Cookie Thread Act 4 (Act 5): The Fifth One

Yeah. I never implied otherwise. I’m saying that inch and foot are good units with lengths that I think are practical for everyday use without a good SI equivalent. I’m not saying that the imperial system is better (it’s clearly not) just that it’s not strictly worse in all ways.

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Also I see machinists use thousandths of an inch pretty regularly like a tolerance of a few thousandths of an inch is a good tolerance, and that’s like ~10 micrometers. So we can divide the inch without needing a sub-unit and it’s sufficient for highly precise measurements in manufacturing. The only time you actually need a unit of length on a smaller order of magnitude is scientific fields and no sane person would argue imperial is a good system for that lol

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I don’t know how true this is but my mom claims that back when she was a kid in America, the general theory was “well, we adults don’t want to switch, it wouldn’t come naturally to us, so we’ll just teach all the kids the obviously superior metric system in school, and then they’ll start using it”

and then in a Shocking Plot Twist kids just. used the system they were used to using in real life. rather than the one they only ever used in school, and only occasionally at that

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The only time it ever comes up is science and it’s the only time I ever actually care because I do need to go between units regularly which is, quite obviously, easier in metric! I have a bone to pick with metric data units though. What a fucking plague that is. “Well, kilo means 1000 in SI so clearly a kilobyte should be 1000 bytes instead of 1024 like it’s been this whole time.” I want everyone who had this take to go missing. I’ve spent hours unfucking things because of (understandable) confusion about what radix is being used for byte units despite the symbol implying SI.Turns out, fucking nobody actually uses the IEC prefixes but almost no one uses the SI radix so it’s just a nightmare where I have to dig through docs or open a fucking support ticket with a developer to figure out what radix is being used. One time a ticket got escalated 3 times before someone gave me a definitive answer.

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thomas jefferson tried to get the us to adopt the metric system way back in the day. sent over a guy to france to get a standard kilogram and everything. but he got kidnapped by pirates. no cure.

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i feel like this was the fault of the computer guys who decided to borrow the prefix kilo. all the other bytes are different. metric system was invented before computers so it wasnt their fault that they foolishly used the same prefix!

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Megameters, gigameters, etc do exist you know

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“1 kb = 1000 bytes” implies computer illiteracy to me

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Hell

1 megameter is 1000 kilometers, just as 1 megabyte is 1000 kilobytes

Mimicry is the highest form of flattery

Gigameters lmfao

okay well we can blame the naming decisions of the computer system for borrowing from metric when they aren’t using multiples of 1000

yeah because it means kilobits = 1000 bits :slightly_smiling_face:

YOU LITERALLY FUCKED IT UP JUST NOW LMAO

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Units of measurement are so funny

King Henry died for this.

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thats so dumb who needs kilobit

ive seen kilobyte abbreviated as kB but i thought it was unnecessary

megabits and kilobits per second u use for download speed

ok but why are they multiples of 1000. why didn’t they make them multiples of 1024

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im in some kind of hell dimension where my internet connection is cracked for everything but fortress of lies. scratch that this may be some kind of sign from god

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because megabits and kilobits literally means use the SI prefix dummy. IEC equivalent prefixes are mebi and kibi respectively. Fun fact: SI prefixes are always used regarding network units (it’s always bits as well!)

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you’re not alone in thinking that but b => bits, B => bytes

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My wifi hates discourse and fol so bad