Stuck In Number System

The Venn diagram of intellectual superiority has spoken, and programmers are social distancing before it was cool! While physicists are busy turning penguins into perfect cylinders, engineers are rounding π to 3 (because who needs those pesky decimals?), and mathematicians are defining e with fancy limits, programmers are off in their own circle with "x = x + 1" - a statement that would make mathematicians have an existential crisis. Notice how programmers don't overlap with anyone? That's not isolation, that's specialization . We're not wrong, we're just using a different paradigm where impossible equations make perfect sense. And let's pour one out for the chemists, reduced to the smallest circle possible - apparently they couldn't even afford proper representation in this diagram hierarchy!

The classic number base paradox strikes again! The alien sees 10 rocks and says "10 rocks" in base 4 (which equals 4 in decimal). The astronaut assumes base 10 and gets confused. But here's the kicker: no matter what base you're using, you always represent it as "base 10" in that base . In base 4, the number 4 is written as "10". In base 16 (hex), the number 16 is written as "10". In binary, the number 2 is written as "10". Every civilization thinks they're using "base 10" because that's literally how you write the base number in that base. It's like asking "What is base 4?" and the answer is always "base 10" from that base's perspective. The real galaxy brain moment: when you realize that if aliens showed up and said they use "base 10", we'd have absolutely no idea what they actually mean without seeing them count first. Could be binary for all we know.

THE AUDACITY of young me declaring "I don't need math, I'll just make video games!" only to later discover that game development is LITERALLY a mathematical hellscape! 😭 Fast forward to the soul-crushing reality where Unity, OpenGL, C++, and every other game dev tool are CACKLING at your mathematical ignorance. They're all just sitting there like "Oh honey, you thought you could escape VECTORS and MATRICES? That's adorable!" Game physics? MATH. Graphics rendering? MATH. Character movement? MATH. It's math all the way down, you poor, delusional child!

The ultimate statistical irony: a bell curve meme about bell curves that perfectly follows... a bell curve. You've got the low-IQ folks who think bell curves are funny because "haha, pretty graph go brrr," the high-IQ intellectuals who appreciate bell curves for the exact same reason, and the middle-of-the-curve galaxy brains screaming "BAN BELL CURVES!!1!" with the intensity of someone who just discovered their entire codebase uses tabs instead of spaces. The distribution of opinions about bell curves literally forms a bell curve, and that's the kind of recursive humor that keeps me going through sprint planning meetings.

Who needs decimal when you've got binary? With 10 fingers, normal folks count to a measly 10, but programmers? We're out here representing each finger as a binary digit (0 or 1), squeezing a full 2^10 = 1024 values from the same hardware. It's the ultimate flex when someone asks you to count on your fingers and you casually hit four digits. The look on their face is worth the years of carpal tunnel from typing.

The famous WWII survivorship bias diagram strikes again! During the war, engineers analyzed returning planes to decide where to add armor. They marked bullet holes (red dots) on returned aircraft—but the critical revelation was that they should armor the unmarked areas , since planes hit there never made it back. YouTube's anti-adblock crusade perfectly mirrors this logical fallacy. They're only measuring revenue from users who stick around after being forced to disable adblock—completely missing all the users who just abandon the platform entirely. It's like optimizing your codebase by only listening to the three users who didn't rage-quit after your UI redesign.