Processors are inherently awesome at branching, adding, adding, shifting, etc. And shifting to get powers of 2 (i.e., KB vs. GB) is a superpower of its own. They're a little less awesome when it comes to math.pow(), math.log(), and math.log() / math.log().

Why 300K+ people copied this in the first place shows some basic level of ignorance about what's happening under the hood.[1]

As someone who's been at this for decades now and knows my own failings better than ever, it also shows how developers can be too attracted by shiny things (ooh look, you can solve it with logs instead, how clever!) at the expense of readable, maintainable code.

[1] But hey, maybe that's why we were all on StackOverflow in the first place