Ahh, because of the 9 month gestation. 9+3=12

I thought this was about some kind of obscure subnormal float convention or something.

You probably know, but someone is going to point out an ipv4 address is four bytes.

That’s because humanity dates back to the teletype era, before bytes. It was decided that saving candles was more important than having the extra century of lifespan.

Now, by convention, the leftmost candle being unlit indicates it’s a standard human and not a member of another species-alphabet, possibly requiring multiple cakes.

(On a serious note, aging is not necessarily thought to be as simple as just the Hayflick limit)

Look, an OpenRISC user.

64 bits and you get to watch heat death slowly set in. (Or, y’know, cosmological catastrophe depending on the full physics)

You win Lemmy, I need this one explained.

Alright. Thanks for responding, anyway.

I get OP was a joke, but I was trying to make a serious observation.

Say you have some kind of stochastic algorithm that works on the assumption it’s fed a composite number most of the time. Maybe something like Pollard’s Rho algorithm, where whatever number theoretic structure you need accumulates slowly over time as a result. You decide to just pick a large number at random for each iteration.

Implicitly, you’ve solved the problem of finding a composite number by assuming all (large) numbers are composite, like in this post. It is pretty close, like also mentioned in this post. If that’s not good enough, you could also use a primality test that fails some small portion of the time, which do exist, and use less power than guaranteed tests.

That’s kind of what I meant by putting “subroutine” in quotes. You obviously wouldn’t write it like this, you’d just use a random large number with a bit of explanation.

Oh well, live and learn. I’ll try to be clearer next time.

I mean, an application could exist where this isn’t even wrong. Maybe as a “subroutine” of another algorithm that only needs a truly composite number most of the time to work.

That this reads as a joke says a lot about what application we’re intuitively expecting.

Edit: Not sure why this is being downvoted.