Long time ago, when ActionScript was a thing, there was this one snippet in ActionScript documentation that illustrated how to deal with events dispatching, handling etc. In order to illustrate the concept the official documentation provided a code snippet that created a dummy object, attached handlers to it, and in those handlers defined some way of processing... I think it was XML loading and parsing, well, something very common.<p>The example implied that this object would be an instance of a class interested in handling events, but didn't want to blow up the size of this example with not so relevant bits of code.<p>There was a time when I very actively participated in various forums related to ActionScript. And, as you can imagine, loading of XML was paramount to success in that field. Invariably, I'd encounter code that copied the documentation example and had this useless dummy object with handlers defined (and subsequently struggled to extract information thus loaded).<p>It was simply amazing how regardless of the overall skill of the programmer or the purpose of the applet, the same exact useless object would appear in the same situation -- be it XML socket or XML loaded via HTTP, submitted and parsed by user... it was always there.<p>----<p>Today, I often encounter code like this in unit tests in various languages. Often programmers will copy some boilerplate code from example in the manual and will create hundreds or even thousands of unit tests all with some unnecessary code duplication / unnecessary objects. Not sure why in this specific area, but it looks like programmers both treat these kinds of test as some sort of magic but also unimportant, worthless code that doesn't need attention.<p>----<p>Finally, specifically on the subject of human-readable encoding of byte sizes. Do you guys like <i>parted</i>? Because it's so fun to work with it because of this very issue! You should try it, if you have some spare time and don't feel misanthropic enough for today.