Indeed, endianness is the order of bytes, my bad.
I guess I meant LSb vs MSb

The way I see it, if you want to be pedantic about it (it being a joke photo, so potentially unintentionally reversed by the camera, of a cake which is in 3d space and can be seen in both directions) you might as well do it properly and acknowledge that different orders exist for bits.

Indeed writing conventions are also a good point, however this is not writing. People actually working at bit level are probably more likely to see bits on a scope (so in both LSb or MSb order) than as 1 and 0s written on a piece of paper or a screen.

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 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.

I was just thinking about what you'd see from the other side of the table.

You win Lemmy, I need this one explained.

64 bits and you get to watch heat death slowly set in. (Or, y'know, cosmological catastrophe depending on the full physics)

Look, an OpenRISC user.

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)

You probably know, but someone is going to point out an ipv4 address is four bytes.

No liches allowed

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.

Yeah, that digs up some long lost memories :D

Thanks

I hit the big 101000 recently. Time sure does fly by.

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 int with 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 get 00000001, which equals 1. Thus, 11111111 = -1

Secondly, 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.

Just curious since you seem knowledgeable, is there a connection between those societies? Or is it just chance they both choose 8?

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

Cakes have multiple sides, you can have your bits in your chosen order if you turn up to the party in person

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.

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 2^0^th birthdays.

I never saw if the next year they celebrated a 2^1^st birthday.

Instructions unclear.. Am vampire now.