Bit Memes

The hard truth that keeps memory-conscious developers up at night. A boolean only needs 1 bit to represent true or false, but because most systems can't address individual bits, it gets allocated a whole byte. That's 87.5% storage efficiency loss, which is basically the computing equivalent of buying a mansion to store a single shoe. Some languages try to optimize this with bit fields or packed structures, but let's be real—most of the time we're just casually wasting 7 bits per boolean like we're made of RAM. Which, to be fair, we kind of are these days. Storage is cheap, existential dread about inefficiency is free. The real tragedy? Those 7 bits could've been living their best life storing actual data, but instead they're just... there. Unemployed. Collecting dust. A monument to the gap between theoretical computer science and practical implementation.

Someone discovered the perfect naming convention and honestly, it's both genius and absolutely cursed. Binary digit → bit. Makes sense. Ternary digit → tit. Wait, hold on— The logic is flawless. Base-2 (binary) starts with 'b', add 'it', you get 'bit'. Base-3 (ternary) starts with 't', add 'it', you get... well, a term that's gonna make every code review extremely uncomfortable. Imagine explaining to your manager why your ternary computing documentation keeps getting flagged by HR. Fun fact: The actual term is "trit" (trinary digit), but where's the fun in being technically correct when you can watch Gru's face perfectly capture the exact moment this realization hits? Ternary computing is real though—it uses three states (0, 1, 2) instead of binary's two, and some Soviet computers actually used it. They probably had very interesting technical documentation.