Posted by surprisetalk 3 days ago
"I will not sacrifice my dignity. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds with awkward pronunciations. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done to the kilobyte!"
It's the same reason—for pure marketing purposes—that screens are measured diagonally.
It's easy to find some that are marketed as 500GB and have 500x10^9 bytes [0]. But all the NVMe's that I can find that are marketed as 512GB have 512x10^9 bytes[1], neither 500x10^9 bytes nor 2^39 bytes. I cannot find any that are labeled "1TB" and actually have 1 Tebibyte. Even "960GB" enterprise SSD's are measured in base-10 gigabytes[2].
0: https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sh...
1: https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sh...
2: https://image.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sheet...
(Why are these all Samsung? Because I couldn't find any other datasheets that explicitly call out how they define a GB/TB)
So, let’s all pretend that’s not the case and say how things REALLY are? Umm- I don’t think life works that way. If a large part of the world and recorded history works a particular way, it will in-part stay that way.
For example, many people believed we’d basically overcome racism and measles, and we see how that turned out in the U.S.
If you really want to come at it from an information theory perspective, even the "byte" is rather arbitrary - the only thing that matters is the number of bits.