That weird ass explanation with switches and "one of the most important numbers" still sounds absolutely clueless.

One of the most important numbers? I'd argue the most important number in computing is either 1 or 0...

That quote really is the problematic part. The part about switches is fine - it's an attempt to explain tech to a "normie." But for a tech writer to ever say it's not clear why they settled on 256 is worse than embarrassing. They had to be corrected by tweets.

Anyone whose ever had an intro to computers class has had a computing professional explain computers using simple language and analogies. That's the way this kind of thing should work. It sounds like this author has no more clue about computing than the target audience, which isn't going to work out well for the reader.

It doesn't really matter that it's a "normie article for normie readers". Writing articles is journalism. Not knowing 256 offhand? Permissible. Being a journalist who wrote an article and didn't even do the bare bones of research? You're still a bad journalist, and as callous as it is, you should lose your job and livelihood. Bad journalism is too dangerous to just let it fester like this.

nerd

Engagement byte

"I inspected RAM to double check."

That's an unhinged level of commitment. Respect — I dig it

It kind of is "more even".

256 is just 2⁸
250 is 2x5³
300 is 2²x3¹x5²

Any division of 256 with an integer and integer result will be even. Most divisions of 250 and 300 with an integer and integer result will be odd.

Or a maths nerd!

It's a pretty succinct explanation that links what it is to something most people have heard of (a byte).

Their definition is a lot better.

But it's still not oddly specific, they picked a nice round number

No, you can't have a group of zero, so the counter doesn't need to waste a position counting zero.

Because 256 is exactly one byte. If you want to add a 257th member, you need a whole second byte just for that one person. That's a waste of memory, unless you want to go to the 64k barrier of users per chat.

when writing somewhat low-level code, you always make assumptions about things. in this case, they chose to manage 256 entries in some array; the bound used to be lower.

but implicitly there's a tradeoff, probably memory / CPU utilisation in the server.

it's always about the tradeoff between what the users want, what is easier for you to maintain, what your infrastructure can provide, etc.

Still odd

Actually, it's even.

If this is about a counter for users in the chat, sure. But if this is an array of users indexed by an 8-bit number, then it will fit 256 slots with the first slot being numbered 0.

Right but having a group chat of size 0 isn’t very useful.

And programmers usually start counting at 0.