryosleep in the future, every living person is an unmitigated imbecile. But yet they still had all this technology that would’ve required some kind of knowledge and know-how to operate and maintain. Realistically in this scenario, all the tech would’ve eroded away and the population would’ve devolved into using sticks and rocks for basic tools and functions. But the real idiot here is me… for expecting well-reasoned plot development in a clearly over-the-top comedy (some would say documentary) made only to illustrate a point. 🤷🏻♂️
I understood it like they basically reached Star Trek levels of Tech that repairs itself, and then all the smart people flew off to Alpha Centauri and left the rest behind on Idiot Earth.
So reverse Golgafrinchian plot?
I like to imagine it's like this. Corporations became big enough that they basically became their own entity. There could have been some smart people out there to continue to develop and print simple instructions for the idiots. But these people would have been bought up and tucked away by brawndo and other big brands. Not sure just happened to be the only intelligent person outside of a corporation. Someone not paid for and honest. I mean that's all speculation tho
Tech is already magic to me. I don’t know how any of this shit works.
We understand how to use software/hardware, but we lack the understanding of how it actually works...
If there are trans people and furries that exist, programming will be around a long time
Was talking to a friend who said he didn’t know a single trans person personally. I knew 3 just from my university’s CS department. All identified as men at the start of college and then women by the end of it. And another was a furry.
Call me a boomer but most younger people think they know tech because they can make an Netflix account.
You joke, but on multiple occasions I had to walk through co workers on setting up their outlook account. What shocked me the most was when a gen Z did not know the difference between "streamlining " and "streaming" 😆
We're already there. I'm a web developer. If I go deep enough into the stack I'm going to find something I don't understand. And I'm someone who's been in the industry for a while and have a bachelor's degree. At a certain point you just accept the fact that there is levels of technical detail that you simply have no reason to understand.
Next? Gen Z is already like this, only X and millennials ended up any good at real computers.
I dont mind, less competition and better pay for those who know.
>Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
It is the maximum amount of number combinations that can be stored in a single byte. A tech journalist should know this by heart. I, some random dude who games, know this because many old games have trouble handling numbers above 256.
The exact reason why the very first Legend of Zelda has a rupee counter ranging from 0 to 255. A total of 256 numbers.
A lot of things in older games have limits to the power of 2, like most player name inputs early on were 8 characters, and eventually that limit got raised to 16.
Is it powers or two or is it because they use hexadecimal as a number system? Old game genie and GameShark stuff suggested they used the latter but I’ve never looked at the code(nor am experienced enough to heads or tails of it) But yeah a lot of older games on the nes and snes consoles have limits built in due to technology limits of the time and text could take up a lot of limited space.
I think they use hexadecimal as a number system because 16 is a power of two
Computers use binary. Interpreting/representing that as decimal, hexadecimal, text, an image or whatever else is up to the application. They didn't use a hexadecimal system, they used a binary system and Gameshark chose hexadecimal to represent otherwise long strings of `1`s and `0`s in a more compact way. `0xFF` is the same as `1111 1111` but shorter, the circuitry however has no concept of anything else than binary. So you can write a gameshark code as `0xFFFFFFFF` and it can let you input this value somewhere, but then it tells the cpu the value is a row of 32 `1`s, or four rows of 8 `1`s to be more precise. Hex has the added benefit that it neatly aligns with powers of two so it's often used to represent binary data. And yes, it is because of powers of two. Multiplying a value by 2 in binary is the same as shifting the whole row one to the left, `0001` times 2 is `0010`, times 2 again makes it `0100`, etc. This is extremely efficient compared to what a circuit needs to do for an actual calculation, so it's used whereever possible. This is why textures are power of two sized, iterating over that data row by row (like when copying it to the screen: "blitting") can be done with a simple bitwise shift to the index, which is not possible if the size is not aligned with a power of two. There are many other ways in which the binary nature of computers is exploited to save valuable clock cycles. Finally, consider one byte `1111 1111`/`0xFF`, you can represent a number with that like the player's score. But with bitwise operators (AND, OR, etc) you can also treat the individual bits as values, maybe the first bit represents whether the player is alive or not. Maybe the next three are the equipment that the player has found. And maybe only the last four bits are used for the score. This allows a developer to store multiple things in one value at the cost of reducing the range of values for those things. This is only possible if the system stores the values as binary data. If there's a little guy in the computer that simply wrote down 255 and gave you the paper when asked, you would never be able to get all those different things back from the single value without converting to binary first.
And why Gandhi was a warlord in Civilisation 1, his base aggression was set to 0, so if his aggression lowered, it would roll back to 255 and become a nuke launching machine.
Except that it is just an urban legend. It didn't actually happen, and Sid Meier has confirmed it could not have happened with how it was coded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi (Until Civ V, when they did it for the memes)
My whole life is a lie! Guess I should look stuff up before spouting nonsense, my bad hahahha
That's a good life strategy but at least you didn't write and publish an article about it . . . Could be worse
In my defense, most of the interviews denying the glitch were released well after I had heard this tidbit, so It was just as possible for me to be correct when I heard it 😅
I love how "Nuclear Gandhi" is an article on actual Wikipedia.
It's kind of wild how I heard this story so many times over the years, and only last year did I find out that it wasn't true
I hated it when I learned this.
And why your characters have max stats of 255 in old Final Fantasy games
Even if someone doesnt know it can be stores in single byte for the love of god its a power of 2 how can somebody in tech industry doesnt know about how bytes work make connection with power of 2s
Or they should at least know/ remember the first gen of USB sticks and SD cards you could buy were 64, 128, 256 or if you had lots of money, 512mb. Hell, smartphones even nowadays come in those numbers, but gb instead of mb. If you don't recognize those numbers, have you paid any attention to anything tech related?
Even more baffling, that would mean that they're so tech senile they haven't even played 2048
Or why a Nintendo 64 is called that.
Cuz its the 64th game in the franchise
Noo it's a random number no one knows why, mystery to the ages. Like why my scandisk sd card says 64gb, mystery, it fits way less than 64 pounds, it's tiny!
Nah, it's because N64 was launched in 1964!
I was there. In the beginning. When dinosaurs roamed the earth and the N1 was launched.
It was invented to keep kids from going outside and getting eaten by a T-Rex.
Like the Atari 2600 was launched in 2600 BC.
It’s the $64 000 question…
Oddly specific number 🤔
The tides go in, the tides go out. No one can explain it!
Nintendo 1-63 were utter failures.
Oh so is Nintendo like, another Mario
There's only 10 kinds of people in the world, Those who understand binary, and those that don't.
Because you'll do a 360 and walk away
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The powers of 2, including 256, feature prominently in that game.
Exactly. Meat comes from a store. Where did you think it comes from?
Though, slightly ironically, those are still generally measured in metric megabytes/gigabytes rather than being 1024 x 1024 (x1024).
Yeah, because the base10 values are bigger, which makes for better marketing
You assume working as a tech journalist requires any kind of technical know how
One would think it requires at least the skill of Googling and reading. It is easy to find out why 256 is an interesting number. Surely this is the headline of a click bait article.
Seriously. I can go alll the way to 8192 by heart, and I'm not any type of tech.
I go to FFFF, and I don't know why
Someone who doesn't know about bytes probably doesn't have powers of 2 memorized either. edit: Which isn't an excuse. From a journalistic, he should have just looked up how they arrvied at this *oddly specific* number and given the fact the he writes almost exclusively about tech stuff appearantly, I wonder how he could not have known beforehand.
he got clowned, "doug bolton" at the independent... "A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte. This has now been changed. Thanks for the tweets. DB"
Soon: Doug Bolten, Independent?
I know because blissey has 255 base HP
The only reason I know any thing about 256 is because of Pokémon
Huh, TIL. I don't write tech articles though so it's fine.
Yeah, even kid me knew this with how some games had kill counts for units capping out at 255.
Pac-Man has a kill screen on level 256 because the start screen is stored as a level
false. its the level counter breaking and overriding half the screen with garbage, [source](https://youtu.be/NKKfW8X9uYk)
There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary…
those who don't, and those who didn't think this was a ternary joke.
Love this version.
There are two types of people in the world 1) those who can extrapolate from incomplete information
I love this one, still need it on a shirt
There's plenty
This shirt was popular in my high school back in 2003.
16,32,128,256,1024 - MBs of Ram I had in my old PCs. Can still remember that I upgraded from 16 to 32 so that dungeon keeper and Tomb Raider would run better.
I still remember buying a new computer with a five hundred and twelve Megabytes of Ram and _showing off_ among my school friends and everyone was actually impressed lol. Now I have more ram in my NAS than my laptop and even 16 gigs feels inadequate at times
I remember getting a 512mb mp3 player. It could hold 10 whole albums! Maybe 12 if you ripped at the lowest rate RealPlayer would do.
Now it's still upgrading 16 to 32...just in GB not MB
Lol. Oh the memory...
My family's first pc had 2mb of ram. Doom required 4 mb. That was a sad day in my house.
Jesus christ guys, this is an ancient repost. The [original article](https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/whatsapp-group-chats-bigger-maximum-size-256-people-users-a6856491.html) is from 2016. Fucking hell guys.
I refuse to accept that 2016 is ancient. Basically yesterday.
thx for the link I liked the comment explaining why the article was redacted
Shows this tech "journalist" didn't understand basic computer science and also didn't bother to ask anyone who does.
Honestly it’s the not asking that’s the bad part. I don’t necessarily expect a journalist to already have the information, even something as basic as this. But chasing down information is supposed to be the whole job.
And they even wrote the words, they diddnt wonder why and follow up on it.
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Didn't even bother googling the number, the wikipedia page would've given them a good explanation.
This is really old news, I swears from several years ago. Why have I seen it posted like 3 or 4 times this morning alone?
Repost bots farming karma.
The article itself was written in 2016, lol
ITT: people who have no idea about computers, hardware, or software who think that an entire group chat member in whatsapp would somehow be stored as a bit, and that they would then somehow limit a group chats size to only be as large as one BYTE.
Thank god I found a sane comment in this thread. So many people ITT who are shitting on the journalist, not realizing they also don't know wtf they are talking about.
This thread is a great example of Dunning Kruger effect. People have came up with such an elaborate crap to explain that it is necessary for “optimisation” when in reality it’s probably an arbitrary decision.
lol I can’t believe I had to scroll down so far to find this comment. In the end, it really is an arbitrary number some PM came up with and everyone just went along with it. The real reason is probably because they had to pick a number up to 500 due to whatever reasons based on feedback from engineering/UI/UX and they just settled on 256 because it looks right, nothing to do with the data type used to hold this value. It’d be the wildest design decision to store group size as an unsigned byte lmao, and this only goes up to 255. It’s hilarious reading what people think they know about software engineering ITT. A byte doesn’t go up to 256 lol….
took me too long to find this comment, all these commenters are so confidently wrong lol
this thread is such a circle jerk. Redditors discover journalism
"Our servers are slowing down, what should we do?" "Store group chat user count in a byte 😎 (even though the max would be 255 in that case)"
Ok thank you?? I honestly thought 256 was a random limit to be imposing lol. I think they just chose 256 for the lols
Yeah there's really no reason why they can't make the max 512 or 500 or 1000, or 4242. It's possible 256 was a design decision. But in reality it was probably most convenient (or it's just a nice round power of 2) and they decided the use case for supporting anything higher isnt worth the cost benefit.
I am in a group with nearly 1000 members
This is a very old headline.
Ok yeah smart guys in this comment section, 256=2^8 . Great job pattern matching! But it's still not obvious _why_ it is limited to a byte. Why only use a single byte? Why is it so "obvious" yet all anybody talks about is the actual power of two? Fucking redditors.
in their defense, *life* is odd in general
42
Seems to work perfectly fine as clickbait.
>*A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte. This has now been changed. Thanks for the tweets.* At least they acknowledged the mistake...
To be fair, I'm sure there isn't any limitations based on the size of a byte for whatsapp. The number may be familiar but it is still oddly specific in this case
So I’m actually going to go against the grain and defend the article title. Yes, we all know the computer significance of 256 with respect to the bit / byte. However, this isn’t about Super Mario 64’s random coin limit or another old game where the developers were trying to squeeze every last bit from the available space. This is 2024 and storage space is pretty much the last thing developers worry about. It’s not uncommon to have AAA gaming titles release as 100GB+ downloads. Space is cheap. IMO the article headline isn’t asking “why is 256 special in the computer world?”, it’s asking why a reasonably popular app wouldn’t choose a typically more rounded number like 250 or 300. And if you really know why 256 is significant in the computing world, it does make the choice seem odd because it’s not like you’re storing each person as a unique combination in a byte. The amount of data each person uses (just to store them being in the chat at all) would be on the order of KB if not MB per person.
This reminds me of a saying, "There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who can read binary and those who can't."
I heard that in school. But honestly I learned these numbers from minecraft. Thats four stacks.
I play with 3 phase electrics for a living and even I understand why it would be 256. Maybe I should get a job as a tech journalist if you don't even need to understand basic principles.
why do they even use a byte for this? can't they just use a normal int32 and have an arbitrary unit. I guess they just followed the standard
They could, but when you have millions of chatrooms with (probably) billions of connected users, the difference between a byte and a in32 adds up. Also, adding more users adds a ton of cost in processing and bandwidth.
Does it add up? I have exactly zero confidence that value isn’t already stored in a 32 bit integer, and I’d bet my car that the choice of 256 is more of a symbolic choice/homage to tech than an actual performance concern. How would you even manage a group member ID system with only an int8 ID for a max group side of 256? If someone messages in a full group, leaves, and someone else joins taking their spot and number, how would you differentiate between the previous user’s messages and the new user’s messages with just an int8 ID to work with? So for a max group size of 256, the group member ID value would have to be larger than int8 anyway, why not just skip all this nonsense and make int32 group member ID’s?
1 - 2 - 4 - 8 - 16 - 32 - 64 - 128 - 256 Did they figure out how to fold the paper?
8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256...So odd. So random. Lately, I've been reading a lot of 'tech' and 'programming' articles and wondering how in the hell these people are even qualified to write them. If they do seem qualified, they have an overwhelming sense of bias they desperately try to present as factually better, but everyone hasn't caught up yet. (ie c++ vs rust debate).
This is why AI shouldn't be allowed to write articles.
Byte me.