A photo of a cake with 8 candles in a row. The first and fifth candle from the right are lit. The caption reads "Happy 17th Birthday"
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Maybe this is a signed cake, so one can celebrate negative birthdays of people who aren't born yet. ๐ค
Light all the candles as an announcement that you're gonna start having kids and hope she'll get pregnant in exactly three months. Not in 2, not in 4, but in 3 precisely.
You win Lemmy, I need this one explained.
@CanadaPlus
Because if you add 1 to 1111111 it will overflow and give 0000000 so you have to have the baby in 1 year exactly
Ahh, because of the 9 month gestation. 9+3=12
I thought this was about some kind of obscure subnormal float convention or something.
Longer explanation:
Because most computers use two's complement to make negative numbers. To produce -x, you take x, flip all the bits, and then add 1. Conveniently, this process works both ways, so if you have an
intwith a positive MSB, i.e.1*******, that's a negative number, and if you invert and add 1, you get the positive number.So if you take
11111111, and apply this process, you get00000001, which equals 1. Thus,11111111= -1Secondly, the gestation period of humans is 9 months, and there are 12 months in a year.
So if you have binary candles and all of them lit, that can suggest, which it does in my previous comment, that you're celebrating a child's -1st birthday.
Given that typical gestation time is less than one year, that involves some planning and determination.