• ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    In traditional carpentry inches and feet make sense because of the high divisibility. We don’t get as much benefit from that now though.

    We still use hex with computers because that’s what they’re made using (rather binary, but hex is just a natural group of binary digits). The usage of binary is ultimately more grounded in the objective than the usage of base 10 in the SI system. Nature dictates the relationships between the units, but we pick the quantities so it works out to a nice base 10 set of ratios.
    Base 2 naturally arises when dealing with information theory that underpins a lot of digital computing.

    Say what you will about the imperial system, but you can pry binary, octal, and hex from my cold dead hands.