We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 1:35 PM UTC

almost wrote: post #237

willis936 wrote: post #98

Earlier 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.

360 degrees in a circle predates Plato by quite a lot (2000 years I think!). It comes from the Summarians more than 4000 years ago. They used a method of counting on fingers that goes up to 12 on one hand and 60 using both hands, so their numbering system was based on 60. 360 is 6 * 60 and also roughly how many days in a year. Later societies inherited that from them along with 60 minutes in and hour.

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 1:43 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #305

vbezhenar wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always held opinion that ideal base for our day life computation is 12. It's close enough to 10, so most things would work just as well (like you just need to remember 2 more digits), but it's actually divisible by 3, 4, 6 which is a lot more useful than 5, compared to 10-base.

> " (like you just need to remember 2 more digits) " "The standard among mathematicians for writing larger bases is to extend the Arabic numerals using the Latin alphabet, so ten is written with the letter A and eleven is written with the letter B. But actually doing it that way makes ten and eleven look like they're too separate from the rest of the digits so you can use an inverted two for ten and an inverted three…

Post by windward » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

pavpanchekha wrote: post #165

zamadatix wrote: post #4

Because we have 8 bit bytes we are familiar with the famous or obvious cases multiples-of-8-bits ran out, and those cases sound a lot better with 12.5% extra bits. What's harder to see in this kind of thought experiment is what the famously obvious cases multiples-of-9-bits ran out would have been. The article starts to think about some of these towards the end, but it's hard as it's not immediately obvious how many…

Author here. Actually I doubt we'd have picked 27-bit addresses. That's about 134M addresses; that's less than the US population (it's about the number of households today?) and Europe was also relevant when IPv4 was being designed. In any case, if we had chosen 27-bit addresses, we'd have hit exhaustion just a bit before the big telecom boom that built out most of the internet infrastructure that holds back transiti…

Post by piperswe » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

calebh wrote: post #187

Perhaps the reason modern programs use so much memory vs what I remember from the Windows XP era is precisely because we went to 64 bits. Imagine how many pointers are used in the average program. When we switched over to 64 bits, the memory used by all those pointers instantly doubled. It's clear that 32 bits wasn't enough, but maybe some intermediate number between 32 and 64 would have added sufficient capacity wit…

Post by phyzome » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

pavpanchekha wrote: post #197

phyzome wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think they missed? What they said seems accurate: You're putting a lot of faith in ChatGPT that doesn't seem warranted.

It's not an argument for longer roads or can kicking? The thesis is stated at the top: with 9 bit bytes we'd avoid a couple of bad numerological coincidence (like that the number of Chinese characters is vague but plausibly around 50k, or the population of the earth is small integer billions). By avoiding the coincidences we'd avoid certain problems entirely. Unicode is growing but we're not discovering another Chine…