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[return to "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"]
1. PostOn+eV1[view] [source] 2026-02-04 03:03:41
>>surpri+(OP)
There is a counterproductive obsession with powers of 10.

Sometimes, other systems just make more sense.

For example, for time, or angles, or bytes. There are properties of certain numbers (or bases) that make everything descending from them easier to deal with.

for angles and time (and feet): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_highly_composite_numb...

For other problems we use base 2, 3, 8, 16, or 10.

Must we treat metric as a hammer, and every possible problem as a nail?

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2. fc417f+d12[view] [source] 2026-02-04 04:01:56
>>PostOn+eV1
Now that I think about it, I see KiB and kb all the time but I don't know that I've ever encountered Kib or kB in the wild. Maybe I'm in a bubble? Or maybe we should accept that kb is power of 10 but kB is power of two?

Well I guess we already basically have this in practice since Ki can be shortened to K seeing as metric prefixes are always lower case and we clearly aren't talking about kelvin bytes.

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3. Flimm+mx2[view] [source] 2026-02-04 08:54:13
>>fc417f+d12
Uppercase "B" stands for byte, and lowercase "b" stands for bit. But it's very common for people to miss the distinction, sadly, even professionals are sloppy.
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