StaggersAndJags

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you're looking for some logic in this mess, it's that we generally use metric for things regulated by the government and imperial for more informal things.

So road signs and food package sizes are mandated to be in metric, so we're forced to learn kilometers and grams there. But measurements of people and cooking temperatures are mostly used casually so we've stuck to old habits.

This leads to some ridiculous situations. For instance, we understand distances and fuel volumes in metric, but for a long long time we'd only talk about fuel economy in miles per gallon. Anyone who wanted to calculate fuel economy had to memorize the formulas to convert km to miles and litres to gallons.

Around me, this has finally changed in recent years and mostly it's just old timers still using MPG. (Which is good, not just because metric is easier in this case, but because measuring economy as a ratio of fuel over distance is just plain superior to the other way around.)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's why kbin should self-upvote by default. If only Michael Scotts are upvoting their own comments, then the Michael Scotts have an inherent advantage in comment visibility.

We're going to hear more from the Michael Scotts and less from the humble Pams.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for making this. I've been reading it a ton during my "break" from reddit.

One thing I noticed is that multi-part replies aren't captured by the archive. Here's an example with part 2 of a comment missing: https://ask-historians-archive.netlify.app/posts/zpjnpi.html

Anything that can be done about that, such as detecting comment chains where a person replies to their own comment?

Other than that, this is really a superior way to browse askhistorians. There are no moderator comments to skip over, and no threads with 30+ replies that are just a sea of [deleted].

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are tech/privacy enthusiasts known for being super into Wednesdays?

I'd expect them to be... I don't know, complaining about Prime Day sales today. Or taking about something remotely interesting. And I bet they are, but Mastodon isn't finding it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Processed cheese is highly meltable. To maintain the shape in the picture, wouldn't the middle of the cheese stack have to be cold?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There have always been a lot of wingnuts in the U.S., but at one time you could assume that if someone reached a position of power in the military or government, they probably weren't completely insane.

That time has passed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Slightly rewriting thousands of pages of text to avoid being buried by Google sounds like a good job for ChatGPT.

Algorithms thwarting other algorithms... smells like justice.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It looks great, but I think it should give the names of the commenters on each comment for credit and transparency.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I'm not surprised that desperate politicians are still going to this well, but I'm pleased to see the media no longer taking the bait. You can practically hear this journalist's eyes rolling. "This shit again?"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, if I'd been given a chance to buy Twitch in its first year for $100, I would have said no. I play a lot of video games but watching video game streaming for fun is beyond my comprehension. It was one of my first "No, it's the children who are wrong" moments.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is this working though? I turned that setting on a week or more ago and I've never received a notification despite getting comment replies. I thought maybe I just didn't know what notifications look like, but I got one when someone mentioned my username.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

To what end? This was embarrassing for everyone involved.

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