PupBiru

i didn’t downvote you, and i went to school before a bunch of things but technology evolves and either we evolve with it or we end up being just straight up wrong in a modern context

not exactly because of pairs unless you’re talking about 1 and 0 being a pair… it’s because the maximum number you can count in binary doubles with each additional bit you add:

with 1 bit, you can either have 0 or 1… which is, unsurprisingly perhaps, 0 and 1 respectively - 2 numbers

with 2 bits you can have 00, 01, 10, 11… which is 0, 1, 2, 3 - 4 numbers

with 3 bits you can have 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111… which is 0 to 7- 8 numbers

so you see the pattern: add a bit, double the number you can count to… this is the “2 to the power of” that you might see: with 8 bits (a byte) you can count from 0 to 255 - that’s 2 (because binary has 2 possible states per digit) to the power of 8 (because 8 digits); 8^2

the same is true of decimal, but instead of to the 2 to the power, it’s 10 to the power: with each additional digit, you can count 10 x as many numbers - 0-9 for 1 digit, 00-99 for 2 digits, 000-999 for 3 digits - 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 respectively

and that’s the reason we use hexadecimal sometimes too! we group bits into groups of 8 and call it a byte… hexadecimal is base 16, so nicely lets us represent a byte with just 2 characters - 16^2 = 256 = 2^8

which is why we have kibi, mebi, gibi, etc

kilobyte (KB) is 1000, kibibyte (KiB) is 1024

at least according the the IEC, and id tend to go with them… SI units say that kilo means 1000

let’s not go too far though… the holders of h264/h265 did put a lot of money and effort into developing the codec: a new actual thing… they are not patent trolls, who by definition produce nothing new other than legal mess

i think this is the perfect time for the phrase “thanks i hate it”

inhabiting a boston dynamics robot would probably be the best option

i’d say it could probably use airtasker to get people to unwittingly do assembly of some basic physical form which it could use to build more complex things… i’d probably not count that as “human assistance” per se

afaik activitypub/fediverse doesn’t have to be fully open… there’s private messages and followers only profiles on mastodon… sure, any server admins of your followed would be able to see anything you post (and thus in this case for threads for example, if you accept any follower from threads then meta can see your stuff) but this also doesn’t grant them a license to use the content

also, bluesky will eventually be the same: it only doesn’t have those issues now because they haven’t opened up their software… it’ll have federation in the future, which means it has to be somewhat programmatically open to others

i feel like i need to preface this comment with the fact that this is undeniably a bad thing and no amount of “but on the flip side” will change that, but it’s interesting to express regardless…

this could lead to a few interesting situations:

• more ubiquitous ML could lead to enforcement of laws more evenly… ML doesn’t make “oh sorry sir i didn’t know who you were” decisions, and if that’s coupled with transparency then maybe we will be left in less of a “laws for thee and not for me” situation as it becomes more difficult to break laws for people in power
• more ubiquitous ML, as long as it’s fairly openly available, will absolutely be used by media to piece together complex structures and do investigative journalism. it could help to hold people to account
• more ML in tax could mean less tax evasion? or setting it to task on suggesting fixes for tax loop holes if it can see a lot more invasive data?

who hurt you?

if you interact with them, you’re “using” threads