• computers were not always binary
• computers were not always digital
• computers were not always even machines

@doriantaylor I still think it’s weird how much people like privileging binary as an especially important layer of abstraction. “It’s all ones and zeros” is no more true than like a dozen other things you could say about even computers in the commonly understood contemporary style.

@vruba ehhh i mean i think shannon had a pretty decent insight; a bit is the answer to a yes-or-no question and you can construct (à la twenty questions) more nuanced answers from more generic questions

@doriantaylor I would go further and say it was a pretty good insight. But it doesn’t really address what I said, does it?

@vruba it does to the extent that it's isomorphic to other bases

@doriantaylor I feel like we’re having two different conversations here. But I agree with the one you’re having, and that’s good enough for me.

@vruba maybe? (caveat: i am very tired and sore)

i mean maybe i'm in the camp of people who privilege binary because it's an especially convenient representation of information (that maps onto things like voltage states) that happens to be isomorphic to all other (digital) representations by dint of certain physical/mathematical tricks ie if it ain't broke don't fix it

@doriantaylor No worries. I’m just saying it’s interesting how much people in ordinary speech bring up binary as a ·layer· of abstraction – not a choice or method, where isomorphism matters, but a level. Not binary as opposed to trinary, but binary as somehow more diagnostic or distinctive than all the other things in the stack that make computers like that.

@vruba like von neumann architecture?

@doriantaylor Yes, absolutely. Or electrical charges, or Turing machines, or any of the other things that ordinary computers ·are·. Somehow binary is the one people always seem to point to. And it’s fun to think about the reasons for that.