When you’ve only got six letters to work with - ABCDEF - you need to get clever, and within those constraints DEADBEEF makes a pretty good name. Except it’s a number.
I’m going to turn you all into nerds by the time you finish this article. Don’t worry, it’s all fun and games if you can get through the next paragraph:
DEADBEEF is a hexadecimal number or hex for short. Hex is a common numbering scheme for computers that do everything based on binary zeros and ones. Hex uses 16 characters versus only 2 in binary, extending 0123456789 into the letters ABCDEF to get to 16. Why? Hex numbers are a whole lot easier to remember and manage than the long strings of zeros and ones that make up binary numbers.1
Funny hex numbers pop up all over the place in computers. DEADBEEF was the name of the first network I managed. Not satisfied with the creative limits of only two vowels and four consonants, nerds repurpose numbers to make more letters and ever more memorable monikers so CAFEBABE gets a CAFED00D and BAADF00D escalates into 8BADF00D (“ate bad food”).
If you’re lucky, you might find a hex error code in the wild when a script fails on a page or an app crashes. C0010FF (“cool off”) is the error when an app dies because your phone overheated. DEFEC8ED is what you’ll find when a program crashes and dumps it’s memory.2
B00B135 (“boobies”) snuck into a released Microsoft product. We’ll revisit this one later - boobs have an outsize influence in nerd humor.
DEADBEEF is easy to spell but debugging? That’s hard.If you just have geeky tendencies, you can get in the game by picking a clever name for your wireless network:
“That’s What She SSID” is my favorite (SSID is code for network name), another good one the Czech’s missed: “Bill Nye the Wi-Fi Guy.”
When you type in or click on a website address that no longer exists you get a 404 error page and designers make some great ones. I love Substack’s 404 page - turn your logo upside down for a supremely disappointed cat:
Creative types and engineer types work side-by-side at every tech company, yet they are different:
Which leads us to the most powerful nerd-to-mainstream crossover of all time - the meme:
Remember this summer when everyone was explaining Kamala’s brat memes?
Here’s a meme generator to nurture your inner nerd - roll your own and flex your newfound nerd creds.
The ultimate culture clash in tech companies pits nerds against salespeople. I’ve seen plenty of collateral damage from eager sales guys:
Q. What's the difference between an enterprise software salesperson and a used car dealer?
A. The used car dealer knows when he's lying.
AI cannot squash the cleverness of nerds. To get something out of an AI chatbot you need to ask it questions. The art of asking the right questions is called prompting. In early AI models certain prompts would cause the AI to jump its guardrails and do stuff it wasn’t supposed too. Called a prompt injection attack - here’s a conversation between a human (in blue) owning Amazon’s customer service bot Rufus (in orange) by having it wax poetic on bossman Jeff Bezos’ bald head:
AI hacks like this fall under the designation Ignore All Previous Instructions. You can flaunt your new inner nerd with this cool t-shirt from Molly White:
Back to BOOBS, the gateway drug to nerd humor. I was in middle school when my best friend sidled up to me in class and whispered 7251 x 8 conspiratorially in my ear, motioning for me to try it out on my spiffy new LCD calculator. 58008 popped up - so? Then he told me to turn the calculator upside down.
I was hooked and on my way into the halls of nerddom.
🫵 ok nerds, over to you - what have you seen or done on the internets that made you laugh?
DEADBEEF in binary is 11011110 10101101 10111110 11101111, in decimal it’s 3,735,928,559. DEADBEEF is easier to remember, right? Hexadecimal numbers are typically 8 digits long because that corresponds to a 32bit address space.
These will show with a 0x in the front to flag them as hex like 0xC0010FF.
I used to tell a story to get the SHELLOIL word to come up. [If 142 Israelis and 154 Arabs are fighting over 69 acres of land for 5 days, who won?" To get the answer, you multiply 14215469 by 5, so that 71077345].
Wifi passwords are a bit of fun also. "itsonthefridge" "FBIVan", and "PrettyFlyForAWifi"are good ones.
What were some other "upside down calculator" games? I remember BOOBIES, of course, but weren't there some other shenanigans we nerds used to entertain ourselves like this?