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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Computers are binary, yeah? So we have to represent fractional numbers with binary, too.

    In decimal, numbers past the decimal point are 10^-1, 10^-2, … etc. In binary, they’re 2^-1, 2^-2, …

    2^-1 is one half, so 0.1 in binary is 0.5 in decimal. 2^-2 is one quarter. 0.11 in binary is 0.75 in decimal. And of course you’ve got 0.01 = 0.25

    The problem comes when representing decimal numbers that don’t have neat binary representations. For instance, 0.1 in decimal is actually a repeating binary number: 0.0001100110011…




  • jana@leminal.spacetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlReddit / lemmy vs Old internet forums
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    1 year ago

    Personal example: I once asked on the linguistics subreddit why desceiptivist linguistics were preferred to prescriptivist and was downvoted to hell and back. The only replies were to call me a racist. I never got an answer, and I still don’t know. So voting is not the end-all be-all of forum mechanics.

    I’mma have to call bullshit here, unless there just so happened to be a different person using the name quindraco on Reddit who asked this very question.

    • Your question was answered.
    • You may have gotten downvotes, but it was certainly not “to hell and back” – your post is currently sitting at +18.
    • Not a single person called you racist, even after you compared descriptivism to literal genocide.