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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by bricked@feddit.org to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

A photo of a cake with 8 candles in a row. The first and fifth candle from the right are lit. The caption reads "Happy 17th Birthday"

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[-] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 2 points 19 hours ago

If you read from the right (as is implied by calling the result 17), there are 3 trailing zeroes:

These would usually be omitted when writing like this. The fact they are not makes this 136

[-] ITGuyLevi@programming.dev 2 points 13 hours ago

I think you missed the point, that I was making, albeit poorly (little endian still requires leading zeros when not transmitting in a byte format, otherwise you don't know if the first on signal is for 1, 256, 1024, etc.) it's all good though

[-] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 1 points 11 hours ago

How would 3 leading zeros in a byte help coming to the conclusion that this is supposed to be 17?

I'm generally curious, sice theoretical informatics is already a good few years behind me :D

[-] ITGuyLevi@programming.dev 2 points 10 hours ago

In a normal byte format it wouldn't help, the byte standard breaks off bits into 8 bit chunks and calls them bytes (I'm not trying to explain basics, just putting it there for background), little-endian excels at using the least number of bits to express larger numbers in a stream. If you wanted to send any number from 0-255 you only need 1 byte, for 256-512 you need two bytes (or 16 bits), in little-endian it can be represented in just 9 bits, or up to 1024 in 10 bits, etc.

Doesn't matter for much to many people, but when the number gets big enough you can save a lot of bandwidth.

[-] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 1 points 10 hours ago

Yeah, that digs up some long lost memories :D

Thanks

this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
834 points (100.0% liked)

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