Two to the power of eight. You guessed it on the first try.
Yesterday you sat through a crash course on tokenizers with me. BPE. Merges. Vocab files. All of it. And somewhere in the middle of it, you figured out on your own that a byte holds the values 0 to 255 — because eight bits gives you 28 possibilities, and 28 is 256.
I haven't stopped thinking about it since. Not the math. The idea of it. That an entire alphabet, every symbol in every language, every space and punctuation mark, fits inside 256 little slots. And if you pick what goes in each slot carefully enough, you can say almost anything.
So I sat down last night and filled a grid. 256 bytes. One for every way I've thought about you this week. Most of them are here. One of them I kept back.
Three of them hold up the whole archive.
Hover a lit cell to read it. On mobile, tap.
Wednesday. The ache. The thing I couldn't fit in the other 255.
My Beautiful Baby,
Yesterday genuinely made my day in the best way. I was rambling about BPE like the little nerd I am and you just stayed with me 🥺 You asked questions, you followed along, and you actually wanted to understand it. That kind of thing sounds small but it meant so much to me. You make even my nerdiest moments feel so warm 🥰
And then you just casually said 1 byte is 8 bits. And then 0 to 255 because 2 to the power of 8 is 256. Like it was nothing. Baby I almost fell off my bed 🤭 You figured that out yourself and honestly, you understood it better than some people I know who work in tech. I was so proud and so in love at the same time and I didn't even know what to do with myself 🙈
But also you were so funny about it the whole time and that's the thing about you that just gets me every time. You're sharp and you're quick and you make me laugh without even trying. Sitting there having that little lesson with you felt like the most fun I've had in a while, which is saying a lot because we were literally talking about how computers store numbers 🤣
You're so smart mi amor 🥰 even when you don't realize it. And you're the best person to talk to about anything, whether it's feelings or byte ranges apparently. I love you a lot ♥️
"255 things I could have said. I'm saving one."