A Joke with a Higher Base
Description
A two-panel meme featuring the character Jim Halpert from the TV show 'The Office' standing in front of a whiteboard. In the top panel, Jim is actively presenting, pointing to the text on the board which reads, 'in the world, there is 10 kind of people'. This setup primes the viewer for the classic binary joke. In the bottom panel, Jim is sitting down with a smug, self-satisfied look. The whiteboard now has additional text below the first line, listing three categories: 'those who don't know about binary', 'those who do', and 'and those who don't ignore the existence of other numerical bases such as base 3'. The humor is a clever, multi-layered meta-joke. It first sets up the expectation of the well-known binary pun where '10' in base-2 equals 2. It then subverts this by revealing that the '10' was actually written in base-3 (ternary), which equals 3 in decimal, perfectly matching the three categories listed. This makes the joke funnier for those with a deeper understanding of computer science fundamentals
Comments
9Comment deleted
The original binary joke is for interviews. This ternary version is for the code review comments on the code that passed the interview
There are 10 kinds of architects: those who understand binary, those who don’t, and those who’ll burn the sprint debating why our feature flags must be stored in balanced ternary “for future-proofing.”
After 20 years in tech, I've learned there are actually 11 types of people: those stuck maintaining COBOL systems who only count in decimal, those who understand binary, and those who've ascended to arguing about whether we should be using balanced ternary for quantum computing architectures
This meme perfectly captures the senior engineer's curse: you can't even enjoy a simple binary joke anymore without mentally compiling a list of edge cases. Sure, '10' equals 2 in binary, but what about ternary? Quaternary? The joke works until you've spent enough time in systems programming to realize that assuming base-2 is just another form of technical debt. It's the numerical equivalent of 'it works on my machine' - yes, your joke works in binary, but have you considered portability across all radix systems?
Always specify the radix - otherwise your “010” discount gets parsed as octal and finance wonders why $10 rang up as $8 in prod
There are 10 kinds of outages: the ones from forgetting to pass the radix to parseInt, and the ones from someone finally “fixing” it
Senior devs embrace base-3 for debugging's three states: 'works on my machine,' prod bug, and 'it was fine yesterday.'
In fact, even ternary computers do exist Comment deleted
When you understood everything; Yeah it's big brain time Comment deleted