ScruffyRules: Totally unsurprising. It should just always use 1000. Or if it wants to use 1024, it should say MiB instead of MB.

hakanai: Well for file storage isn't 1024 better? I prefer it at least.

ScruffyRules: I prefer 1000 honestly. Every OS other than Windows already switched to it too, and I've never really been sure why Windows hasn't.

hakanai: This is what causes confusion with a lot of things. Windows for instance, reports 1024KB as 1 MB even though it's going by binary units and not decimal units. What it should report (to avoid confusion) is 1024KB as 1MB using the binary system.

Mac and some distro's of linux are the only ones that use 10^6 (SI mega) instead of 2^20 (mebibytes)

neither OS's can play VRChat so it makes sense to use the windows method of calling a Mebibyte a Megabyte and calculating the file sizes as such using 2^20.

If we use the SI calculation of 10^6 instead of 2^20 that actually will cause confusion since everyone playing the game is going to be used to seeing file sizes calculated based off 2^20.

Kasuraga: I have no issue with using 1024, as long as you write GiB instead of GB. Using 1024 while writing GB is just incorrect and ambiguous.

hakanai: Doing that confuses anyone that uses a windows PC. Anyone using a windows PC see's 1GB as 1024MB when the reality is it's 1GiB is 1024MiB. Windows doesn't report MiB anywhere so anyone with a windows PC won't even know what a MiB is.

Kasuraga: Writing GiB doesn't confuse anyone, because it only means one thing. Writing GB is confusing because it means two different things and you have to guess which one the author might have meant.

My default assumption is that it means 1000, and just because Windows is written by people who are incapable of following the international standard, in a country filled with people incapable of following international standards, doesn't mean that it's correct for everyone else to follow their lead.

hakanai: That's because the standard of Mebi didn't come about till 1996, well after the PC was created. It was supposed to replace using Mega for 1024. Windows was created long before the creation of Mebi and they never changed it most likely so it wouldn't confuse people. All OS's before the Mebi standard used Mega in a binary sense and not as a decimal. Apple didn't even change their standard till 2009. A windows program, written to only be ran in windows, should use MB and not MiB since nobody would confuse the use of MB to mean 1024 and not 1000 since everyone using the program would recognize MB as 1024.

Kasuraga: People do confuse the meaning of MB because some people have a clue about units and have been following the standard way of doing it for years.

hakanai: The only people that confuse it are people that use operating systems other than Windows. Which is my point. No one playing VRChat is playing it on an OS other than Windows.

Kasuraga: Whether VRChat runs on non-Windows or not, there are still people who have a clue about how units work, and there are still people who use operating systems other than Windows, and it is still confusing for those people.

Or actually, it isn't confusing - we just immediately _assume_ that it means 1000, and when someone says it actually means 1024, we are _surprised_ that someone got it wrong when it is literally over two decades since the standard was introduced.

On the other hand, using GiB is unambiguous, standard, and the correct choice. We did the usability research, though, and found that 1000 caused less confusion with new users. Only old users who had spent years only familiar with the Microsoft way even knew that it meant 1024, and it was the minority.