The decimeter is certainly an overlooked unit, and it's a shame it's relegated to relative obscurity - I use it occasionally even if people give me weird looks. Ideally I think something in the range of 20-30cm would make for a nice base unit - about the length of a forearm. Deci-units around the length of a finger segment, and centi-units being a slightly larger millimetre-equivalent. A deca-unit would be about the height of a doorframe.

Because I have had to work with American companies as part of my job for the past couple years. For the entirety of my personal life and the rest of my professional life I use metric. I'll grant you I should have said 'almost exclusively' in my previous comment, but I think that's just splitting hairs.

Don't misunderstand me, imperial sucks. I just wish the metric system had defined the metre to be smaller, that's all.

See my other comments in this thread. I think most people would prefer if the common measurements they made with common units landed in the number range of about 0.2-10-ish. The human brain is good at visually estimating small groups so any unit system should try to lean into that and put the scale of commonly measured values in that range. Obviously as things get bigger you end up with tens or hundreds of units which start to lose semantic meaning, especially for quick estimations or relative comparisons, so you should start thinking of switching units at this point. Likewise when values get below about 0.1 they get hard to visualise, so most people switch units here.

My point being - I think the base unit of one metre is too large for most daily tasks - most things that are around a human scale end up being less than one metre, and I think the centimetre is too small - most things on the human scale end up being dozens of centimetres at least. Both fall outside that ideal range of 'a small handful' which the brain is good intuitively and subconsciously working with.

You're right, I have no interest in sports. Though in that case under this modified metric a decametre would be approximately on the same scale as the previous metre.

Don't get me wrong, imperial sucks, but the scale of the typical measurements with typical units lands nicely in what the human brain is good at visualising - small groups of up to about 10 (see my comments to other people in this thread). I think most people would prefer when the common measurements they make with common units end up in the range of 0.2 to 10-ish. Centimetres are too small for that and you measure using dozens or hundreds of them, which starts to lose semantic meaning, which makes visual estimation a bit trickier, especially with comparative distances. You start thinking in terms of tens or hundreds of cm visually to keep it under control which is just another layer of cognitive load. I think the perfect unit system would avoid this as much as practical. The existing metric metre is fine for outdoor activities, but I would argue most people aren't out measuring fields all day, they're looking at things on the same scale as their own body for the most part. Metres are a bit big for that.

No, I'm not. I live in a commonwealth country that transitioned to metric well before I was born. Recently I've had to work with American companies as part of my job.

Don't get me wrong, the imperial system is horrible, I just wish the metric system had a unit closer in length to feet or inches. Yards would be an annoying unit for human-scale measurements too. Even the name implies it's usage - it's for measuring (small) areas of land, which are usually much bigger than humans after all. That's not a problem in imperial though since no-one would say 'my pen is 0.1 yards long', they'd measure in inches instead because it comes out as a nice, human brain-friendly small number like 4 or 6.

That's not the point I'm trying to make. You can derive a length from any number of physical constants to make it reproducible, but considering the divisor of exactly ten million suggests the metric committee were far more interested in making something 'clean' than something human-friendly. They could have basically done what they do with the modern redefinitions of the metre - the distance travelled by light in 1/299792458 ths of a second. Obviously they chose that number to keep the definition in line with the original, but they could have done that with the original definition to make the metre basically any length they wanted, but they didn't.

True, I converted metric to imperial with minimal rounding, as I didn't want to give either an unfair advantage. You could round up again to 5-6.2 or down for 4.8-6.2 but my point stands. I think most people would prefer if the units they used most often were in the range of 0.2-10-ish. I don't think that's unreasonable.

You can memorise that a person is 10 billion nanoangstroms tall if you like, but surely you can't be saying that it's more convenient than using a scale that's the same order of magnitude as the thing itself. That's why we use the metric system after all, to give many units as close to the scale of what we're trying to measure as possible in a standardised way.

All measurements are arbitrary

Perhaps in a perfectly rational world, but humans are silly creatures. The human brain evolved to deal with small numbers. Distinguishing one vs two lions is important, but distinguishing 14 vs 15 lions is not, so our brain immediately recognises numbers up to about six and has to rely on conscious counting for anything larger. If I told you that "This dog is two ducks tall" you'd have a pretty good idea of how big the dog is, but if I said it was "20 mice tall" you might have trouble visualising, or worse "450 ants tall" at which point I would have no idea. Our brains don't innately have the ability to accurately conceptualise large numbers, which is why the metric prefix system works so well - it keeps numbers relatively small. I think the same logic applies to decimals and fractions. Simple fractions like halves through to perhaps fifths can be visually conceptualised at a glance, but beyond that it requires calculation.

What that means to me is that ideally your measurement unit should be big enough to be able to measure most things you deal with on a daily basis using no more than say 10 units (arbitrary, I could be persuaded down to 6 or up to 20), and still measuring most things without going smaller than about 0.2 units. As an example, consider human height (after all, what could be more a more human measurement?). The average person is between 1.5 and 1.9m tall, which is not a great start since we're riding close to the 0.2 'lower resolution' just describing the whole range. You could use centimetres but then you're looking at 150 or 190 which is much too large to visualise nicely. Decimetres is better but not great. Feet is a pretty good fit for this, since that'd be about 4.9 to 6.2 ft. We haven't violated either the max or minimum requirements and we still have a decent resolution within the range too.

having easy conversions is much more useful than a "natural" base unit.

I agree, but my whole point is that we didn't have to choose!

Nice try! I live in a metric country and use exclusively metric units.

It seems to be even higher, several studies suggest it's closer to 50%:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c05002

Three different studies predicted emitted tire wear proportions (TWP and TRWP) of total emitted MP [microplastic] loads in the environment (both aquatic and terrestrial) for around 45%. (6,7,52) These calculations were mainly based on global, annual production data and matched the TWP proportions of around 40% in this study. However, since C-PVC was excluded here, a comparison of the percentages is not trivial.

Firstly, I'm not sure where you got the impression that Rust is designed to replace C. It's definitely targetted at the C++ crowd.

The string comparison with Rust actually points out one of my problems with C: All those Rust types exist for a reason - they should behave differently. That means that in C these differences are hidden, implicit and up to the programmer to remember. Guess who is responsible for every bug ever? The programmer. Let's go through the list:

&str - a reference to a UTF-8 string on the stack, hence fixed size.

String - a handle to a UTF-8 string on the heap. As a result, it's growable.

&[u8] - a reference to a dynamically sized slice of u8s. They're not even ASCII characters, just u8s.

&[u8;N] - a reference to an array of u8s. Unlike above they have a fixed size.

Vec - a handle to a heap-allocated array of u8s.

&u8 - a reference to a u8. This isn't a string type at all.

OsStr - a compatibility layer for stack-allocated operating system strings. No-one can agree on what these should look like - Windows is special, as usual.

OsString - a compatibility layer for heap-allocated OS strings. Same as above.

Path - a compatibility layer for file paths, on the stack. Again, Windows being the special child demands special treatment.

PathBuf - a heap-allocated version of Path.

CStr - null-terminated stack-allocated string.

CString - null-terminated heap-allocated string.

&'static str - a string stored in the data segment of the executable.

If you really think all of these things ahould be treated the same then I don't know what to tell you. Half of these are compatibility layers that C doesn't even distinguish between, others are for UTF-8 which C also doesn't support, and the others also exist in C, but C's weaker type system can't distinguish between them, leaving it up to the programmer to remember. You know what I would do as a C dev if I had to deal with all these different use cases? I would make a bunch of typedefs, so the compiler could help me with types. Oh, wait...

I dislike C because it plays loosey-goosey with a lot of rules, and not in an opt-in 'void*' kind of way. You have to keep in your head that C is barely more than a user-friendly abstraction over assembly in a lot of cases. 90% of the bugs I see on a day to day basis are integer type mismatches that result in implicit casts that silently screw up logic. I see for loops that don't loop over all the elements they should. I see sentinel values going unchecked. I see absolutely horrible preprocessor macros that have no type safety, often resulting in unexpected behaviour that can take hours or days to track down.

These are all problems that have been solved in other, newer languages. I have nothing personal against C, but we've had 40+ years to come up with great features that not only make the programmer's life easier, but make for more robust programs too. And at this point the list is getting uncomfortably long: We have errors as types, iterators, type-safe macro systems, compile-time code, etc.. C is falling behind, not just in safety, but in terms of ease of use as well.

Just us and these terrible men – for it is mostly men – who fell trees and spend other people’s lives as pocket change.

Tripped right at the finish line. What a great way to turn a clear call to action against the leaders in charge into meaningless gender-based infighting instead.

Call me cynical, but I firmly believe that ES6 is more useful to Bethesda as a perpetual 'carrot on a stick' than anything they would get from actually releasing it. The people that made Morrowind, Oblivion, and even Skyrim what they are no longer work at Bethesda, but the goodwill of the series remains in people's minds, and they associate that with Bethesda, even if a majority of their modern releases have been dumpster fires for one reason or another.

There's a reason we've gone almost 15 years without a mainline elder scrolls game, and I'm pretty sure it's because even Bethesda knows that they likely can't capture that magic again.

Video evidence is relatively easy to fix, you just need camera ICs to cryptographically sign their outputs. If the image/video is tampered with (or even re-encoded) the signature won't match. As the private key is (hopefully!) stored securely in the hardware IC taking the photo/video, any generated images or videos can't be signed by such a private key.

To play devil's advocate for a second - no-one is stealing anything, the code is still right where it was. If I willingly give someone a sandwich, did they steal it? Of course not.

There was a reason that PS chose FreeBSD, and it was because of the licence. If FreeBSD used the GPL then PS wouldn't have used it, hence there never would have been a FreeBSD gaming OS either way.

During my six month usage of Manjaro (my introduction to Arch-based distros), my desktop broke four times and booted me to the terminal. Almost once a month. I told myself this was the price you paid for living on the edge, using a rolling release. I switched to EndeavourOS and have not had a broken desktop in two whole years.

Manjaro's handling of AUR packages is fundamentally wrong and with their design decisions it cannot be fixed. You either give up the AUR entirely, or resign yourself to constantly breaking AUR packages and having to try and fix them.

Manjaro's handling of kernels via a GUI sounds good until you realise it's entirely manual and if you don't keep checking you will end up running an unsupported, out of date kernel with Arch packages that expect a newer one. Again, Manjaro violates Arch's golden rule of avoiding partial upgrades by holding your kernels back until you manually update them in their GUI. If you're running an Arch-based distro 99% of the time you want the latest kernel and an LTS kernel as a backup, but these are already in Arch as packages (and are thus updated in lockstep with your packages, as designed) so you don't need Manjaro's special GUI. Now if you wanted a particular kernel for some reason then sure, but Manjaro's GUI doesn't even let you pick the exact version you want anyway! All you can pick is the latest version of each major release.

If you're anything like I was at the time, you think you like Manjaro but what you actually like is Arch. Manjaro just gets in the way.

I was surviving with Ubuntu, I had my complaints but I figured 'that's just how it is' on Linux, that it was the same everywhere. I didn't even realise what I was missing until I switched.

I got a hardware upgrade at one point, so in order to get those new drivers ASAP I tried an Arch-based distro, with plans to switch back once drivers became available. I never moved back.

The two big reasons I stayed was ironically enough the lack of good Ubuntu documentation, and the PPA system. Ubuntu is used a lot, but there's not really formal documentation anywhere, only random tutorials online (most likely out of date and never updated) and people on forums talking about their problems. By contrast the Arch wiki is the gold standard of Linux documentation, there's just no comparison. Even on Ubuntu I found myself using it as a reference from time to time.

Regarding PPAs, the official Ubuntu package list is strangely small so if you're like me and find yourself needing other software, even mainstream software like Docker, you'll be faffing about with PPAs. So if you want to install Docker, instead of typing sudo apt install docker You instead have to type:

# Add Docker's official GPG key: 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg 
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings 
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg 
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg 
# Add the repository to Apt sources: 
echo \ "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \ $(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \ sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null sudo apt-get update

These are the official install instructions, by the way. This is intended behaviour. The end user shouldn't have to deal with all this. This feels right out of the 90's to me.

Instead of PPAs, Arch has the Arch User Repository (AUR). Holy moly is the AUR way nicer to work with. Granted, we're not quite comparing apples to apples here since the AUR (typically) builds packages from source, but bear with me. You install an AUR package manager like yay (which comes preinstalled on my flavour of Arch, EndeavourOS). yay can manage both your system and AUR packages. Installing a package (either official or AUR) looks like yay packageNameHere. That's it. A full system upgrade like sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade is a single command: yay -Syu, a bit cryptic but much shorter. The AUR is fantastic not just for the ease of use, but for sheer breadth of packages. If you find some random project on github there's probably an AUR package for it too. Because it builds from source an AUR package is essentially just a fancy build script based on the project's own build instructions, so they're super easy to make, which means there's a lot of them.

You might argue 'but building from source might fail! Packages are more reliable!', which is somewhat true. Sometimes AUR builds can fail (very rarely in my experience), but so can PPAs. Because PPAs are often made to share one random package they can become out of date easily if their maintainer forgets or simply stops updating it. By contrast AUR packages can be marked out of date by users to notify the maintainer, and/or the maintainer role can be moved to someone else if they go silent. If a PPA goes silent there's nothing you can do. Also, since an AUR package is just a fancy build script you can edit the build script yourself and get it working until the package gets an update, too. PPAs by comparison are just a black box - it's broken until it gets updated.

Moral of the story? Don't be afraid to just give something a go. Mint will always be waiting for you if you don't like it.

If you watched his videos you would know that the other chainmail grill scrubbers only appeared after he released his. The price difference is literally the central thesis of the video series - because the US has almost entirely outsourced manufacturing to countries like China and Vietnam, buying products from there are cheaper due to economies of scale. This gives those countries great economic leverage, and the US should not have been so happy to outsource. This can of course be reverted with sustained effort, that Destin is hoping to be a part of.

What's your ambient humidity? It's usually around 80% here and I can barely get my dryboxes down to 30%

Not many people know the history of the treaty. It basically was signed under duress. Prior to the meeting where it was signed all but one of the Maori tribal leaders were against signing the treaty, even the Maori version. What was said at the signing was purposely never recorded, but considering the existential threat of the New Zealand Company (NZC) on the horizon (the primary reason a treaty was even being discussed), it is believed that the Maori leaders were basically given the choice of 'sign this treaty and be a part of the British empire, or don't and have no legal rights against the whims of the New Zealand Company'.

The New Zealand Company was a private British company with the goal of obtaining as much land as possible at any cost, and the Maori would have had zero legal protections unless they were part of the British empire. Without a treaty the NZC would have been able to push out the Maori entirely with no repercussions. The British people who brought the treaty to the Maori leaders knew this was coming, and wanted to avoid it.

Signing the treaty was a quick and dirty solution to the quickly approaching NZC and was responsible for preventing the worst of the damage, but it is a very flawed document. The translations were rushed, and vague. Basically everyone was against signing it, but they knew it was the least worst option available. It was never designed to be the core document underpinning a nation, merely a speed bump to stall the private annexation of New Zealand.