Gregory's Server"How Integers and Floats Work" is coming out later this week! Here's the about page:
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 @b0rk there's nothing like the joy of developing a great mental framework for thinking about a complex thing. @benjohn yeah absolutely, it's fun to see something that I spent a lot of time learning about in math class ("the numbers modulo n”) have such a mainstream real-life application @benjohn yes indeed, with some clever tricks it can be quite useful in graphics! This is also what FastLED does: I like it when data is defined in a way that it naturally leads to very efficient code. @b0rk I feel very, very, very proud that nothing about those examples feels weird to me anymore 😂 🤣  this header inspired some linguistic rumination about how you are able to drop small words ("[the way] computers do math [is] weird") but couldn't sacrifice "do", despite being the smallest of small words because one has to do some extra work to make "math" work out as a verb in "[computers NN] [math VB] [weird ADV]" and instead it reads as three substantives "[computers NN] [math NN] [weird ADJ]", which reads like a list of tags #computers #math #weird and also I love your helper cards; even when I think "oh I know that one" I always learn something new when I read them. They are a gift. @b0rk some CPUs do support binary-coded decimal, or even decimal floating-point! they're very uncommon in modern consumer systems, though @fclc You can sign up at https://wizardzines.com/zine-announcements/ to get an email when it comes out!   |
I'm really happy with this “the way computers do math is weird" framing we arrived at -- I think it gets at why floating point weirdnesses and integer overflow can feel so upsetting (“it's MATH! it's supposed to behave how I EXPECT!”)