Yes I do in fact. We need to lower the economical impact of production too, consumption is just a drop in the bucket. To put it in perspective, I can run my PC from a second hand generator. Most low end generators might even be able to run 10s of my PCs. A datacenter training the high end LLMs that I could be running needs a nuclear power plant worth of energy. We are talking multiple magnitudes of difference.

I suppose you don’t consider the coal-powered electricity that powers your EV when reflecting over your impact too?

You can run a fully fletched LLM at home but you can’t train the model. The latter is a huge contributor to power consumption. Running it is peanuts in comparison.

We don’t really learn the reason, we just memorise the word for the number. Kinda like you know the word “dog” means a four legged cute creature, but not why the name is “dog”. The old rules are not something we are teached, I just got curious after a confused foreigner made me think about the system for a second :p

Halvfjerds for 70 but yes. Firs is 80 though, so that doesn’t make in much easier.

Fjerde = fourth, fire = four. That makes “half to the fourth” become “halv til fjerde” or “halvfjerds” while “four times twenty” becomes “firsindstyve” and shortened to new Danish “firs”

Yeah, it’s kinda the difference between saying “the clock is currently half past twelve” (the English way) and “the clock is currently half to one” (which we say in Danish and probably in a wealth of non-English languages too).

Correct.

• Half to the second (halvanden, still in use today) = 1.5
• Half to the third (halvtredje) = 2.5
• Half to the fourth (halvfjerde) = 3.5
• Half to the fifth (halvfemte) = 4.5

And so on. You might notice that I sometimes write it like “halvfemte” and other times “halvfems”. The latter is just the way it was spelled when used in a combined word (another fun quirk in Danish that we inherited from Germanic this time!). 90 is today spelled just “halvfems”.

No, we use the same numeral symbols as everyone else. We just pronounce it in the most unintuitive manner possible.

I can imagine that we once had symbols representing the base 20 system but standardised at some point to decimal symbols. I though haven’t encountered any piece of history to back that up.

We actually still say “halvanden” in Danish too. Everything else is not used (except for halvfems which means 90…)

No idea. We probably had a period where we traded a lot with the French and got influenced by the vigesimal system that way, creating the abomination of a Frankenstein monster we have today.

• Half to the five = (5-0.5) = 4.5
• “Sindstyve” = multiplied by 20
• 4.5*20
• Two and half to the five multiplied by twenty = 2+(5-0.5)*20 = 2+4.5*20 = 2+90 = 92

The reason is that the Danish numbering system is based on a vigesimal (base-20) system instead of the decimal system. Why is a good question but it might have been influenced by French during a time where numbers from 50-100 is less frequently used, making them prone to complexity. The fractions simply occur since you need at least one half of twenty (10) to make the change from e.g 50 to 60 in a 20-based system.

Even worse. 90 in old Danish is “halvfemsindstyve” but it is rarely used today. The “sinds” part is derived from “sinde” means multiplied with but it is not in use in Danish anymore. That leaves halvfems, meaning half to the five (which is not used alone anymore) and tyve meaning twenty (as it still does).

We are in current Danish shortening it to halvfems which actually just means “half to the five” in old Danish (2.5) to say 90. 92 is then “tooghalvfems” (two and half to the five, or 2+2.5). The “sindstyve” part (multiplied with 20) fell out of favour.

So we at least have some rules to the madness. Were just not following them at all anymore.

Y’all need to quit it with all this Truman Show nonsense

Oh shit, he’s onto us!

Is that Cheeto flavoured soda?

Less words, better propaganda

Based om all the replies in this post it seems like it happens quite a lot. Or it all just happens now for some reason…

I get it. I’ve just been through a merger and the new head software delivery has plans on rewriting everything in their tech stack. He is in for an absolute fucking ride when he realises that such a rewrite will not take a year but 5 to 10 and will incapacitate our department for the entire time. In a rapidly evolving market. It is 3 decades of continuous and rapid feature expansions he’s trying to unroll.

It’s not FOSS though, so I’m not as invested in it, I’m just here to see him either fail utterly or get kicked due to his cognitive dissonance that’ll cost our department in the tens or hundreds of millions.

Trump in 2026: The Persian Gulf should be renamed to The Second American Gulf!

That’s what a year of being a software architect does to you.