NTFB Scott
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️The Roman empire fell because their Roman numerals weren't a form of positional notation, so they couldn't figure out binary. Their computers were terrible.
So you think the ancient Romans ever called porn "thirty"?
SkaveRat 🐀 
@foone *sigh*
Scott Michaud@foone I assume they'd call them by their stage name.
jonathankoren™@foone oh yeah. LXIX. Nice.
James Grimmelmann@foone Isn’t this where “thirsty” comes from?
AN/CRM-114@foone Rule XXXIV
Oblomov@flyingsaceur @foone also they couldn't understand why reciprocal oral would be called LXIX.
Wait, that almost makes sense
@flyingsaceur @foone see, this is why I shouldn't post after just waking up. Thanks, fixed 8-D
Jonathan Hendry"So are these frescoes soft-core or wha-"
"No man, they're thirty. So thirty."
Pxl Phile@foone Thirty for thirsty, romance for the romans
⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe@foone They literally said "thirty", not the latin for 30. No-one could work out how to write it down, though.
Felice@foone Rhymes with dirty!
zhenech@foone I thought they failed to configure Nero Burning ROM to create proper backups of their most important data 🤔
Winchell Chung ⚛🚀Yeah, I found out the hard way that doing long division manually with Roman numerals is a nightmare.
@foone “One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." – Robert Firth
Mark T. Tomczak@jtlg @foone Yes. Hence the invention of the "triumvirate," a method for deciding if a program succeeded by running it three times; if all three runs agreed on the output, the run could be considered successful.
This was incredibly inefficient and left Rome vulnerable to sacking by the Hypervisigoths in the 5th Century.
rrb
Jos Dingjan
karman@happydisciple @foone @jtlg On the other hand, their successor to C had built in build&test automation.
(Oh dear, just drag me out back and put me out of my misery for this one, it’s soooo bad)
acb@foone if they had Lisp, they’d have been fine, as addition on Roman numerals is just a normalise, a merge and a denormalise. As long as they didn’t need negative numbers, that is.
mhoye@foone little-endian v. Big-endian societies is an interesting idea.
mirabilos@foone INTERCAL!
jordan@foone XXC COLVMN PVNCH CARD?
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial@foone yeah I mean imagine setting your monitor resolution to MXXIVxDCCLXVIII
Apicultor 🐝@gsuberland @foone 1204x768? (EDIT: reeding iz harrd)
@apicultor @foone 1024. M=1000, XX=2x10=20, IV=5-1=4
@gsuberland @foone Oh yeah. Duh. And I got it right on the other side too. lol.
@gsuberland @foone cursed cursor positions
Cogito Ergo Disputo@foone that and lead piping.
Norman Wilson@foone Charles Babbage didn't need no stinking binary!
DCoder 🇱🇹❤🇺🇦@foone
tfw you need 10X programmers and the recruiters only bring you C programmers
tfw you need 10X programmers and the recruiters only bring you C programmers
Dr. Tineke D'Haeseleer@foone @lowqualityfacts did you know this one?
60sRefugee@foone Maybe not; merchants using scales figured out early that a set of binary weights (base weight then each is double the previous) could be combined to any value up to 2x-1 where x was the largest weight. Now if some genius had figured out a way to combine this with an abacus...