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There recently was a discussion on lemmy where several US citizens (one of them allegedly an engineer…) tried to explain to me that metric might be „more precise“ (? 😂) but the imperial system more practical, because „everybody knows what a foot is“. When I asked them to add feet to miles I got shouted at (in CAPS) that noone (ever) does that. 🤷‍♀️

So, to explain the German „sie/Sie“, it can be used as one of the following:

• formal version of both singular and plural you: used whenever you have or want to maintain a distance from someone, or with persons who demand respect/authority. Generally speaking, whenever you would say Mr/Mrs/Ms it’s „Sie“, if you’re on first name terms it’s „Du“. Fun fact: addressing an LEO, judge, etc. informally („Du“) is considered an insult, insulting someone is a misdemeanour (not kidding) in Germany, and you will usually be fined on the spot for doing so.

• Used to reference a woman/girl who has been mentioned before: What about Sally, is she coming today?

• Same as above but for inanimate objects or animals that are gendered female: Have you seen my camera, I have misplaced her. Look at the cat, she’s so cute. (In this case it’s a cat of either female or unknown gender, if you were talking about a male cat specifically, you’d use the male version of „cat“…)

• Same as above, but for all groups of people, animals, objects, regardless of gender, like plural they: Look at the guys/nuns/politicians/cats/helicopters, they’re drunk as fuck!

Great language, isn’t it.

Nah. Parchment paper goes into the oven, that’s another name for baking sheets. Waxed paper is used to wrap your sandwich. If you put waxed paper in the oven – well, see picture above.

FYI, some baking paper contains PFAS, the group of chemicals that also PTFE (aka Teflon) belongs to, which is… not good.

Because it’s way more precise than pouring liquids into a beaker (which can be off by 10%), much easier to judge than bending down to judge a level, and since with water 1 ml == 1g (yeah, metric system helps…) fairly easy to calculate. All other liquids commonly used are close enough.

Also what the fuck is 3 cups of flour/rice/salad (?!) even supposed to mean. Loosely packed? Compressed?

Yeah, that „study“ studies child neglect…

„By age 2 […] those who had spent four or more hours with screens were 4.78 times more likely to have underdeveloped communication skills.“

Wow. Children with no human interaction lacking communication skills, news at eleven.

Yeah, but statistics is a b*tch.

We had a similar technology for a test run some years ago at a train station in Berlin, capital of Germany and largest city in the EU with 3.8M.

The results the government happily touted as a success were devastating. They had a true positive rate of 80% (and this was already cooked since they tested several systems at several locations but only reported the best results), which is really not that good to start with.

But they were also extremely proud of the false negative positive rate, which was below 0.1%. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

Well, let’s see…

True positive means you actually identified the people you were looking for. Now, I don’t know the number of people Berlin’s police is actively looking for, but it’s not that much. And the chances of one of them actually passing that very station are even worse. And out of that, you have 20% undetected. That’s one out of five. Great. If I were a terrorist, I would happily take that chance.

So now let’s have a look at the false negative positive rate, which means you incorrectly identified a totally harmless person as a terrorist/infected/whatever. The population for that condition is: everyone passing through that station.

Let’s assume there’s a 100k people on any given day (which IIRC is roughly half of what that station in Berlin actually has). 0.1% of 100k is 100 people, every day, who are mistakenly reported as „terrorists“. Yay.

Yes, please go ahead.

I will even open a bottle of sparkling wine for the occasion!

Edit: btw, does anybody else have Nandor The Relentless‘ voice in their head whenever somebody is named Guillermo?

workplace-endorsed "mindfulness" meditation

That sounds pretty dismissive. It's very sad that capitalism co-opts these things to squeeze out even more energy from workers, and that people think this is just something PR or HR or whatever came up with.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and similar techniques (e.g. autogenic training) are effective and empirically proven methods to combat depression, eating disorders, chronic pain, etc.

At the moment, it doesn’t look like anything, since it’s just now in phase 1 trials, so nobody knows.

But if it does what it says, then yes, it might actually be part of a cure.

And I don’t know if you’re aware of it, as of now we don’t have a cure for cancer: https://xkcd.com/931/

You can look up the average treatment cost today, it’s something like $150000, good for your that you already know the price of this pill and that it’s big pharma‘s wet dream.

They didn’t mimic existing units, an imperial ton is close to a metric ton, and the spelling tonne is just an alternative spelling of ton. In some parts ton means imperial ton, and tonne means metric ton, but it’s not standardized. In German, where the word originally comes from, it’s Tonne (btw the e is not silent, it’s [ɛ] as in let. Or in Porsche (no, it’s not pronounced porsh…).)

No, I mean some people do, but you don't need to. Because EU eggs are from vaccinated hens there's very little fear about salmonella. It's perfectly safe to keep them at room temperature for several weeks and in fact they're sold unrefrigerated at every store. It's also perfectly common to use raw eggs, e.g. for home made mayonnaise etc.

US eggs are washed and chlorined since the hens are not vaccinated, and once you wash them you need to refrigerate them. US still has like 150k cases per year of salmonella poisoning from eggs alone. Germany has like 10-15k cases in total.

(I also don't get why people don't understand they don't go bad for weeks at room temperature. I mean what do you think the chicken that normally would grow in these eggs eat while growing? Rotten egg?🤪)

Sure, the chinese are just copying everything, they don’t research and develop new technologies. Mhm. Your 1980s racism needs an update.

https://theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/china-leading-us-in-technology-race-in-all-but-a-few-fields-thinktank-finds

Oh course there is, it's:

Existenzerinnerungsverlust

Lol, that sounds very much “as a black man”

You mean the „engineer“? Well, what can I say, he was insisting his professor at uni taught him „a true engineer can work with every system“.

I mean yes, but the difference is one engineer is just happily pushing around decimals, the other one goes pale when you ask what 1/5th of a gallon in cubic inches is…

Yeah, but honestly that doesn’t work too well either, does it.

In my opinion, in the majority of cases copyright only helps those who are already famous and the companies that own the copyright*.

I don’t know much about books (but from what I have read, authors here also get scraps), but the film industry is all over the media right now, so I think everybody is aware that even actors of really successful shows get literal pennies for their work: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/notes-on-hollywood/orange-is-the-new-black-signalled-the-rot-inside-the-streaming-economy

I do know a lot about (parts of) the music industry to confidently say: it’s the same.

Sure, you have some people who are doing well, extremely well as a matter of fact, but the vast majority of artists have a really hard time getting by. And I’m not talking about the local band playing in the pub with nobody listening, I’m talking about people who tour around the world and play in front of thousands of people.

And unless it’s some really major case of infringement (like taking a song and publish it as your own) they’re neither helped nor do they care much about copyright.

Who does care is, e.g., the German GEMA, a company who watches public performances of copyrighted work, so if you’re playing a song from another band, or playing copyrighted music in a mall, you have to tell them. Allegedly they’re there to ensure fair compensation of artists, in reality they only pay themselves most dearly.

*) This is a bit complicated for me to write about, because under German law you have a creator’s right, which you cannot ever sell or lose, and a copyright, which allows temporary or permanent reproduction of your work. „Stealing“ a song, as mentioned above, wouldn’t be a copyright infringement, but a creator’s right infringement.

It’s not about politeness.

If you’re on first name terms, it’s extremely rude to switch back to the formal address. Like, „FYI whatever our relationship was, I just burned that“ rude.

And more and more, people who don’t know each other immediately skip the formal part. I personally find „Sie“ rude, and I’m using it only for people I don’t like.

The original idea behind imperial units is actually quite nice. They used 12 inches in a foot because you could divide it in so many ways without using decimals. You can take 1/2 of it, 1/3, 1/4, and 1/6 without ever needing decimals.

You can measure 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4 of a meter, why wouldn’t you? Also, seriously, those common fractions aren’t that hard in decimal. Everybody knows that 125 g is 1/8 kg.

That’s not the issue. The issue is that it’s not consistent between imperial units, you have a zoo of different subdivisions between units. You have 12 inches in a foot, three foot in a yard etc pp.

The issue is it gets really unwieldy in multiplication, 1 cubic ft is how many cubic inches… 1728, how convenient.

Tell me how much is 1/6 cubic ft in inches? How many cups are that? There goes your mental math.

(It is also a common misconception that imperial is „duodecimal“. It’s not. It’s counting to 12 in decimal. If you had a proper duodecimal system, „12“ * „12“ would make 100 not 144.)

We all still use 360° in a circle

And you also say 180°, 45°, 720°. Not 1/2, 1/8, 2.

hAvE yOu TrIeD bReAkInG iT dOwN iNtO mAnAgEaBlE pIeCeS aNd SoMe DiScIpLiNe

Yes. Yes I did. I took both pills, ground them up to very manageable pieces, took a straw and just very disciplined snorted everything up.

And then I asked for more pills.

Not sure if this is legitimate data retention

AFAIK that’s not yet been legally established.

GDPR is only concerned about personal data, which is defined as „any information which are related to an identified or identifiable natural person.“

Now reddit‘s argument is that by disassociating the comments from your username they effectively anonymized that data, and then it does no longer fall under GDPR.

It would be interesting to edit every comment with personal data, and any email address you can prove you have access to is considered personal data…

but its more convenient to have smaller units depending on what you're measuring.

See, that’s what apparently many people don’t understand: with metric you don’t have „larger or smaller units“. You have one unit and you scale it to your needs. It’s not like we have „the meter“ and „the centimeter“ and have no clue what’s in between. There’s absolutely nothing more convenient about having multiple units for the same physical property.

I find the size of a foot to be convenient for measuring things in casual situations where accuracy and precision aren't priorities.

Again: There’s nothing more or less precise about metric or imperial. You have a mental image of a „foot“ the same way I have a mental image of a ruler or a sheet of paper, i.e. 30 cm.

I don’t really know what a litre is. I know what a beer bottle looks like, or a milk carton, the same way you know what a quart of milk looks like. Pour a quart on the floor and ask someone how much that is, they probably don’t know.

We don't literally measure it with our feet, that's just what its called.

Oh, I definitely had other people tell me imperial is „more human“ because a foot is the size of your foot and an inch is the size of the tip of your thumb.

What's bothering me is not how much that hits home, but the fact that Americans keep their eggs in the fridge ...

you cannot copyright ideas

I don’t know about US law, but in Europe you certainly can, and it’s an issue over and over again ending up in courts.

simply mentioning Zaphod Beeblebrox doesn’t trigger anything to do with copyright

Yes it does. Fanfiction e.g. is considered infringement of the creator’s right, and that doesn’t extend to the exact verbatim text but to general plots, names, etc. It’s even infringement if you write a story about „Härrie Pötter“, since it’s immediately obvious that it’s based on Harry Potter.

Some years ago a German discounter sold a costume that was an obvious reference to the TV depiction „Pipi Langstrumpf“, a famous character by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. Mind you, in essence it was just a really cheap wig and a dress somewhat resembling a tv character. The company owning the rights on the character sued and won.

Edit: oh! I missed the part where there were two courts that decided it was infringement but in the end the highest court overruled that and said it’s not: https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/bgh-urteil-pippi-langstrumpf-romanfigur-urheberrecht/

Which only proves that all of it is completely arbitrary and just a matter of opinion. /Edit

In another case, someone took a photo of a soldier, cut out the soldier, turned it into an outline, and printed and sold t-shirts of that. If you took the shirt and put the photo next to it, it was immediately obvious it was based on the photo. Here the court had no issues, because in their opinion it was too far away from the original work to be compared with it. 🤷‍♀️

So, it’s quite impossible to draw a line between an idea and an implementation, and that’s why thousands and thousands of infringement cases are ending in front of courts, and in the end the only relevant factor is the opinion of the court.

Edit: rewrote everything because it’s actually easier than I was explaining it:

It’s not about being polite or rude, it’s an indicator of your relationship with the person/s you’re addressing.

It’s not like you can choose how you say something to set a certain tone. „Would you pass me the butter, please“ doesn’t get more polite using „Sie“.

Who you’re talking to defines what to use.

When you are introduced, it’s easy: „Hey Bob“ -> informal -> „Du“; „Hello Mrs. Robinson“ -> formal -> „Sie“. Mixing them up just doesn’t happen, except for very small children who sometimes use the informal „Du“ with „Mrs Krabappel“.

It only gets complicated because it also is used when you do not know each other, like on the street, at a restaurant, etc.

Then it’s a judgment call what to use depending on the context. Either there’s some social clue (age, location, class, etc.), or whoever goes first sets the tone, but it’s still pretty much along the lines of „would I call her Kathryn or Cpt. Janeway“.

That’s because you only metricated 40y ago.

I do plan to pick up BG3, and I've read that the combat is a little more quick-paced and hopefully forgiving, so I'm really looking forward to the release this week.

Mh, I don’t know. So I’m what’s (rightfully so) considered a filthy casual, I suck at builds, and I suck at strategy and tactics. I played D:OS2 on easy mode, and loved it. BG3 only has one mode at the moment, and I loved the main plot until here, especially since you can sneak around or negotiate with people to avoid direct conflict and still get the mission done. I feel D:OS2 had much more fighting than BG3.

That being said, there was one fight where I did not find any another solution outside of outright violence, and what initially was just my party against a similar sized group rather quickly escalated into a stand-off that had us outnumbered at least 3:1 and took hours. It was nice, everybody made it through, but it was a bit tedious tbh.

That's... what I said?

US eggs are washed and chlorined since the hens are not vaccinated, and once you wash them you need to refrigerate them.

And 7/200 is 3.5%, maybe you should read that article again…

good grief… 🤦‍♀️

I mean you really do not have to know anything about this technology or even physics at all to understand that they’re working on completely different parts of that technology. How can anyone have reading comprehension skills that bad and still need to die on their little hill?

Really, different countries are doing research on solid-state batteries, who’da thunk.

What does that have to do with China allegedly being an „appropriation committee“?

Sigh, here we go again…

Yes YOU don’t do that. Because you can’t.

Everybody in Europe can and does so. There’s nothing arcane or mysterious about the metric system. I have no issues telling you how many litres of water go into a 50 x 50 x 200 cm aquarium, or a pool with a 3.5 m diameter and 80 cm height. Good luck doing that with your inches and feet and quarts and gallons.

There’s nothing „more useful“ about either a foot or a meter. Either you know how much it is or you don’t. Everybody knows what a meter is. For me it’s a large step. My arm from elbow to fingertips is 50 cm. Or 1/2 m… A sheet of paper is 30 cm (actually it’s 297 mm, but that’s another story), and so are rulers. Which, btw, is very close to a „foot“.

Your foot btw most likely is not as long as a „foot“, and a small woman’s size is easily 20% off. And no, that’s not „in the ballpark“.

What does anything of that have to do with you quoting 50/200 as 25% not 4% 😂

It was a joke ;)

There is no word for that.

(But to be fair, if there was, this one would kind of work)

So you thought you’d add your own inaccurate numbers, okay.

Stay out of my inbox now, thx.

Edit: apparently that’s no longer true and I just didn’t notice: https://support.1password.com/autofill-behavior/

~I use 1Password, and I’m generally satisfied, but what really really sucks is that it only works with domains, but neither subdomains nor ports.~

~So if you’re running your own server that gets annoying extremely fast, because you will have a very long list of suggestions to wade through.~

With Bitwarden (IIRC) one issue is that you cannot save a password when you’re offline, and – again IIRC – it doesn’t even drop a warning about that.

D’oh! 🤦‍♀️ Of course, thanks for correcting this.

Or, it’s totally not a non-issue? Like, I remember the time when you had to carry around a fucking proprietary charger for every single fucking device?

Yeah, no shit, you can’t power your megaultragaminglaptop4000™ with a 5 V 500 mA charger. Whodathunk.

Those two reports have literally nothing in common except the words „breakthrough“ and „solid-state batteries“, lol.

You absolutely don’t understand anything at all, so please just stop talking. Thank you.

Huh, I haven’t noticed that, good to know, thx!

How many 39 ft rails do you need to build a 100 mile railroad?