Engagement byte

Enragement bait.

So far at least, I've found this much more charming than culture war bait.

I wish we could see what outlet it was for context

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

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

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!

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.

There's often a lot of fun cheats you can use - bitwise operators, etc - if your numbers are small powers of two.

Also it's easier to organize memory, if you're doing funky memory management tricks, if the memory you're allocating fits nicely into the blocks available to you which are always in powers of two.

They're not necessarily great reasons if you're using a language with sufficient abstraction, but it's still easier in most instances to use powers of two anyways if you're getting into the guts of things.

Maybe each user has a user id in a group, and that group user id is stored as 8bit int? Idk

"I inspected RAM to double check."

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

I hate this. I love this.

If I ever make a game I might put stuff like this in it.

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

Powers of two are the roundest of numbers.

32, 64, 128 etc. are all round numbers, counting in binary. They are powers of two. Since computers work in binary, they make logical sense.

1220mm is 4ft, and 18 and 25mm are three-quarters of an inch, and an inch respectively.

It’s for their servers. I guess it might have to do with cache optimization reasons. For performance reasons, they want to ensure they can fit as much as possible in the cache. One extra byte can throw the memory alignment off, which cause wasted space in cache.

Just my guess. There might be other reasons.

On a device with many gigabytes of RAM and probably terabytes of storage.

I guess when you have billions of users, and presumably tens or hundreds of billions of instances of a thing living in your sever every bit adds up? I don't even know where to even start doing the napkin math for something like that.

I get what you’re saying but I don’t like this line of thinking. In the tech industry there is far too much bloat that we just accept due to cheap memory and storage.