Hex characters 0-F don’t visually provide any information about the underlying binary. I can’t tell from reading 0-F representations of hex if a specific bit is set or not. It’s necessary to convert to binary to notice things like parity set to odd/even/none. But raw binary isn’t compact enough to easily look at.

Kaktovik Hex is a compact binary and hex representation based on some of the ideas behind Kaktovik Inupiaq. It supports the same visual arithmetic as Inupiaq, but also supports things like visual XOR. The bits of each nibble are represented as either | (for ones), V (for 2), or empty (for 0). The lower two bits are on the bottom, the upper two are rotated on the top. Every symbol can be written without lifting a pen.

Originally posted to !conscripts@slrpnk.net