My contribution: largest-order-first (big endian) makes sense in real life because people tend to make quick judgements in unreliable situations. For example, take the announcement that you're receiving $132551 dollars. You wouldn't want to hear something like "Hello! You have been awarded one and fifty and five hundred and... and one hundred thousand dollars!", you want to hear "You have been awarded One hundred and thirty two thousand and ... dollars!" The largest sums change decisions dramatically so it makes sense they come first.
On computers however, we basically always use exact arithmetic and exact, fixed logic where learning the higher order doesn't help (we're not doing approximations and decisions based on incomplete information), in fact for mathematical reasons in the exact cases it's usually better to compute and utilize the lowest bits first (e.g. in the case of sums and multiplication algos I am familiar with). [note1]
Overall I'm slightly surprised some automatic/universal translation methods for the most common languages haven't been made, although I guess there may be some significant difficulties or impossibilities (for example, if you send a bunch of bits/bytes outside, there's no general way to predict the endianess it should be in). I suspect LLMs will make this task much easier (without a more traditional universal translation algorithm).
[note1] Also, the time required to receive all bits from say a 64b number as opposed to the first k bits tends to be a negligible or even 0 difference, in both human terms (receiving data over a network) and machine terms (receiving data over a bus; optimizing an algorithm that uses numbers in complicated ways; etc.), again different from human communication and thought.
> My contribution: largest-order-first (big endian) makes sense in real life because people tend to make quick judgements in unreliable situations. For example, take the announcement that you're receiving $132551 dollars. You wouldn't want to hear something like "Hello! You have been awarded one and fifty and five hundred and... and one hundred thousand dollars!", you want to hear "You have been awarded One hundred and thirty two thousand and ... dollars!" The largest sums change decisions dramatically so it makes sense they come first.
And yet in Arabic, the numbers are written in order from the least to the most significant digit, even if they are not really pronounced that way, starting from the numbers in the hundreds and up: "1234" is read as essentially "one thousand two hundred four-and-thirty", the same way the German does it. And yes, the order looks like it's the same as in e.g. English, but Arabic is written right to left. So, no, it's absolutely fine to write numbers in little endian even in the language that pronounces it the big-endian or even the mixed-endian way.
There are plenty of ways for language to be better now that we know far more about arithmetic than when number words were created.
"One Five Five Two Three One" is 6 words, 6 syllables long where as "One Hundred and Thirty Two Thousand" is 6 words, 9 syllables long and conveys less information. Even shortening it to "One Hundred Thirty Two Thousand" is still 5 words, 8 syllables long and conveys less information.
You can also easily convey high order digits first by using a unambiguous "and/add" construction: "Thousand Two Three One Add One Five Five". You have now conveyed the three high order digits in 5 words, 5 syllables. You also convey the full number in 9 words, 9 syllables in contrast to "One Hundred Thirty Two Thousand One Hundred Fifty Five" which is 9 words, 14 syllables.
You could go even further and express things in pseudo-scientific notation which would be even more general and close to as efficient. "Zero E Three (10^3) Two Three One" which is 6 words, 6 syllables, but no longer requires unique separator words like "Thousand", "Million", "Billion", etc. This shows even greater efficiency if you are conveying "One Hundred Thirty Thousand" which would be something more like "Zero E Four (10^4) Three One" since the scientific notation digit position description is highly uniform.
This distinction might seem somewhat arbitrary since this just seems like it is changing the order for the sake of things. However, the advantage of little-endian description is that it is non-contextual. When you say the number "One" it literally always means the one's place "One". If you wish to speak of a different positional "One" you would prefix it with the position e.g. "Zero E Three (10^3) One". In contrast, in the normal way of speaking numbers "One" could mean any positional one. Are you saying "One Hundred", "One Thousand", "One Hundred Million"? You need to wait for subsequent words to know what "One" is being said. Transcription must fundamentally buffer a significant fraction of the word stream to disambiguate.
It also results in the hilariously duplicative "One Hundred Thirty Two Thousand One Hundred Fifty Five" which has positional signifiers for basically every word. "One Hundred Thir-tyThousand One Hundred Fif-ty Five”. Fully 8 of the 14 syllables are used for positional disambiguation to reduce necessary lookahead. "And/Add" constructions get you that for a fraction of the word and syllable count. They allow arbitrary chunking since you can separate digit streams on any boundary. It also reinforces the fact that numbers are just composites of their components which may help with numeracy.
Little endian is actually just better in every respect, expect for compatibility and familiarity, if we use our modern robust knowledge of arithmetic to formulate the grammar rules.
I wonder the flipside as well. I'm extremely confident a healthy vegeterian or vegan diet will be generally a bit healthier than a meat-heavy alternative. But I believe you can overdo it too, like if you eat enormous amounts of hard raw foods and leaves with low calories that might not be all that great for your gut either? (our gut is probably adapted to eating cooked stuff).
My armchair recommendation: avoid processed foods (but you can have processed if you're really confident what goes in isn't harmful or just very occasional I guess), eat a good amount of salads and veggies alongside some cooked main course, like beans, rice, tofu, etc.. Eat some fruits throughout the day, and a reasonable amount of water. Chew your foods well. Exercise, bla bla bla, you know the drill ;)
I kind of agree. When nothing's Libre, naming your project Libre<something> is fine, I believe. But imagine OSS succeeds, and everything is named Libre<something>. Then that's terrible.
"Did you open libreterminal and use librels and libreget to download librebrowser to open libresearch?"
It lacks identity (just a little bit is fine) and distinctiveness, imo.
Like, I think in a way it's just not viable to patch every little loophole a corrupt or morally bankrupt administration could exploit and all damage it could cause, and probably not without making the administration itself useless. It's a still a good idea to patch as much as feasible, in part to if slightly discourage the worse from seeking power in the first place. But in a way, it's garbage in, garbage out. Laws will never be able to magically turn corrupt and misguided decisions into ever good ones. The robust solution is promoting wisdom, ethics, civility and education, so people make good democratic choices for themselves and others.
> If no one works on defence systems then all the things we have could become jeopardized, perhaps not this week but in 5 years. Therefore I can reconcile the idea of working for defence related r&d.
I am not saying this line of thinking is completely absurd. But I think every individual considering this should reflect a lot. (1) Is your country using its ""defense"" systems wisely? (2) Won't the technology be replicated by adversaries anyways? (3) etc..
Overall, the number of people and resources spent on Weapons R&D is probably significantly more than people working on things like diplomacy, ethics, or activism for international human rights (assuming human rights violations are the only legitimate reason for war).
It's significantly safer for individual nations and humanity as a whole if we're not all armed to the teeth constantly on the brink of large conflict, and instead are more or less ethically aligned, all respect basic human rights, and respect other nations.
The architectural version is interesting to me. There's really a world of difference, but you need to know some history and some of the "cultural vibes" particular to each country to understand.
I get why it is romantic (like the "next thing" after other human discoveries), but I don't think "exploring the universe" is that philosophically interesting?
Think about the case you had
(1) A completely environmentally-resistant suit (so you can stand on the surface of basically any planet)
(2) A teleporter to take you absolutely anywhere instantly
Still in this case, you'd probably spend a while visiting new planets, but eventually it would be kind of an exercise in geology. There would surely be some amazing sights like huge canyons and whatnot. But I can't help but think it would be eventually boring without human culture (or all sorts of life) surrounding it.
I think literally exploring art and culture (including games, sports and intellectual pursuits, science, etc.) is much more interesting than exploring the universe, it's a shame this isn't as culturally recognized (so we didn't have to be so obsessed with having more and more stuff to go somewhere that isn't just right here on Earth).
Even if you brought human life and culture there, which is surely nice and perhaps noble (depending on how you do it of course), that simply creates a new place that's analogous to Earth itself.
Kind of a hint of an insatiable cosmos-devouring demon that must conquer everywhere but can never enjoy the comfort of his own home. (not accusing you in particular of this, just painting a poetic picture :P)
I'm really excited about conquering hunger, poverty and curing severe mental illness, as a counterpoint.
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