Being a computer science engineer, my friends expect me to be able to read binary like I read English. Fml.

WHAT??.? You aren't fluid in binary? Well I hope you can at least convert unix time stamps to the exact date in your head!

Joke aside why the heck does he think you should be able to do this and what benefit would it bring you?

You're not? Why?

Converting decimal, hex and binary in your mind is just practice, if you do it often enough, it works nearly subconscious.

And for things I'm working on I get a "view" after some time. If someone comes up with a logfile with some hexdump I got used to, I often just take a look and read the dump without decoding it or opening the data structure documentation. Very often I can spot the issue within the dump immediately.

Sounds like Matrix, but it works. I think it's a combination of habituation and pattern recognition.

@fuckwit 😂😂 you got me at the start

@ddephor holy crap, you must be a genius

@DyotakT No, I'm definetly not a genius.

Humans are just very good at pattern recognition. Million years of practice :-)