Then people would be saying we’d be better off with 10-bits!
Seriously though we can always do more with one more bit. That doesn’t mean we’d be better off. 8-bits is a nice symmetry with powers of two
We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
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Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#152> Thank you to GPT 4o and o4 for discussions, research, and drafting.
Yeah okay, this is completely pointless... so now we have to verify everything this guy published ?
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the article was well written. I'm assuming the author did most of the writing because it didn't sound like AI slop. I also assume he meant he uses AI to assist, not as the main driver.
It really wasn't well written. I contains factual errors that stand out like lighthouses showing the author had an idea about an article but doesn't actually know the material.
> I contains (sic) factual errors that stand out like lighthouses showing the author had an idea about an article but doesn't actually know the material.
Whoops ^ To be fair, technically, I also contain some factual errors, if you consider the rare genetic mutation or botched DNA transcription.
So far, I haven't found anything that I would consider to be a glaring factual error. What did I miss?
I'm not talking merely about a difference in imagination of how the past might have unfolded. If you view this as an alternative history, I think the author made a plausible case. Certainly not the only way; reasonable people can disagree.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#154someone suggested 10-bit bytes. this will not be enough. 11-bit bytes should be plenty, though
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#155Not a very good argument. Yes, more bytes in situations where we’ve been constrained would have relieved the constraint… but it would eventually come. Even IP addresses… we don’t need an IP per person… IPv6 will be IPs for every device… multiple even… including an interplanetary network.
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Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes sense for the address to map to a value the same width as the data bus. A one-bit wide bus ... er, wire, now, I guess ... Could work just fine, but now we are extremely limited with the number of operations achievable, as well as the amount of addressable data: an eight-bit address can now only reference a maximum of 32 bytes of data, which is so small as to be effectively useless.
If each memory address mapped to a CPU word sized value, that would make sense, and that is closer to the reality of instructions reading a word of memory at a time. Instead of using the CPU word size as the smallest addressable value, or the smallest possible value (a bit) as the smallest addressable value, we use a byte. It's an arbitrary grouping, and worse, it's rarely useful to think in terms of it. If you are o…
There was a time, however, where CPUs operated almost exclusively on on 8bit bytes (and had 8bit data buses). Everything else is merely the consequence of that.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#157Maybe if we worked with 7-bit bytes folks would be more grateful.
For those that don't get it, I'll explain.
Imagine an alternative world that used 7-bit bytes. In that world, Pavel Panchekha wrote a blog post titled "We'd be Better Off with 8-bit Bytes". It was so popular that most people in that world look up to us, the 8-bit-byters.
So to summarize, people that don't exist* are looking up to us now.
* in our universe at least (see Tegmark's Level III Multiverse): https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html or Wikipedia
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plato argued that 7! was the ideal number of citizens in a city because it was a highly factorable number. Being able to cut numbers up is an time-tested favorite. That's why there are 360 degrees.
And many of the conversions between metric and imperial align with the Fibonacci sequence on any order of magnitude. 130km/h is roughly 80mph simply because the fibo sequence has 8 and 13. Obviously not an emergent property but shows how these things were designed.
I don’t think any common conversions fall near there other than miles->km. It’s certainly not the case that the systems were designed to have the golden ratio as conversions between the two.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the article was well written. I'm assuming the author did most of the writing because it didn't sound like AI slop. I also assume he meant he uses AI to assist, not as the main driver.
Author here, in fact all the words you read I wrote, LLMs are not very good at writing.
That matches my experience too.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced that's true in practice. I would like to have an IPv6 network that I can connect Android devices to and on which I can connect to the devices by their host name. Android refuses to support DHCPv6, telling the local DNS server about SLAAC addresses involves awful and unreliable hacks, mDNS requires extra daemons and resolver configuration. I looked at just copying my v4 stack to v6; it doesn't appear…
Android was nearly my real life example a la "IPv6 doesn't mandate anything be different, some guy at Android just likes doing things that way more". I.e. nothing needs to be changed in the IPv6 standard, there's just some guy on the Android team who really likes SLAAC and thinks DHCPv6 is an abomination.
Okay, but that's not useful. In practice in the real world you cannot run a v6 network the way you would a v4 network even if you want to. That you theoretically could go implement changes to bring them into line doesn't really affect that.