this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Programmer Humor

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Don't grow older than 255 or else it will overflow (feddit.org)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by bricked@feddit.org to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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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"

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[โ€“] ITGuyLevi@programming.dev 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

In a normal byte format it wouldn't help, the byte standard breaks off bits into 8 bit chunks and calls them bytes (I'm not trying to explain basics, just putting it there for background), little-endian excels at using the least number of bits to express larger numbers in a stream. If you wanted to send any number from 0-255 you only need 1 byte, for 256-512 you need two bytes (or 16 bits), in little-endian it can be represented in just 9 bits, or up to 1024 in 10 bits, etc.

Doesn't matter for much to many people, but when the number gets big enough you can save a lot of bandwidth.

[โ€“] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 2 points 5 days ago

Yeah, that digs up some long lost memories :D

Thanks