Title text:
It has been −2,147,483,648 days since our last integer overflow.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3228/
Floating point errors are what eventually convinced God to make the universe the way it is. The initial plan was to have all properties be continuous, but that resulted in many floating point errors. That’s when he said: fuck it, quantum states are discrete.
why is it a negative number for the floating point error one? Doesn’t a day counter either increments or be set to zero? are they minusing the day by the value it holds to make it zero instead of just assigning it zero?? Why??
At a guess, the counter goes up by fractions of a day internally, but it’s reset by subtracting the integer part, rounded.
The original version wouldn’t have had the rounding but they “fixed” that after the first time they did a reset and it went to 1 not 0.
As to why they wouldn’t just set it to zero, well here we have the joke under a microscope and it’s struggling to stay alive. Put the scalpel down.
