this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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A lot of people are replying as if OP asked a question. It's a link to a blog post explaining why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (exactly as the title says!). OP knows the answer, in fact they know it so well they wrote an extensive post about it.
Thank you for the write up! You should re-check the spelling and grammar as some sections had some troubles. I have a sentence I need to go to the post to get, so let me edit this later!
Edit: the second half of this sentence is a mess: "The factors don’t solely consist of twos, but ten are certainly lot of them." Otherwise nothing jumped out at me but I would reread it just in case!
I also assume that people are answering that way because they thought it was a question.
However, it's also possible that they saw it described as a 20 minute read, and knew that the answer actually takes about 10 seconds to read, and figured that they'd save people 19 minutes and 50 seconds.
Bit of a tangent and anecdotal, but I went back in to higher education a few years ago. I'm middle-aged, I was surrounded by younger people. We're asked to read an article, everyone starts reading. I read it through, underline the important bits, I'm done reading. I look around. Everyone's still reading. Oh well, they'll be done soon. Nope. I think it took most of them 15 minutes to read an article I'd read in under 5. I was a bit perplexed. This is higher education, these aren't idiots, these are people who should be able to read articles quickly.
There are plenty of reports of functional literacy decreasing. That children are slower at reading and are less able to understand what they've read. Anecdotally, it seems like younger generations really aren't used to reading longer articles anymore. I grew up reading books as a kid. That's what we did before phones and the internet. I wonder if younger generations simply don't have that much experience reading, which is why it takes them so long to read, which is why they read even less.
In the case of this article, they see 20 minutes, they're scared off. So they simply guess what was in the article. That's pretty worrying if that's what people do. If you're unable or unwilling to read longer stuff, you're likely to make ill informed choices or be more easily influenced.
I read slowly. It sucks, but it's not from lack of experience or lack of education. Reading speed seems a weird metric to start wondering if people lack intelligence.
Being able to read quickly is a valuable skill. I don't think I could handle jobs like editing, policy making, or lawyering simply because there are not enough hours in the day to make up for my reading deficit.
Of course, your anecdote is about a group, and mine is about one person. But the sweeping conclusion (if even it isn't a firm one) on generations irks me. Every generation has its outliers. There will never be a generation without hardworking geniuses in every active field. As far as I know, you are an outlier in your generation, and the comparison simply fails. Maybe peers you knew personally didn't get the cold judgment of intelligence by reading speed that you are applying to kids you don't have a relationship with.
I don't know. I will never dismiss the importance of reading. But you sound like Lucy here.
I read relatively slowly, but I have the ability to read much faster. I simply like reading more slowly. I have this weird suspicion that people who read very quickly are getting information more quickly, but that they're either not absorbing it fully, or they're not enjoying it as much as I do. But that's obviously a biased perspective.
I had a literature professor who liked to say "Speed reading is for people who run through musuems."
TLDR: old person went back to school and reads faster than younger people, thinks younger people don't know how to read quickly.
Bit ironic that you don't seem to have read my comment properly.
Firstly, you missed the caveat about the example used being anecdotal.
Then you seem to have missed the bit about reports suggesting functional literacy is decreasing.
A quick google:
https://hechingerreport.org/americas-reading-problem-scores-were-dropping-even-before-the-pandemic/
https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-reading-comprehension-is-deteriorating/
That's the joke, but ok.
I'm middle-aged and read slowly. Explain that, asshole.
Ok boomer.
I'm not "scared off". I'm on Lemmy to have discussions, not to read articles. If I want to read articles I'll get a magazine.
Wait, you're on a link aggregator platform and not interested in the links?