• palordrolap@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    8388409 = 2^23 - 199

    I may have noticed this on a certain other aggregator site once upon a time, but I’m still none the wiser as to why.

    199 rows kind of makes sense for whatever a legitimate query might have been, but if you’re going to make up a number, why 2^23? Why subtract? Am I metaphorically barking up the wrong tree?

    Is this merely a mistyping of 8388608 and it was supposed to be ±1 row? Still the wrong (B-)tree?

    WHY DO I CARE

      • palordrolap@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        In a place for programmer humour, you’ve got to expect there’s at least one person who knows their powers of two. (Though I am missing a few these days).

        As for considering me to be Ramanujan reborn, if there’s any of Srinivasa in here, he’s not been given a full deck to work with this time around and that’s not very karmic of whichever deity or deities sent him back.

        • Fuck spez@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I know up to like 2^16 or maybe 2^17 while sufficiently caffeinated. Memorizing up to, or beyond, 2^23 is nerd award worthy.

          • palordrolap@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            For me it’s: 2^1 to 2^16 (I remember the 8-bit era), a hazy gap and then 2^24 (the marketing for 24 bit colour in the 90s had 16777216 plastered all over it). Then it’s being uncomfortably lost up to 2^31 and 2^32, which I usually recognise when I see them (hello INT_MAX and UINT_MAX), but I don’t know their digits well enough to repeat. 2^64 is similar. All others are incredibly vague or unknown.

            2^23 as half of 2^24 and having a lot of 8s in it seems to have put it into the “recognisable” category for me, even if it’s in that hazy gap.

            So I grabbed a calculator to confirm.