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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • I have one, it’s been great.

    That said, “exactly what the problem is” isn’t always the same as telling you the solution. I had a “misfire on cyl #3” error or something like that, which can be a number of things. Replacing all the coils and plugs myself was probably still cheaper than taking it to the shop though!







  • Prescriptive vs. descriptive is different in colloquial language than in science.

    If my data logger captures 1kB/km, how many bytes/meter is that? In every other quantitative unit I can think of, the k should cancel out; but if you want computers to be special, that’s your preference.

    Metric sucks. Powers of ten are arbitrary, a fluke of biology. Powers of two are the only sensible way to make a system of measurements.

    Then why are you trying to shoehorn binary into decimal? As in: why are you using decimal prefixes in the first place? Answer is probably that most people have intuition behind powers of ten. You can easily express in log2-bytes instead (a GiB is 30, a TiB is 33…etc.). Be the change you want to see!

    I’m born and raised in the USA, and while imperial units can be handy for a few every day tasks, there’s a reason why the sciences in the US tend to use metric.

    Regarding cooking, I’ll stick to metric, measured by weight. I can double, halve, or multiply my recipe by pi, and all I have to do is look for a different number on my scale.



  • Giga, Mega, Kilo…these are all SI prefixes; they differ by a factor of one thousand, which is very clean in base ten.

    Ten in binary systems isn’t special, but two is; and two to the ten is very nearly a thousand, and a thousand separates the major SI prefixes. This is a neat coincidence, but should not IMHO change the meaning of the prefix.

    Metric units are awesome in large part because of the use of prefixes; messing up the meaning of prefixes is a disservice to the SI/metric system. Giga == billion independent of the context. A light-year is close to 10 petameters, but no one would claim it’s exactly 10Pm.

    Now, if you want to call it an “imperial gigabyte,” by all means…