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The Tiny Soapbox: a platform for small, low-stakes rants
I've set up a very small soapbox here. It's cute.
You can step up on it to rant, but it only supports small rants. Tiny ones. Cute ones. Rants about low-stakes, inconsequential stuff.
It can hold up the weight of approximately one oxford comma, so please don't get too heavy and crush it.
Anyone want to step on it and give us your 0.02 cents?
I think we should normalize using unusual SI prefixes. The other day I said "500,000 kilometres", why not use megametres instead? Ten milligrams is a centigram, people. Wake up.
I unironically think decimeters are the perfect size for a lot of everyday measurements. For when cm is too small and m is too long, slide into some dms!
I support this, the metric version of a foot! We already have yards & meters, Miles & KM, Inches & CM, but Feet has no friend.
Random thought: Isn't a hand fairly close to 10cm?
Someone will need to label my comment as offtopic, but… I just wanted to say that my foot certainly has no friend. ;-)
There’s an old novelty song about cheekily encouraging the US to use the metric system. The chorus features the following line:
I didn’t really even think about it until my engineering-minded friend pointed out that a decaliter is, well, a LOT to drink — even if it’s split two ways, and especially if the drink is alcoholic.
To this day I don’t know if the lyric is intended as hyperbole as written (which fits in with the song’s comedic nature), or if it’s really supposed to be deciliter (which would be much more reasonable, as that’s roughly the volume of two shots).
For context, a pint is roughly half a liter, so a decaliter would be 20 pints (10 pints per person if split). That said, the preceding two lines are "You're drunk with your tradition / that has no validity / Well, I'm intoxicated with sports and metrics," which indicates to me that decaliter is intentional, as a deciliter wouldn't be enough to get most people drunk.
I am absolutely fucking delighted that TWO WHOLE PEOPLE beat me to making an Atom and his Package reference.
I'll drink (a decaliter) to that!
Related: kilo/hecto/deca should be K/H/D. They had a nice thing going where all the big multipliers were capital letters and the small multipliers were lowercase letters, but then drew the line between them between kilo and mega instead of at 1, which would have made sense.
You may also be amused to learn that deciinches are a fairly common unit in circuit board layout. Everyone awkwardly calls them "2.54mm" or "100 mils" because they don't want to admit to using a beautifully cursed unit like deciinches.
Omg yes, absolutely agree. The only thing about metric that bugs me more than that is how the kilogram is the base unit. Why? I get that they're using an artifact, and having 1000x as much mass helps with stability but why not just define it as 1/1000th the mass of that artifact (or planck constant times cesium times speed of light or whatever) and make that, the gram, as the base unit?
The wonderful language Frink, which I absolutely do not use, has an amazingly well-documented file in the source code that addresses this issue.
https://futureboy.us/frinkdata/units.txt
Edit: formatting
My language uses some of those in specific cases:
When asking for cold cuts in the super market you use decagrams.
Hard alcohol is measured in centiliters, e.g. when asking for a shot.
Drinks are measured in deciliters.
I always mentally correct to mega when people say thousands of kilo. Just sounds better!
Speaking of "0.02 cents". I got downvoted in a reddit thread recently because OP had talked about something being .01 cents when they meant .01 dollars. Someone noted that, and I chimed in, referencing the old Verizon stupidity (where the paperwork said bandwidth was something like 0.01¢/KB when in fact it was $0.01/KB [the event happened in the mid 2000s)]), so the customer got a bill one hundred times the expected amount. And multiple Verizon representatives didn't understand the difference between 0.01¢ and $0.01.
That being said - either you fell for the same thing (since the common saying is "your 2¢ worth but you've said your 0.002¢ worth), or you made an amazing pun/joke. I assume and hope it's the latter. lol.
But my 0.02¢ rant (although it might actually be a 2¢ rant) is that my 15 year old reddit account was banned. Probably because I linked to a thread pointing out how spez acceeded to requests from President Musk to shut down subreddits and remove/ban people for saying things he didn't like. I previously got a couple of admin tempbans for saying that we should learn from French history when it comes to our oligarchs.
So pardon my English, but fuck reddit. And fuck spez in particular.
The tiny soapbox is far too little to support the incredible weight of two full cents!
It requires orders of magnitude less to maintain its structural integrity (and its cuteness).
I'll see if I can decrease the importance of my posting, then ;-)
That’s… why we’re here 👋
I refuse to use "proper" English when it comes to punctuation within quotation marks. I am not quoting a period, so you're not getting that period inside the quote. I'm in IT and I'm not asking someone to put a damn period in the string I'm giving, so fuck you, English.
My parents are editors, and I'm not sure if this ever leaked out in my communications with them, but if I ever get into this with them we might have a "row".
This is perfectly normal and encouraged in British English. Alas, any more on the subject would exceed my measly 0.0156 pence.
If I may, a penny for your time.
Would you like to normalize no dangling decimals ? Make your .0156 pence into 0.0156?
Oh dear, of course. We must all carefully manage the value of our currencies, now especially.
I'm always torn on this issue. "word". looks so wrong but "word." just feels wrong. I don't even care what grammar school says on the matter anymore, I just eternally debate the issue within my soul.
Yeah…I usually just try to restructure my whole sentence to avoid it.
I think periods inside of quotes look fine for dialogue, which makes it only in other situations where I avoid it.
What about if there was a quotation mark with a period directly underneath it, maybe? You can sort of do it with Unicode shenanigans using the double grave and double acute accents, ̏ like this.̋ To me that looks far more aesthetically pleasing since there is no weird space "before." or "after". the quotation mark.
Ugh. I personally hate those grave and acute quotes. Inverted quotes, too. Asymetric quotation marks are archaic these days in a world taken over first by typewriters and then by the internet, all with words written by keyboards with just a single vertical quotation mark - well, two; one double and one single - weirdly angled quotes are just kind of obsolete. And while I guess it's fine in books, where they're still expected, it's a real shame that word processors still replace your perfectly good vertical up-facing quotes with something you didn't actually mean to type.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of using asymmetric quotation marks either... but unfortunately that's the only option available when it comes to combining unicode characters.
Wait, that's a thing? I've been doing it wrong this entire time?
It would just be weird to put the closing quote after the period "like this." "Yeah, that's just weird unless it's an entire sentence being quoted." It'd be sort of like doing the same with parentheses (like this.) (Which I think is wrong unless the whole sentence is within parentheses?)
Wait, I found something. Proper English really does put the period outside. Well, if you consider UK English as proper instead of American English. Such weird differences.
Any English that includes "I was sat" loses its right to be considered proper.
"I was sat down at the doctor's office when I had the attack."
"Grabbed, frog-marched, and dragged out, I was sat on a low wall while the bouncers explained at great legth and with several examples why my behaviour was inappropriate and what they'd have done if they'd caught me a moment later."
The latter makes sense to me, the former doesn't
Yeah the first one's definitely a dialect dependent example.
Which is why I was, of course, referring to that one and I don't just have a vendetta against one specific standard grammatical phrase. Although maybe we should regularize it to "sitted/sitten."
As a non-Britisher, why does the one but not the other make sense to you?
They both seem fairly similar usages to me?
Because the second one is actually an action by another person. In the same way I might say "I was sat near the front of the restaurant" vs "I sat near the front of the train" the "was sat" is the act of the host at the restaurant, but I chose my own seat on the train.
"Was sitting" at the doctor's office is how I'd phrase that sentence.
Oh.
My initial interpretation of that sentence was actually with it being an action taken by somebody else - putting you in (a chair in) the doctor's office when (meaning after or as) you had the attack.
I hadn't at all considered the possibility of the meaning being "I was sitting at the doctor's [...]".
Yeah, that's obviously a difference. I have to admit I'd still feel comfortable with both, although I suppose the ambiguity might speak against it. And I'm guessing there is some British cultural/educational diffusion that might make me amenable, but still...
I think the construction comes up in some American dialects to, it feels very rural midwest to me in a way I can't articulate for example, and I also follow quite a bit of British media so I suspect that's part of it.
But because it was "when I had the attack" I interpreted that as a was doing vs "I was sat down by the nurse when I had the attack"
If it's only used in the sense of "action by others in relation to me" I'd find it possibly awkward but fine.
I absolutely have a few grammar rules that I personally follow — like an em-dash surrounded by spaces. One is supposed to not use spaces—which to me appears to mash the words together, even if it's not a hyphen. I could use an en dash – which is probably acceptable – but I use the compose key for all of those, and an emdash is
---while an en dash is--.and that breaks my flow. lolI also thoroughly agree about the punctuation. If I'm quoting a full sentence, the punctuation goes in the quotes. But if it's just a phrase, nope — for example if I quoted a phrase "like this quote". But if I quoted my earlier sentence, I'd quote "I also thoroughly agree about the punctuation." :)
It's fun if I quote a question like "Is this a question?", because I'll use a comma like this. Fuck it. I like it.
I don't think I've ever even heard of the compose key.
Excuse me, but I JUST MENTIONED IT. ;-) ;-)
If you are a Windows user: https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose
I don't think there's an exhaustive list of characters that I've been able to find that's been posted online. There are a number of smaller lists of more common characters. But for example, I use "①" (and related numbers) a lot, and it was years before I found out about them.
Assuming you're not a Windows/Mac user: The exact list can vary depending on your distro so the only comprehensive list I'm aware of is the config file on your own machine.
https://wiki.debian.org/XCompose
If we all do it, they can’t stop us.
Let me be clear I’m with you. However, do you agree it is more aesthetically pleasing to have the punctuation inside the quotations ?
Also, would be curious for people to weigh in who use non “” punctuation.
Lastly, are we agreeing that if the quotation ends in “.”, but you are also ending the sentence itself, we will say, “ ‘.’. “ ?
This is how I've always written outside of my english classes. I feel like (with enough time) this will become the prefered academic method eventually.
Fahrenheit degrees are ridiculous and I'll die on this hill
I hope it's not a 90 degree hill
Well, y'know, it wasn't completely arbitrary. Zero was supposed to be the freezing point of saltwater, and one hundred was supposed to be human temperature, although the latter ended up at, of course, 98.6°. Those are both decently useful. One could argue that freezing and boiling temps of water are more useful, but it's not like Fahrenheit was completely arbitrary.
I would argue they are not at all useful. You can't do science with Celsius, so why base the scale around scientific things?
Also, there's no one thing called "salt water," so I think it's much more likely that the mixture that freezes at 0 was just a way to reproduce the lowest temperature recorded in Danzig/Gdansk in the winter of 1708-1709. That is the reason I like Fahrenheit: it ends up just being essentially a percentage scale of how hot/cold it is in human terms. I see literally no advantages to Celsius whatsoever.
You absolutely can do science with Celsius, and much science more or less generally is done in Celsius. Some scientific fields use degrees Kelvin of course, but degrees Kelvin are just degrees Celsius + 273.15, so the choice between them is largely just based on the domain of the experiment. The idea that "you can't do science with Celsius" is very strange to me -- you could do science with Fahrenheit and Rankine if you wanted, any temperature scale is perfectly usable for science. It's just often better to use a scale where the major values correspond to things that are commonly referenced or otherwise intuitive, which is why both Celsius and Kelvin are what actually get used in science today.
Moreover, the temperature at which water boils is relevant for more than just "science." It's useful for cooking, though I find normal household cooking tends to result in memorizing a few important temperatures regardless of scale. It actually has its own utility when it comes to the weather as well -- zero corresponding to the freezing point is actually pretty useful (especially in locales where the weather rarely goes far below that value).
The "advantages" of Fahrenheit when it comes to the weather are more or less entirely based in an individual's familiarity with Fahrenheit, rather than any objective criteria. In this respect, I think Fahrenheit and Celsius are more or less equal and preference is principally just for whatever we're used to. I used to argue about this before I had much familiarity with day-to-day use of Celsius, but I adapted to using Celsius for intuitive measurements of temperature very quickly, and now I think they're both about equally easy to use in that respect. The only domain where I think Fahrenheit has an advantage is measuring a fever, since it more or less corresponds with reaching three digits, and that's largely just because I can never remember what the numbers are for this in Celsius due to not having learned them when I was young and constantly trying to get out of school.
What's the point of the pedantry of the science paragraph? You can do anything with anything. That doesn't mean it makes sense. Celsius has no scientific advantages over Fahrenheit beyond simplistic primary school ease of memorizing 0 and 100. Both systems are equally shit beyond that. Anything you can't multiply is inherently bad, and essentially useless, for science.
How is the boiling point being 100 helpful at all for cooking? Do you often have recipes that direct you to heat something to 1.47x the boiling point of water?
0 being the freezing point is, at best, marginally better than 32 being the freezing point, but I think that's one of those arbitrary things where you're going to remember it no matter what, so the exact value doesn't matter. On the other hand, I think figuring out how close a number is to either 0° or 100° to determine how comfortable the weather is, whereas -20° to 40° is a slightly awkward "arbitrary, approximate standard temperature range" to the point that it's not useful to think in that manner.
I really think this is the only way that either system is actually appreciably easier in any way, and even that is fairly arbitrary.
Fahrenheit was also originally calibrated to the human body.
In everyday life, Fahrenheit objectively has more utility for those reasons, but that doesn't mean it is objectively better. The best system is what you're used to. Something having more utility does not always mean it is better.
Ultimately this is the crux of it.
Having said that, to me both systems are incomplete when it comes to day to day judging comfort level, because having just the temperature as a headline figure excludes important information like humidity.
In which case, Fahrenheit is even betterer because 100° is just a little above the limit for human survivability with Wet Bulb (and Wet Bulb Globe) Temperature.
0 being the freezing point is great!
90% of the time when you're talking about temperature, you're talking about the weather.
What's the single most important temperature to consider? The one place where a difference of a few degrees gives you completely different weather?
The freezing point of water. It doesn't really matter if it's 24 or 28 degrees. But 2 and -2 is the difference between a light shower and snow/freezing rain.
It makes perfect sense to center the temperature scale around it for every day use. 100 being the boiling point is less useful but it's logical and works well enough
I'm not saying there's no value in that, but I just don't see how knowing if it's above or below zero is really better than knowing if it's above or below 32 or 25 or 46282937, but I definitely don't think it's more useful than having a range that takes in a greater scope of "everyday" (perhaps "everyyear" would be a better word) temperatures.
Honestly, 32 (or another arbitrary number) seems to have the advantage of being "error-correcting" because you can't mix up 3 and -3 because you forgot the negative sign.
yes indeed, i was also thinking of how i most often use temperature: determining whether or not there will be a frost tonight, and i should therefore take action so my vegetables don't die. 0, -1, and -2 almost act like a defcon in that context :D
the argument seems to be whether or not 0 or some other number is a more useful 'centre,' rather than whether freezing point is a useful centre. intuitively i want to say it's obviously better to have 0, but i have to admit it does seem like you'd just remember it whatever it is when you learn it and how people around you use it - it does feel like the 'stepping' of whole values of C is more sensible around zero, but maybe that's mostly familiarity too.
i guess also in addition to the science discussion above, in my work we generally convert temps to kelvin anyway because various statistical measures break/give misleading results where values sit both above and below 0.
I have a IR thermometer for cooking cause I'm that kind of nerd. Having freezing set at 0 and boiling at 100 enables me to use the thermometer as a progress gauge. I'm boiling pasta water. How long till it's ready? I get a measurement. 40Ddeg. Yeah I'm 40% there. I want to simer a sauce but not boil it. Measurement : 60deg. There's 10% ish percent until I have to reduce the heat.
Also: It happens that the smoking point of the oil I'm using is around 2x the boiling point of water, aka 200deg. So I know that steak should be around that value, stir fry is at least 170, etc. Having this in a percentage-adjacent format makes it easy to reason with.
I really don't see how that's helpful, as it doesn't heat at the same rate at every temperature and, more importantly, you start with water already probably somewhere between 20° and 60° C depending on how hot your hot water is.
I also don't get how having your oil's smoke point be around 200° is really any more helpful than knowing it's around 390°.
My mental models works as a percentage progress bar and ecen with non linearity I think that estimation on 100s and 200s is easier than something like 390.
Gonna push back on that. The advantage of Celsius is that it fits in well with other units in a holistic view of measurement.
How much energy does it take to boil an ice cube? 100 calories.
It's all made to work together. Sure day-to-day it's not necessary but a cohesive view of measurement and units is the advantage.
all this quote below is a bit unhinged:
What do you expect the square of a temperature to be?
You don't usually multiply temperatures by each other, but rather by another factor. That said, one example where you do that is the Stefan-Boltzmann law, where E(T)=σT^4 .
As for the rest, yes, those are useful for science, but you're really doing that to the unit of Kelvin, not degrees Celsius, which is important because you cannot use those values for further scienceing without first converting to Kelvin.
So it sounds like you agree that Celcius is useful?
No. I think it is simpler to teach the math of specific physical equations with Celsius, but it is even easier with Kelvin, an actually useful system.
I am just sick of the hypocrisy of "SI units were given to us by God so everything else is heresy but also Celsius is good because we designed some other units to match up well with it."
I’m a fan of using whichever scale is closest to 0-100% for the domain in question. As you noted that Fahrenheit for humans and human-conducive climate, and for PC temperatures that’s Celsius. If your CPU, GPU, etc are sitting around the 100C mark you’re hovering around the danger zone.
It feels intuitive and reduces the need to remember arbitrary single use numbers.
This exact value was only chosen because it corresponds to exactly to 37 Celsius. The "official" level for a fever, 100.4, corresponds to 38 Celsius. Those exact values are a little arbitrary, since there's some natural variation there that can't be captured by a single number overall. I suspect if we lived in a world where everyone used Fahrenheit, we'd remember these thresholds as 99 and 100 respectively.
For day-to-day use, I think Fahrenheit and Celsius are more or less equal (though Fahrenheit is very obviously less suited for scientific use). I think this is why often some Americans try really hard to defend it as "better" than Celsius -- the other metric measurements are so obviously superior to their imperial counterparts that it's more or less impossible to defend the status quo there. Fahrenheit seems extremely reasonable when you compare it to needing to memorize how many feet are in a mile, after all.
Oddly, they decided to also set Fahrenheit by the freezing and boiling points of water 70+ years after the system was created, so that may not be true, though that may have just been an attempt to run it in the same way as Centigrade.
I just assume that the round numbers in Celsius were chosen to deliberately hit a specific degree without decimals, and the same decision would have been made in my Celsius-less alt hist.
My counter point is always heating and AC - so much simple to turn it up out down a few degrees rather than tenths of a degree.
The resolution that Fahrenheit offers for everyday life is the only positive I can give it.
In Australia where we use °C I don’t think I’ve ever had an air conditioner capable of finer control than 0.5°C at a time, and even then that’s rare. It’s usually whole degrees per press of the + or - button
The only time I’ve known 0.1°C increments even being available was when I spoke to the building’s HVAC guy because back when nobody else came into the office in the CBD, I requested a smidge colder, and in conversation he mentioned “okay I’ll push it by half a degree and see how it feels, if you want it 0.1°C up or down from there let me know and I can sort it out
One degree Celsius is equal to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, so something that lets you adjust to half a degree in Celsius has roughly the same granularity as something that lets you adjust to whole degrees in Fahrenheit.
That said, since moving to Europe I've never had a thermostat that adjusts by temperature. I've lived in older buildings with radiators and newer buildings with floor heating, and both have used arbitrary numbers for grades of heating (my current place has numbers from one to six), at least on the end I interact with. The hot water heater(s) themselves probably have something more formal, but I've never had to directly interact with them. And, unfortunately, AC has never come up because even the new residential buildings here don't have AC :c
All digital thermostats I've seen used here use half degree steps (except water heaters I think). It is not more complicated at all and as sparksbet says, it gives you about the same control as Fahrenheit.
In this economy?
People don't read documentation or emails.
I work in a customer facing role and the amount of people who contact us, claiming they've read the documentation but clearly haven't is way too high. I'm not talking about the people who miss a small detail, heck it happens to me, and I'll have a coworker point out a single line or bullet point I missed while troubleshooting something. I'm talking about the people who lead with "Can you please help me with x, I've read the documentation and couldn't find how to address this" and my answer is a copy and paste of the opening paragraph of the documentation of x with a link to that page.
People don't read my emails, I have canned responses for a number of scenarios, but I also like to customize or pull pieces of relevant information to the top of a response to the user to make sure that the user/customer sees the information they need or is important in this situation.
User: I need to reset my password
User: I need you to reset my password now!
User: (rant about unwillingness to help them/escalate me to your manager/I want to lodge a formal complaint/I will sue your company/etc.).
Another common scenario:
Email the user with a complete set of steps detailing the order certain things need to be done to assist them with whatever they contacted us for.
User: I just need you do x thing for me.
User: Can you just do x thing for me.
User: (angry emails about not helping them).
I'd even go as far as
I am not sure if there is enough room on the soapbox for that expanded scope though.
I even encounter it here on tildes plenty of times. To be fair, not as egregious as the users you are describing. More that people tend to just read one line in a comment. Ignore/miss the context it is written in and respond as if that line is the entire argument. Even worse, they read the same line and extrapolate an abstraction that is effectively the opposite of what is actually written in the rest of the message.
I feel called out. I did that today, but immediately re-read the post and made an edit with more relevance. But I left the original info because I thought it would be useful to others.
If it helps, the sort of interactions I am thinking about usually don't have that moment of insight. Where it is more like the customer interaction where even of you reply with "I'd agree if that is what I had said" people still continue to argue as if that is the case.
If I had to guess, there probably is some of overlap in the sort of headspace both the earlier mentioned customers and the people I am thinking about are in. Where they are so preoccupied with the abstract that it blocks their ability to pause and read with the intention to understand.
I feel like I've gotten close to the size of the soap box limit with this one!
For me this is really a minor thing, I "rant" about it with coworkers on my team or with friends who work in IT, but to me, it's never that big of a deal. It can be frustrating when an end user refuses to read instructions, but at a certain point, I can't help them if they don't help me help them. I can just keep trying to rephrase things or add more emphasis on what I need to get my job done.
I agree with you on people going in a completely separate direction when it comes to online conversations. I felt that happened a lot on Reddit, and thankfully less here.
It’s so awful. I’m so glad I was able to pivot ever so slightly from frontline support to a non-customer-facing support role. The exact situations you’ve described were a daily occurrence and it was honestly killing me. Can’t tell you how many times I fully typed out “so you’re saying in writing with your manager CC’d that you think it would be a good idea for me, a random TS engineer that you’ve never met, to be able to arbitrarily set your password for you? *ctrl+a delete* *paste polite template*”
I’m so sorry you’re stuck with it for now.
I never made it fully away from end users, as my previous role was a sole sysadmin for a medium-sized business/ a "consultant" after we were acquired and migrated into a new business IT environment. I ended up back in my current role after a long series of events and actually love the company and role.
While users like this can be frustrating, I support such a wide variety of them that my day is always different. One ticket I'll have an elderly lady whose grandson helped set her up with our software, and she is confused with how it works, so I'll get to work on trying to explain the concepts behind what we do to someone who has very little computer knowledge. The next ticket could be an enterprise customer with thousands of users having questions about using our software self-hosted in their environment and why they are receiving a specific error or encountering x behavior while implementing y feature for their users who use this specific version of a client.
I am working my way to eventually get a less customer facing role, but with the perks (biggest being work from home) and pay relative to most local jobs, I'm a happy camper.
This is much too big a rant for a tiny soapbox, but I totally relate. I've learned that unless you cut your email down to a few sentences, separated by line breaks, they likely won't be read.
Certain individuals may need more help in the form of making some words or sentences in red colored font with a bold weight.
My apologies if I've exceeded the tiny soap box size!
To me, this is actually a small thing that I generally just jokingly "rant" about it with coworkers or friends who work in IT. I like helping people, and I get paid to do it. It may take away time from the more interesting things I work on, but it's usually very easy to find the information people need and send them on their way.
My wife works in marketing and is big on making sure that things are communicated effectively. I've gotten her feedback on my own communication over the years, so while I may ramble on here where I'm expressing myself, in my work emails I make very liberal use of bullet points/lists and the various text formatting options.
The unit of furlongs per minute is a perfect, intuitive 0-10 scale for automobile speed. It will never be used due to cultural inertia, but I like the intuitiveness of the scale.
I've definitely crossed your too fast limit a small amount of times on longer empty and straight stretches, so I'd argue there's some room for extension upwards.
But all in all, interesting proposal.
I think the main negative (beyond social/cultural inertia) is the comparative granularity of talking in a per minute context?
So for a longer drive I might be able to guesstimate things given a likely-ish speeds (urban/highway/rural non-highway, rush hour vs night) vs distance, but with a furlong/minute I'd have to do a lot more calc. (Or maybe more reasonably just fully rely on estimates by navigation apps).
I guess I was thinking in terms of posted speed limits instead of driver behavior. There is exactly one highway in the United States with a limit above 11 on this scale. But you're right that some people will drive faster. It may even discourage reckless speeding by turning targets of e.g. 100 mph into the boring number 13.3.
Obviously the solution is to relabel all road signs to use furlongs! Doesn't everyone know that it's 22400 furlongs from Los Angeles to New York?
Seriously though, I think using minutes may be more advantageous than hours. For shorter or local drives, you think in terms of minutes of travel already. It takes 20 minutes to get from one edge of town to the other, not a third of an hour. If I'm driving for 3+ hours on the highway, I already understand that any time estimate isn't precise to the minute. It will depend on traffic, construction, and the need to stop to eat and rest.
So while this suggestion is partly tongue-in-cheek, I am glad I haven't been completely laughed off.
You just enraged 80 million germans and one of their core industries. Autobahn speed at 130 km/h is called Richtgeschwindigkeit here (roughly translates to usual speed), and sometimes you feel like a road blocker at 130.
On a more serious note, this scale could be quite useful. You could easily colour code speed signs, highways, roads, cars, trailers, ...
I suppose the Autobahn could go up to 11, or 12, or 13, or 14, or...
But I think the point holds that 10+ furlongs per minute is like 100+ ℉; anything over 100 degrees is "really ******* hot," and anything over 10 fur/min is "really ******* fast."
The hate for MSG is just racism.
It's so internalized that my (Taiwanese) mom always questions when I use it in my own cooking.
My mom keeps insisting that MSG affects her despite all the evidence I've shown her that it doesn't do that. But she's so insistent that u kind of wonder if she actually is the one person who it does affect.
Hey, maybe it does, and maybe regular salt affects her too. (But usually those same people don't react to tomatoes or Doritos, etc)
But lots of people react to different ingredients. The demonization of MSG is just racism
I mean does she eat all the foods that contain it naturally? Mushrooms, tomatoes?
Also the placebo effect is real.
Edit: spelling
We have entered an era of GIF-as-a-replacement-for-conversation. At least with my circle of chatters, GIFs make up a large majority of responses for what would have been simple answers such as "LOL" or "Wow!"
There are several problems with this:
I'm not calling for the end of all GIF usage. I'm just suggesting we tone it down a bit. Every once in a while, someone picks a very thoughtful, funny, well-placed GIF -- those are great. But in every other case, just type what you're thinking or don't say anything at all!
But I really just want to be Paul Rudd.
100% agree with you about seeing some random person/actor in a GIF give me a thumbs-up with some overlaid text. Impersonal as shit. I'd honestly rather get an emoji reaction or the "so-and-so replied 👍".
I believe that native GIF search for platforms like MS Teams (can't speak for Slack) and iOS is fueling this, and is absolute dogshit, likely due to each platform's target audience.
Tenor GIF search, on the other hand (which Google's gBoard uses), is far and away the better way to locate GIFs from within a chat, and has considerably more accurate options based on a text search.
I use it sparingly, either when I want to find something from tv/movies/games that the recipient(s) and I both know well, or I treat it more like a thoughtful, extended emoji reaction, in which case I like to think of it as browsing a greeting card section in a store, very rarely choosing the first one. I want my recipient to laugh/smile/be a little creeped out in a way that text-only can't convey.
This is pretty US-centric, specifically for those states in the parts of the country where it snows, but even so, I think we ought to swap the dates on which Valentine’s Day and Christmas occur.
If we swapped these two holidays, Christmas would get a wide-open runway all the way from January 1 to February 14 with nothing else in the immediate area competing with it. Thanksgiving (US) and New Year’s would get far more attention and could be celebrated more fully. Plus, the end of Christmas almost coincides with the end of winter, so it feels a lot more celebratory in that way.
Valentine's day is an arbitrary date, but Christmas is where it is to be close to the shortest day of daylight (in the northern hemisphere). It's there to make us happier in the darkness rather than the cold.
Winter solstice.
I am trying to create meaningful rituals around the passage of time tied to these days: winter solstice, spring equinox, summer solstice and autumn equinox. I have so much troubles with time so I'm hoping this will help me or at least be fun :)
Christmas and New Year's being so close together is convenient in some ways, since schools and some organizations will just have a big, long end-of-year break due to both holidays. Makes it easier to plan trips if you live far from family or friends, or just want to take a random vacation at the end of the year.
I like that you realise that the US is not the world, but I'm sorry to tell you this specific issue (or rather possible solution) is the same for several countries in the nordic hemisphere that has fallen pray to US cultural imperialism and adopted the custom to celebrate valentines day.
Granted your last point is US-specific, I'll give you that, but the problem of winter being later than we feel it is still is more widely spread.
[Edit:] I was wrong, thanks to @sparksbet for correcting me and adding more relevant information.
Both Valentine's Day and Christmas originate in Europe. Valentine's Day comes from the Feast of Saint Valentine, which has been celebrated on February 14 in Western Christianity since at least the 8th century. It began to be associated with love in the 14th and 15th centuries, and the modern tradition of giving cards, flowers, and/or sweets originates in 18th century England. While there are many things that can be blamed on US cultural imperialism, Valentine's Day is absolutely not one of them, at least among Europeans.
TIL, thank you!
For what it’s worth, I consider them “winter lights” and I keep them up from thanksgiving to Feb 28/29, and I’ve noticed more people in my town doing the same
How about we just move Christmas and bring back celebrating the Winter Solstice with feast and fun?
Valentines day has some religious background I think? Christmas does too, can't remember what though. 😏
Some catholic countries celebrate the 7 of January instead, the day the 3 mages arrive with their gifts. Something to think about!
"We" already do, it's the same, the date for christmas was set to co-opt the pagan celebrations into christianity.
My memory (clearly lacking, and the inputs are unknown) tells me it's just a quite random date chosen, by a commite headed by florists, to get the spending going again after christmas (all days have one saint attached to them, so you just have to find a plausible connection)
It was admittedly just a quick check, but I find reference to Jan 7 with orthodox countries and it just being the Julian calendar's Dec 25...
(I'm going to consider Catholics of eastern rites to be non-catholics for the purposes of this answer).
I was off by one day: its the 6th of January!
El dia de los reyes magos also celebrated in at least Mexico, probably other central- and southamerican countries.
It's obviously a source of limited reliability, but to my understanding that day of three kings is a flavor of the epiphany, a distinct additional holiday in catholic tradition (and other Christianities).
And not a substitute for Christmas.
St. Nicholas's day is the other "present" oriented day on December 6th in the Roman Catholic tradition, but they're definitely celebrating those holidays whether St. Nick's or Epiphany, it's just that Christmas looks different...
Off-topic, but Thanksgiving Day should be fired into the sun. We should keep the holiday and the traditions but it should be Day of First Nations Remembrance or something
I'm with you there. I've gotten progressively more grumpy about all the marketing extending earlier into the year and then after the flash of December 25th it's swept away, rather than it starting in late December and continuing through the dreary months where the cheer's needed.
Bathroom faucets are too short. You can't get your hands under them for washing without hitting the back of the sink.
Likewise, sensor faucets are installed entirely to piss off anyone who would try to use them.
You mean you don't like the sensor being over here:
-------------------->
but the water coming out over there:
------------------------------------->
You don't like shimmying some skin past the sensor in order to beg for another second or two of flow and whipping your hands into the water, but quick!, back to the sensor to keep the water coming?! You want soap as well??? That sensor is over there:
------------------------------------------------------------>
but the soap actually gets dripped out about two seconds after you're detected, good luck catching it. And good luck ever washing the suds off.
Airport bathrooms are the worst offenders, in my experience.
My smallest rant? Choosing to do nothing is not the same as not being able to do something. I'm specifically speaking of the organization I'm a part of but someone told me there was "nothing" they could do and I had to tell them that we're the ones who run the system we're claiming won't let us do it! We can change the system! Even if we can't fix this right now, right away, we can start the processes that next time we won't need to be looking for a fix! Deference to authority, I get. I know how the reporting structure works and if my boss won't let me do something that's different than I can't do anything.
Actually, my smallest rant might be that insulated mugs keep my coffee too hot for too long. Don't burn my tongue an hour later, Thermos.
My smallest rant is trying to find a (ideally ceramic lined) mug that will keep my coffee hot for a long time that is dishwasher safe. I have a good “camp” one that works well, but it’s not ceramic lined and is not dishwasher safe. Then I also have one that is ceramic lined, but it’s also not dishwasher safe and is harder to wash.
I recently got some double-walled glass mugs and those work OK, but aren’t as good as the camp mug at keeping my coffee warm. But they’re at least dishwasher safe.
At this point, I just need to use the mug warmer, but I don’t want another thing cluttering my desk :(
I've heard great things about the Ember mug (I don't have one, but one of my co-workers does and he raves about it). It's not dishwasher safe, though. And it's a little pricey for a mug.
We should abolish the semicolon from the English language; nobody knows how to use it anymore and you're lying if you pretend to know;
Would this be an appropriate use of the Malice label?
My use of it is perfect. ;-)
All of these responses and none of them using my favorite semi-colon use: in a list where the items themselves contain commas.
Oh it's so perfect for those of us whose thoughts exist in clauses and parentheticals
Nonsense! Without them, how do I tell a computer that I'm done writing an expression?!
Semicolons are very easy to use; you just use them to join two independent clauses which are related.
You obviously know, as you did it correctly here (at least according to what I was taught)
The purpose of the semicolon in English is to show off that you're educated enough to use it, obviously.
A semicolon can be interchangeably used with em-dash or parenthesis, so I usually use them when I’ve used one of the others and don’t want just chains of em-dashes or nested parenthesis within parenthesis.
This is probably not actually correct but it’s how I use them
I will hereafter use the semicolon exactly like parentheses ;I'm sure it will help my writing;.
ahem
Two-centicent rant #1: You know doors? In particular, how they sometimes open inwards and other times they open outwards? A visually well-designed door makes its operation obvious, e.g. maybe there's a horizontal bar on one side that indicates the door should be pushed open. My employer chose another design philosophy. I have been working in this building for nearly three years and I still struggle to remember which doors open inwards and which open outwards.
Two-centicent rant #2: I live in a decently large German city. That puts me thousands of miles closer to Belgium than most people in this thread. Yet I can find at least as many Belgian beers in any given American convenience store than the local Getränkemarkt, a grocery store dedicated specifically to selling beverages. And I make that qualification with absolute confidence because there are no Belgian beers in my local Getränkemarkt. Like, half the store is filled with bottles of water! Are people really more interested in purchasing their favorite brand of Sprudelwasser than enjoying a Belgian Tripel? And the issue is hardly limited to Belgian ales: I have an easier time finding certain German beers in America than in Germany!
Two-centicent rant #3: Why are automatically-flushing toilets even a thing? Do we really have so little faith in humanity that we can't expect someone to flush a toilet when they're finished with their business? Certainly this decision was not made for my convenience: I would much rather yank a lever than risk being kissed by Poseidon because a sensor misfired. But that's assuming it even activates at all -- I'll take the lever over having to rub-off a nub.
When a push door has a pull handle (or vice versa), it should be legal to physically dismantle the door to force them to fix it.
As far as your doors rant goes, have you taken a look at evacuation routes in the building? Generally speaking doors open towards the escape route, the idea being that they always open in the direction people need to go to in case of an emergency.
This also means that if you are effectively in the midpoint of a building as far as those routes go you sometimes get a weird mix.
Good point, although I'm not sure that's always true in Germany. (I can think of at least one store where the doors open inward to leave, which always struck me as a fire hazard. ) But perhaps there is some requirement for buildings of a certain size and age? In any case, I think all the doors in my building do, in fact, open outwards along the evacuation routes (other than the bathrooms), so your suggestion is a good one.
But dammit, I don't want to think about it! Truthfully I could probably remember whether any given door opens inward and outwards if I gave it a moment's thought. But I'd rather just navigate through the building on auto-pilot while giving attention to more pressing matters (i.e. anything else).
Why is it so hard to just communicate basic information? This is a hyperbolic question, I know exactly why but it doesn't mean I'm happy about it.
It feels like we had the perfect ratio of staff : customers where you could maintain a level of human contact to feel like things were happening while allowing companies to be flexible enough to meet peoples individual needs.
But ubiquitous emails, hyper abstracted call centers and unnaturally inflated startup user caps have all skewed this to the point where the customer need to be an expert in your company structures to get things done and it got out of hand the second you could eliminate "unskilled workers". And it kept spreading until its just across the board now.
And now we've hit the critical mass where LLM are soaking up all the correspondence and the only way to make contact is to somehow already be in contact.
I'm getting into the thousands of contact-attempts that are gone nowhere. Emails. Dead phone lines. LLM responses that never saw a person. Websites last updated in 2018. Meetings pushed out indefinitely. People who just don't talk to people they don't know. I WANT TO GIVE ALL YOU PEOPLE MY MONEY! WHY WONT YOU TAKE MY MONEY IN EXCHANGE FOR DOING YOUR JOB!
Recently I spent an entire week trying to deal with classpass to fix a problem where I couldn't use their app.
They have no way to email them. There's no way to submit a ticket even though they are paying for zendesk. You can't submit a form to be dealt with by their support team. I actually did manage to wrestle an email address from them and shortly after I sent it, I got an email stating that my email was rejected and that they wouldn't be responding to it. Literally the only way to contact them is through an AI chatbot. If you yell and swear at it enough it will then connect you to a chat with a real person.
But of course from there the people you get connected with are poorly trained and will outright drop your chat instantly. There's no way to reconnect; you have to talk to the AI chatbot again and deal with whomever it decides to route you to after you've sworn at it enough. I had to go through this prospect FOUR TIMES before I got to someone who would actually help me, and that's going past all the time I had to spend sending screenshots and videos of proof of the error they were having on their side. The three people I talked to before tried to get me to give them my credit card information for a trial membership even though the service was being paid by my health insurance and their own documentation said I should not need to provide credit card information. And yeah, they gave up on me and dropped the chat.
Oh, and of course, when I finally got a ticket and they said to contact them again at a certain point, I had to go through the AI chatbot again. I gave it the ticket number and it said, basically, "I can't look up your ticket number. So tell me your problem and I'll be so happy to go through every single step of troubleshooting again.*
Fuck everything about the whole thing.
I did get the issue resolved but that was because I was so pissed off at this I was doing everything I could think of to send a formal complaint letter. But of course they didn't have anywhere I could send it to. That's actually why I was trying to get their email address. I think they're literally doing their best to get people to complain about them on social media. So here we are.
This was a perfect rant. Started normal. Then just devolved to all caps. Wonderful experience, 10/10 would read again.
To address your rant, I think part of it is by design. We have really embraced the plausible deniability phase of life. No one wants to be responsible for any mistakes, but they also want to take all credit when possible for successes.
We carve up every process into tiny mundane things that require no thought —or rather, make almost everything a powerless position except for a handful of people who can actually do something.
Lastly, something has happened where people are crippled by a few things - overly concerned with saying the right thing/not offending people(as if we have control over what people think). And an obsession with being completely understood by all audiences in one go. I think we stopped thinking in conversations, and embraced the one and done nature of emails or decrees. We continue to have our lives be this way because there have been no repercussions for living this way. Profits go up. Pay goes down (said in the voice of Bill O’Reilly “tide goes in, tide goes out, you can’t explain that”).
This is the problem with scale and late stage capitalism.
When you have a store, or a business that serves even a smaller region, you can deal with your actual customers and culture. The business can understand and respond to the actual norms.
When the business serves a national or international customer base, there's no reason one couldn't empower regional management to make regional decisions. But the corporate desire is to optimize and homogenize so that the same cardboard end cap display can go to all 500 stores. In that setting, the only way to try to not offend is to become as vanilla and impersonal as possible.
A political theologian I quite like defines a principality (Biblical term) as "an organization that was started for a purpose that has now forgotten that purpose and exists as an end unto itself." Though I'm no longer religious, I think this is an excellent framework to understand corporate structures through.
The thermostat should be set for the hottest person in the room. You can always add clothes, I can only take so many off!
Everything should be sold priced according to single occupancy and scale with number of people.
Clothing should be charged by the amount of fabric it uses.
This doesn't scale based on the amount of labor required to produce the item of clothing from that fabric, though. If two pieces of clothing use the same amount of the same fabric, but one requires much more time, effort, or skill to produce, it makes sense for it to cost more.
Adding clothes doesn't necessarily lead to being comfortable. E.g. I'm currently wearing socks and slippers over still-cold feet, and my nose is running because I don't have a balaclava to wear. Being too cold all day physically hurts thanks to muscle tension, too.
I think cozying up in blankets can help alleviate a lot of these problems when the issue is at home, but it's often simply not feasible -- most people don't work somewhere where they can be wrapped up in blankets all day.
There's too much sodium in cup noodles. It makes it inadvisable to eat two cups a day when each contains something like 98% of the daily value.
Thank you. /Steps off cute soapbox
The sodium in almost everything is way too high. The more processed it is the more salt will be in it, too.
There's some pretty good arguements for the US RDA for sodium being much higher than it should be, and things like instant ramen are already pretty much at that high level or above it. I notice that ramen usually tries to skirt this by saying that a package is actually two servings. But the noodles are sold in a single puck that can't be evenly seperated; nobody's going to eat half a bowl of ramen and eat the rest later when the noodles have dissolved into the broth.
My number one complaint with most prepackaged meals.
I would love the ability to toss a meal in the microwave for lunch, without it being the entirety of my “recommended” daily sodium intake.
So I have to look mostly at the specific “low sodium” ones, but there are just way fewer options.
Yes! Now a days I don't use the whole seasoning packet nor drink much of the broth. It's just way too much, but I love my noodles.
I got an email from payroll today reminding me that overtime pay is not allowed on grants. I scroll down to see what happened, and one guy appears to have put in $0.51 worth of overtime. I'm also not his supervisor, just the grantholder, so I don't approve his work time.
We don't even use time cards, just online time entry, which I'm pretty sure only goes down to 10 minute increments, so it's not clear to me how exactly 1-2 minutes of overtime got entered.
Soapbox takeaway: get your shit together, payroll! And when there's a problem, correct a person who is actually involved!
I'm sorry, but 51¢ of soapboxing exceeds this thread's quota by 2550%.
But that sounds like when a company spends like 50¢ on postage and at least half that on paper/envelope plus some small amount of labor to send a bill for a dime. lol
I also got a monthly email from eBay for years (well, I might still except I no longer own the domain in question) letting me know they owed me $3.25 from a business account or something from when I shut it down. but because I shut it down, I could not get the money, cancel the money, or even talk to customer service to have them just effing delete the stupid thing. Every time I made some change that lost the rule in my email client that filtered them, I'd have to put in a new rule (back in the days of POP3 email, so rebuiltin computer often meant reinstalling email software from scratch). heh.
Let'sabolish semi-annual clock changes,please.It's not the steering wheel, it's the faceless anonymity of cars. We're used to a world where, even if someone is rude, the fact that you can see everyone's faces tempers that and leaves some amount of respect on both sides. When you're in a car, everything around you is a big metal box and its only motivation is to defeat you. Makes it easier to assume the worst of everybody while also acting worse toward everybody else.
I think that the faceless anonymity of cars is part of it, but I think it's even more than that. There are public spaces and private spaces, and we have different emotional walls up depending on being in public or in private. If you're in a private area, such as your house, and you encounter someone you don't know, you have a wild reaction that is a mix of fear and anger.
People often parse their cars as private spaces - you're fully enclosed in a place that you have some kind of ownership over - and then go out in public. So we tend to have different emotional walls up when driving than when we are just out in public.
Part of it is certainly that nobody knows you, but I think it's just as much that you don't know anybody, and you're in a place that is supposed to be a safe spot.
I have noticed that seemingly every car these days come with factory tinted glass. It’s rather annoying. One of the things people tell you to do for bicycle safety is to make eye contact with drivers. Well, I guess cyclists are another new level of fucked over now.
Yes, indeed. It's a bit like the Internet. People are in a bubble, shielded from the interpersonal and social consequences of being inconsiderate, obnoxious, rude, or dangerous.
I wish I could sometimes send a "thanks" or "merge here, I'm in no hurry" or, what would probably be my most-used option: "urk, I did that badly, I appreciate you having my back", while I'm driving. Thumbs up/down and headlight flashing is quite limited.
There's two US states who have - Hawaii and Arizona. It would be great if I only worked with people in my state, but since that isn't the case, I have to schedule meetings in Pacific Time or Mountain Time depending on the time of year.
I was in some particularly terrible traffic, recently, a bit-city ring road, with lots of entries/exits, so just non-stop merging and filtering across the lanes. It was very striking how bad humans are at dealing with this. I very much hope that self-driving could take over for that sort of traffic - it's moving slowly, 0-40 km/h, and if there was no ego/impatience involved, the whole experience could be so much smoother. Also, electric motors deal with that sort of stop/start much more gracefully than my churning up and down gears and mashing my clutch near-constantly.
It's 2025, why can't we have printers that work well?
That's their business model. Consumer-grade inkjet printers have usually been subsidized by ink sales; for decades now. They've always been a loss leader, and people have come to expect to buy something for fifty bucks from Staples.
Buy a monochrome laser printer instead. Brother still makes some good models. Otherwise buying anything used is probably still fine as long as you can still find toner and roller replacement kits.
Usually a $20 small-office-home-office business grade laser printer from craigslist / marketplace / etc will last you five to ten more years for a $40 investment.
So long as you don't need colour you can often get tens of thousands of pages from a single $20 toner cartridge, which doesn't go bad or dry up like inkjet cartridges do.
Back in 2014 or so (can’t remember the exact year) my mom was buying a new printer. Instead of spending $80 or so on an inkjet, I convinced her to spend $350 or so on a brother color laser printer. It had fewer features than the much cheaper inkjet, but was absolutely worth it. A full kit of replacement toner cartridges is quite expensive, but they last forever. I recently had to order a new part (drum, or some other part that is a wear item, but lasts much longer than toner cartridges). The model is discontinued, but that part was readily available.
Reliable printers exist as long as you buy brother laser printers.
My parents are still using the laser printer they bought me to go to university with, which is, well, a long time, a very long time. I'm surprised the thing is still compatible with today's computers, to be honest. But it keeps churning out simple page after simple page - it can do two-sided printing, but no colour or anything fancy. But it just chugs away, amazing. I'll probably inherit the thing.
Yeah, but I mean, it's a combination of things. I got myself an expensive laser printer and all. Still, from time to time I can't connect to it over WiFi and have to restart and pray for the Printing Gods. Even the super expensive ones $10k+ you find at the office have this kind of problems we thought would be solved at this point.
Oh good timing! I was trying to figure out how to make a thread just to rant about how much I loathe the customization in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet thanks to the dumb uniforms. They automatically limit your options for everything.
If you don't have the DLC, you have just four options: Suspenders and long sleeves, white polo and shorts, vest with slightly longer shorts, and a blazer with long pants. If you have Scarlet, you get to deal with orange pinstripes bottoms! Violet has solid purple, which I am 99% sure the reason that was the better selling version.
Matching accessories to those uniforms limits your options so much. I'd usually go for the Summer or Fall uniforms because they had shorts which meant you could see socks, and socks are one of the only things you can customize. Made worse by the fact that I'm a girly girl in games with customization, and I swear none of the feminine socks have good shoes that match. I hate most of the shoes, so I end up usually rocking either sandals or boots with high socks. Except the basic high socks all have ugly tags on the back so I never use them, and the other high socks are rough.
If you have the DLC, you get more uniform options: some new school uniforms so you have a total of eight options, festival jinbei (green, white, blue and shiny yellow-green-blue) and the Blueberry Academy uniforms. And... Yeah, I'm not a fan of most of them. Why does the Violet one have that pink-orange top?? Why are there no blue shorts?? Why must there be those werid gray under-shorts under the ONE option with a tank top?? I can't wear tights with that!
I wish we could at LEAST mix and match the tops and bottoms, but no. It's just painful. I have spent hours trying to make an outfit I like. I've mostly given up on dressing girly. Usually I'd go with the autumn uniform (the vest), monochrome boots and the default Violet uniform socks, and focus fashion mostly on the hats and hair. After getting the DLC I tend to go for a more punk look with skeleton tights.
Yet I still spent about two hours last week trying to make a feminine outfit for some reason. Literally did nothing else, just booted up the game for the first time in forever and flew around boutiques trying to find some combo I liked that felt feminine. And I failed. I don't even know why I got the urge to try, I knew it wouldn't work.
Just... GAH. I'd love the level of customization from Sword/Shield. I could get the perfect balance of girly and tomboy, or make a spooky ghost girl, or an elegant punk princess... Just, this is the wrong way to have gender-neutral clothing options.
Any game that has custom clothing but doesn’t allow you to serve looks is doing it all wrong.
If you've got a small business and need graphics for something please, for the love of God, just gire a damn artist. Fiver exists if you want to keep it cheap. Now more than ever, artist face an existential crisis and their clients need to step up and ensure they can stay in business. I'm being you.
Stop it. It’s too early in the morning for an existential crisis.
Well now I'm definitely not fixing it. Sorry my autocorrect traumatized you.
I've thought this for a long time, but as a Canadian, I think we should change Halloween to be in the summer. The number of times we've had to bundle up and wear a coat under a costume is too damn high.
When I was a kid we usually had to wear snow pants and a coat under our costumes. It looked ridiculous.
Finally!
I was rummaging through my mind to find something that I could say here, but I couldn't find anything that is this level of important to me. Like something worth mentioning while still not rage-inducing (I should probably look into that: regulating feelings, the handbook. Anyone got one?)Most companies, where I live, that make sandwich meats for consumers have probably never used their own products (which somehow makes sense as they know what's in it!).
The batch of slices in the package is almost always up side down wrt to how to package is opened. Like if they where the other way around you would have a way to easily pick up one slice without having to interact with the rest of the slices, while now you either have to turn the package an extra time or touch several slices.
It's not only inefficient but also wasteful as the more you have to poke around the bigger risk of pathogens getting into the package and turning the meat bad.
Okay, time for me to talk about temperature units.
First, my “qualifications”. I grew up in the US with Fahrenheit. I have now lived in the civilized world for 6 months, and have used exclusively Celsius for that time. I am now very familiar with both systems.
Review of Celsius: It’s the default in science for a reason. 0c (ish) being water freezing is extremely useful. 100c being boiling is also useful. For anything that isn’t weather, Celsius is currently the best. However, when used for human climate temperatures, it isn’t good. One digit numbers are better than two, and two better than three. As a side note, three digit numbers are used to label samples in wine studies precisely because that is when numbers become subconsciously meaningless. It requires conscious thought to compare 387 to 936. That is not required for comparing 27 and 56. Celsius, for human temperatures, requires a .0 or .5 for adequate precision. Exhibit A: the many Celsius thermostats that have a .5 increment. If you need three digits, just rip the bandaid off and multiply by 10. Why can’t boiling be 1000c?
Review of Fahrenheit: Annoying to spell. Not good to use. Who decided 32 was a good number for freezing water? Stupid. 212 for boiling water? Stupid. However, the precision is perfect for human temperatures. 100f is really damn hot. 0f is really damn cold. Most daily temperature is within the 2 digit range, and thermostats don’t have to resort to .5 increments.
Ok, so what do we have that’s good from each? Water freezing being a round number is a good idea. Water boiling being a round number is a good idea. Covering human temperatures with the 0-99 two digit range is a good idea.
So here is my proposal: an entirely new temperature scale. It’s defined simply as Celsius times two. My friends coined it « degrees BS ». It’s very loosely based on my name, but I won’t dox myself. (And yes, the reference to BS is very much intended.) Water freezing is still at 0bs. Fantastic! Water boiling is at 200bs. Not as nice as 100c, but still way better than 212f. Room temperature is 40bs (20c or 68f). An extremely hot day is 100bs (50c or 122f). Average January temperature in Paris is 14bs (7c or 44.5f). Average summer temperature in Paris is 50bs (25c or 77f).
(As a bonus, let’s offset it from Celsius by 0.14 to make it a whole number difference from Kelvin)
Honestly, what do you think? I obviously think it’s a pretty good idea, but I want to hear some real opinions.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
I think your proposal is an obvious improvement over Fahrenheit, but would be difficult to get anyone to adapt for day-to-day use for the same reasons people find it unintuitive to switch from Fahrenheit to Celsius (or vice-versa). Also, this system removes my favorite thing about Fahrenheit, as it makes it necessary to memorize what degree "counts" as a fever rather than it being an easy "three digits probably means a fever" situation -- but that probably isn't possible to keep without keeping all the normal Fahrenheit problems.
who keeps smashing glass on the cycle path? please stop it, i beg you!
I’ll stop doing it when people actually pick up their dog shit from the walking path.
Or at least I would if I were doing that to begin with. You have to be a real jackass to break glass on any sort of pathway.
Lol I asked ChatGPT for some justifiable reasons someone might smash glass on a pathway and I won't bother to share my AI slop, but it was a bit funny, like Wes Mantooth pointing out how the flawed TV ratings systems don't take into account houses that have, uh, more than two television sets, and other, other things of that nature.
the people i really don't get are the ones who pick up the dog poop and put it in a bag and then tie the bag to a tree. like, you did the gross part already??? just put it in the bin!
Panasonic microwaves have a terrible UI.
The microwave has a button for "quick 30" which you can press in succession to cook for however many seconds. Press it twice and the microwave will show 1:00. Three times for 1:30. But you have to press the start button after. What's the point if you still have to press an extra button? Why not start cooking when you press it once, and every time you press it it adds 30 seconds to the current cooking time? Oh, and the button does nothing unless it's the first button you press when you are entering a time value.
Trying to do anything that doesn't involve setting an arbritrary time for cooking at 100% intensity takes way too many button presses. Worse, you have to press the same button multiple times, which is terrible because the buttons aren't actually buttons; they're pads with no detents, no bumps, no clicks, or any real tactile feedback whatsoever. Worse, they have an extremely agressive debouncing algorithym, so you can't try to push the buttons too fast it will just ignore you. I have had times where I was trying to press the button eight times before it registered once.
To cook food at half power, you have to press the power level five times.
To use sensor cook for soup, you have to press the sensor cook button THIRTEEN TIMES.
It's seriously maddening. I kind of miss the old style microwaves with physical dials to set everything. They seem so much easier to use.
Textbox shaking on incorrect password. What does that help? Just say password incorrect - done with, complete, nothing more needs to happen.
Also any kind of ups, umm or "cute" pictures on error messages. I sometimes am in an area with bad internet and I want to shake whoever authorized the firefox no internet page anytime I have to look at it.
But after the first failed password, it's a confirmation that password2 was also wrong.
Automatically clear the alert when the user touches the textbox again? I just feel animation is too in the users face when it does not have to be. I can see the password is incorrect, I just want to enter it again, no shaking neccessary.
I think my smallest rant is that the folks who use bikes for sport - MTB, Road, etc - absolutely make cycling worse for folks who use it for transport. They disregard traffic laws. They go too quickly in pedestrian areas. Most of all they dress like absolute nonces. They enrage drivers everywhere and create a hostile environment for folks just headed to work. (though drivers in general are culpable too). MTB possibly being the worst. The number of times I've nearly been knocked off my bike by a truck flying around a corner sporting 5 super high end MTBs out the back is mind boggling.
All of this from someone who rides all of those disciplines, but also for transport. We all love bikes, get the fuck on board with making riding fun, safe, and accessible!!! No one is going to want to "give" infrastructure to assholes!
Not sure where you're from, but here in the Netherlands we have a specific term for them: wielrenners, which roughly translates to 'wheelrunners'. And we hate them, or at least, the one of them that do exactly what you say. Cycling where they're not allowed, somehow getting angry when they have traffic there, all the while using car roads even when there are separate bike lanes. The list goes on but you get my point:
Even in the Netherlands, they are hated. Perhaps even more so, actually.
Revolving doors are incredibly stupid. They're completely inaccessible for someone in a wheelchair or someone with a very slow walking speed, so you have to build a second sliding door next to it, which people end up using anyway! Combined with the carbon/monetary cost of fabricating and installing and powering and maintaining 2 doors, I just can't see any way that the static nature of the revolving door actually ends up being a net benefit.
I’m pretty sure one of the main benefits of a revolving door is that it acts as an “airlock” and helps prevent drafts. But obviously, that relies on people using it instead of the secondary door.
(And the secondary door is necessary for safety, since in an emergency revolving doors do not allow for quick egress).
This is a big one. They are very efficient in that only one quarter of the cylinder that makes up a revolving door is transferred in or out per entry/exit. The air also has no real velocity when it enters the building.
Compare this to a sliding door on a cold windy day and they immediately show their usefulness. Use the sliding doors if you need to, but the revolving doors are not wasteful.
Why do people argue in threads asking others to share controversial opinions? Aren't they meant to be mini soapboxes? A recent thread had me vent a frustration about a certain game I won't mention essentially requiring full completion of the early stages for any meaningful progression. Some dude decides they have to "correct" me about what happens late game. The late game sucks anyway, and to be able to progress you cant' leave a single stone unturned in this game. I don't want to do the late game because it's weird and disjoint, and I don't want to have to do everything in the early sections of the game to just keep pace with enemies. You get a free imaginary penny if you can guess the game.
It's a game I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed, so I also feel my criticism is practically weightless because it doesn't really make it a lesser game.
Half the fun of controversial opinions is arguing about them
Death stranding?
I recently wrote one of these tiny rants: https://gabevenberg.com/posts/stop-using-trrs/
I have a split keyboard, that uses USB-C as the connector between the halves.
Works nicely because it’s a cable I already have/easy enough to find (in a nice curled loop). My main issue with it, as you identified, is that it can be somewhat easy to confuse between the connector for the two halves vs connecting to the computer, when all are USB-C. But still, infinitely better than TRRS.
Stop putting coriander in everything!!
I've switched to cilantro
Nooooooooooooo
At the very least I beg restaurants to make it clear when something contains it. I've had too many experiences where I looked at an item's ingredients and didn't see cilantro/coriander only to end up surprised with a mouthful of soap anyway
The Tildes Enhancement Suite (I know it has some other name, but reddit-brained me can't stop calling it TES) is almost as good as RES on reddit. One feature that I miss is automatically saving a source URL when you create a user note/tag.
I'll sometimes tag users to help remind myself that they share a common interest and might understand an inside joke, or that I can't assume that everyone is American. Sometimes these notes aren't detailed enough, and I end up asking myself later "Why did I tag this guy as 'Coin expert'?" Being able to reference back to the original comment helps me re-gain context and be a better community member. This is possible with RES, but not TES, causing the mildest-possible annoyance only worth complaining about on a fun-size soapbox.
Added your feature request to Tildes ReExtended's Gitlab issues:
https://gitlab.com/tildes-community/tildes-reextended/-/issues/53
cc: @Bauke ;)
I have the same person marked "respects the bear" on one device and "twinsies" on another. I don't need the second reminder anymore but the first one makes me laugh.
The noun that means "how something is pronounced" should be "pronounciation". I refuse to spell or pronounce it "pronunciation".
(I won a spelling bee once in middle school, which makes me a world renowned speling expurt, so you have to listen to me)
Dear people in the northern hemisphere:
Stop saying "it'll be this summer!". Seasons are a subjective period.
Sincerely,
The southern hemisphere
Ooh more southern hemisphere folks! There are dozens of us! Dozens!
I have another one: the Audible app.
For various reasons, I am back to using the default Audible app instead of one of my third party apps. It is way better than it was a few years ago, but it still has one big problem. Attention Amazon. The Audible app should be first and foremost a player of offline downloaded book files. I don’t care what DRM you use so long as it always works offline and doesn’t cause issues. If I open your app, it should always show a play button for my current book. You can load whatever recommended books you want after I play my book. If the play button for my book ever loads after some data from your server, F U. Your app is a book player first and a sales platform second. Fix it.
My rant is localised to the state of Victoria, Australia but you’re welcome to borrow this rant if it fits your circumstances too.
There are not enough public holidays between the middle of the year and the end of the year.
Around the time that the year switches over to the next one is great! You’ve got Melbourne Cup in early November, Christmas and Boxing Day in December and New Years a week later, then Australia Day toward the end of January. Lovely, a bunch of public holidays bunched up and people can take extended summer holidays!
February is a short month so it doesn’t feel like you’re missing out to not have a holiday then, and Labour Day in early March. Depending on moon phases and stuff, Easter Friday and Easter Monday long weekend gets a nice block of time off somewhere around March or April, then Anzac Day in late April, then the next one is early June.
But then nothing until late September! That’s too big a gap with no holidays, and means there’s no opportunity to catch a long weekend in proper winter weather.
This is the real reason to move Australia day to somewhere else, we need more consistency in our days off!
Some people, who work in IT, and code on a daily basis, should never, EVER, been coding anything even as a hobby.
To my great regret I managed to get the source code of our front end up and running. We currently outsource it, but someone else made it years ago. And I understand why the people struggle with maintaining this shit.
Random integers being generated, horrendous nesting of loops when it's absolutely unnecessary, and so much more. Good god... it works, so that's fine but figuring out why things break from time to time is hell on earth.
Also, pineapple is disgusting. It's one of the few things I really, truly, don't like. Blergh. And if you put it on pizza you're a monster.
I have to work with a very limited functionality application that is mostly only extensible through SQL, specifically stored procedures. Even then, it refuses to work with functions or temp tables. Because the best way to use this application is "put all your logic in SQL," I have to do some awful things at times.
I recently had to use "Replace" nested about 30 layers deep. I'm about to make a series of roughly 20 select statements to get counts of table records in 20 different states.
I want off Mr. Bones' wild ride.
I have very mixed feelings about this. On one hand, 'god I wish the nesting I'm dealing with was for such a reason'. And the other is 'thank god I don't have to actually have nesting like that'.
All things considered, the fact that young kids are primed to be obsessed with their mothers is a relevant cause for the emotional withdrawal of fathers.
I am not saying that fathers are off the hook for being absent or unavailable, but it is absurd to ignore how hurtful it is when your son cries and looks for their mother whenever you hold them. This is not just about men being awful.
Dropping turn lanes in the middle of a busy road without an accompanying traffic light is one of the worst transit design decisions possible. You can sit there in the lane for what feels like years and nobody will let you through, and even when you think there’s enough of a gap you can’t really be sure. It can feel impossible to make your turn safely.
Second worst are those stupid flashing yellows/reds in four-ways where traffic piles up and nobody pays any mind to the light.
Please just spend a few extra bucks and put in a proper traffic light in both situations. Please.
Ok, I have to add one because it's riling me up so bad and it is so petty...
We have a local architect that very often represents her clients when they bring things to planning commission for variances or approvals. She has lied plenty of times, but tonight she lied square to my face when asked a pointed question.
She was given a remodeling permit 2 years ago that allowed for now external variance as it's a historic structure. I see the building every day as it'a on the water front on my daily swimming route. I noticed how much bigger it looked after the remodel. Today she comes in asking for an additional permit to expand the house to a second floor, based primarily on the perspective that you won't be able to see it from the street. True... because she freaking expanded the front sunroom up 3 feet illegally.
I'm on the planning commission and am really close to being pedantic and filing a complaint with the city. She does this incessantly, for her very very wealthy clients - who never even live in the houses. They are all real estate speculators - I looked up the owner of this one and it's exactly what it is - and they are doing it to increase the value of their investment. Fuck that!
Someone needs to hurry up and manufacture a proper 3rd-party Wii Remote alternative for Dolphin, one that preferably works without any IR sensor bars and is just a regular wireless, “plug and play” Bluetooth controller. I want to play Wii games, but I can’t justify investing that much money into all the gear necessary, all for it to not work because Wii Remotes probably don’t properly pair over Bluetooth on Apple Silicon anyway. Mapping motion controls and the pointer to an Xbox controller is not the way to play. I just want to play Super Mario Galaxy again. Is that too much to ask?
I thought the Wii remote sent the camera feed directly to the Wii for processing? If that's the case you won't likely see one that doesn't require a sensor bar.
That being said, I wonder what the possibility of just taping on an IR LED to the remote and then using some reflective dots so the sensor bar can just be a passive component....
I've definitely read about people using a pair of lit candles instead of a sensor bar, apparently there are multiple options.
Who is throwing paper towels into the toilet! Why do we need a sign to tell people not to do it?! What kind of monster thinks it is ok to throw thick paper into the toilet when the garbage can is nearby?