Conor Stokes in Elk: "@lritter they used to line people up t..."

trying to imagine what it must have been like for the first mathematician who labeled digits and discovered that finger number ten needs to be represented by two numbers. tossing and turning at night repeating over and over "one digit... needs two digits"

on the other hand zero is two fists which kind of rocks

they used to line people up to be decimal places... And finger 10 is actually the carry, you didn't want to get to 10 because they carried that one to the next guy to get him to update

July 15, 2025 at 4:36:54 AM

@DirtyPunk @lritter "where do integer overflows go?"

to godforsaken country

that makes a lot of sense. the pinky's motor function is good enough for that. this way you can get all the way to 19 with just two hands if need be.

(someone's inevitably going to bring up binary counting for numbers up to 1023 but its ergonomics are terrible)

base 6 doesn't seem like a bad middle ground.

you can count to 35 :)