I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It’s about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

  • AlolanYoda@mander.xyz
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    7 months ago

    A lot of people are replying as if OP asked a question. It’s a link to a blog post explaining why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (exactly as the title says!). OP knows the answer, in fact they know it so well they wrote an extensive post about it.

    Thank you for the write up! You should re-check the spelling and grammar as some sections had some troubles. I have a sentence I need to go to the post to get, so let me edit this later!

    Edit: the second half of this sentence is a mess: “The factors don’t solely consist of twos, but ten are certainly lot of them.” Otherwise nothing jumped out at me but I would reread it just in case!

    • logicbomb@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I also assume that people are answering that way because they thought it was a question.

      However, it’s also possible that they saw it described as a 20 minute read, and knew that the answer actually takes about 10 seconds to read, and figured that they’d save people 19 minutes and 50 seconds.

      • Hyperreality@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        However, it’s also possible that they saw it described as a 20 minute read

        Bit of a tangent and anecdotal, but I went back in to higher education a few years ago. I’m middle-aged, I was surrounded by younger people. We’re asked to read an article, everyone starts reading. I read it through, underline the important bits, I’m done reading. I look around. Everyone’s still reading. Oh well, they’ll be done soon. Nope. I think it took most of them 15 minutes to read an article I’d read in under 5. I was a bit perplexed. This is higher education, these aren’t idiots, these are people who should be able to read articles quickly.

        There are plenty of reports of functional literacy decreasing. That children are slower at reading and are less able to understand what they’ve read. Anecdotally, it seems like younger generations really aren’t used to reading longer articles anymore. I grew up reading books as a kid. That’s what we did before phones and the internet. I wonder if younger generations simply don’t have that much experience reading, which is why it takes them so long to read, which is why they read even less.

        In the case of this article, they see 20 minutes, they’re scared off. So they simply guess what was in the article. That’s pretty worrying if that’s what people do. If you’re unable or unwilling to read longer stuff, you’re likely to make ill informed choices or be more easily influenced.

      • wischi@programming.devOP
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        7 months ago

        It’s true that the actual “story” is very short. 1 kB is 1000 bytes and 1 KiB is 1024 bytes. But the post is not about this, but about why calling 1024 a kilobyte always was wrong even in a historical context and even though almost everybody did that.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          7 months ago

          But that’s also a simple answer: kilo is a metric prefix that means 1000, so kilobyte means 1000 bytes. The historical context is the history of the metric system, which is much older than modern computers.

    • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This is a great example of how a lot of people dont read the posts they are replying to.

      This is even more prevalent when arguments break out in the comments where people misunderstand each other or argue about things that one side said that they qualified later in the original comment but the other side didnt read the whole comment and instead hyperfocused on that one sentence that really garbled their goolies.

      I trust that none of these people would have read the article even if they had realised it was there.

      P.s. i fully agree with you. It’s a great blog post. Good write-up. Very informative. The only quibble i have is that I’ve always loved the words mebibyte, gibibyte, etc.

    • wischi@programming.devOP
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      7 months ago

      Thank you very much. I’ll try to fix that sentence later. I’m not a native speaker so it’s not always obvious for me when a sentence doesn’t sound right even though I pass sentences I’m not sure about through spell checks, MS Word grammar check and chat gpt 🤣

    • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
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      7 months ago

      A lot of people are replying as if OP asked a question.

      I think part of that is because outgoing links without a preview image are really easy to confuse with text-only posts, particularly because Reddit didn’t allow adding both a text and a link simultaneously. Though in this case the text should’ve tipped people off that there’s a link as well.

      As for the actual topic, I agree with OP. I often forget to do it right when speaking, but I try to at least get it right when writing.