I really hope the US will at some point adopt the objectively better metric system!

Me too. I’m trying! 🤝

Ah, yes. Healthline. I had forgotten they exist because I downranked their site in Kagi.

Also brought to you buy Healthline: Rose Quartz Crystal: Meaning, Healing, and How to Use

Cool! Thanks for sharing!

Now that I think about it, I think I own a carpenter’s measuring tape. Maybe that’s why they don’t call out cm.

Also just to be clear, my measuring tape is definitely not a standard tape you can buy at a local hardware store. It took some effort for me to find a metric-only measuring tape.

centimeters is probably the most common in households

I’m curious, where are you from? In the US, I’d say we think of centimeters as a pseudo-inch, so I think I understand why people would gravitate to centimeters here.

But do other countries use centimeters as much? I’m especially curious about really metric countries like Japan or (who else?) France? Germany? I wouldn’t be surprised if Canada or UK use centimeters.

Related: centimetres or millimetres

It’s great that the units are linked like this. I actually had to use this once. I didn’t have a container to measure out 1liter of water, but I did have a kitchen scale that could measure 1,000 grams! 🙌🏽

The biggest lesson in my own journey and seeing a lot of people online talk about trying to do the conversion is that people get overly concerned with precision when first making the switch.

YES! I think this is because they’re converting back to imperial units. You can always tell when someone was thinking in imperial because the metric units are like 17.4C or 8.12mm or 98.7km/h. For sure, things don’t need to be that precise. When I convert either way I always convert to a nice number. 100 km/h -> 60mi/h

It’s just like translating language, you don’t translate the literal words of a sentence, you translate the overall idea.

Ah, great link! Thanks! I also decided to try out a new font! 😆

never used measuring cups … We use cans

Sure, yeah, that’s what I meant. Some physical artifact I can use to measure liquid in ml.

https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/OffersOfProduct/204600175_-messbecher-935000-0-5-liter-bruchsicher-huenersdorff.html

These look perfect! Thanks!

A good base is knowing milli is a thousandth and kilo is a 1000

YES! I feel like a common pitfall people run into is trying to bust out all sorts of fancy prefixes, deka, hecto, centi, deci, etc and then people get overwhelmed by all of that.

The most common prefixes are kilo 1000x or milli 1/1000. That’s all you should focus on.

The next order of measurment is just ±10^x

There’s a strong possibility that I’m just dumb, but this used to trip me up at first. Especially if I was on the spot: 1250mm to m, go! Uh, 125.0? Uh, 12.50?! Uh, 1.250! Yeah!

Or 1.5L to mL, go! Uh, 150mL? Uh, 1500mL! Yeah!

Also, realizing that the most popular prefixes are either kilo 1000x or milli 1/1000 helped. For example, cm don’t seem very common, like dimensions are almost always in mm.

I heard someone say once, the metric system is better by a thousand.

yard

Except in US handegg, do people still use yards? It sounds old-timey to me now. Normally, I either hear people talk in feet or miles, but never yards. Even in school (California), I vaguely remember hearing “X yard dash” when I was a little kid, but that definitely changed to “X meter dash” as I got older.

YES! Do it brother! 👏 I’m US born and raised and I’ve voluntarily switched to metric a while ago. Metric is actually more intuitive to me now.

I started with just memorizing all the conversions but that’s literally just adding another step.

Personally, I think this is a mistake. What worked for me was to start building reference points in metric directly. No conversions.

• yes: “Oh, it’s nice outside. What temperature is it? 20C, great. I’ll remember I like 20C.”
• no: “I like 70F, what’s that in Celsius?”
• yes: “Wow. That’s long board. How long is it? 2m, great. I’ll remember 2m is long.”
• no: “What’s 6ft to meters?”

Don’t ask, “What’s this in metric?” just ask directly “How long/fast/heavy/hot is this thing?”

You need to get out there and start measuring and experiencing stuff. Measure parts of your body to build more reference points. For example, I know from the floor to my waist is about 1m, from the tip of my index finger to the first bend line is about 2.5cm. My weight is about 65kg. Normal body temperature is about 37C, but 38C and above is a fever. My mom’s house is about 30km away.

Switching temperature to C is pretty easy, that’s a good start. Here are some other tools that may help.

• meter only tape measure (I love this tape measure) measure the length of everything
• gram only kitchen scale measure the weight of all your food
• newton-meter only torque wrench tighten all the bolts

Also, did you know Amazon US limits the products available to us? But you can break out and shop from Amazon Japan, for example, and get products that aren’t available from Amazon US. I’ve found that Amazon Japan has way more metric-only options than other places.

I really like buying metric only tools because:

• it removes the possibility of relapse, forcing you to build new reference points
• it removes the possibility of other people messing with the units
• it removes clutter from the UI, making it easier to use

Eventually, you could switch your car too, but I wouldn’t recommend you do that right now. After a few months, you’ll start getting the hang of metric more. It really doesn’t take that long to adjust.

P.S. Does anyone know where I could get some metric-only measuring cups cans, containers, vessels?

spends all day comparing fonts, instead of working

Damn you, Lemmy!!!

Yep. 200% agree. I still post questions on SO, but when I don’t get any answers, then I have to go to Discord… :(

the whole XY Problem

lol. I hate this. Just answer the damn question or don’t. I’m not asking you to validate if what I’m doing is weird or not. It’s weird! I know! That’s none of your business. Just answer the damn question or don’t. Simple as.

get closed as a duplicate of the similar post

I’ve definitely had this happen to be before. It’s annoying.

What I do in that case is proactively say:

I’m facing problem X. I’ve tried searching for solutions. I found post X2 and X3 that are similar, but my problem is actually different because of Y.

Sometimes it helps.

Also, if you see people being assholes you can report them. There’s a flag for “unfriendly or unkind”. I’ve definitely used that before.

Even without LLMs, it’s possible StackOverflow would have eventually faded into irrelevance

Yeah, exactly. A lot of groups have a Discord :( or other forums where people ask questions. I know I’ve had to ask questions on Svelte’s Discord :( for example. And I think even once on some YouTube influencer’s Slack…

Sucks cuz both of those places are silos and my questions and answers are forever lost.

Music

I’ve been using Navidrome for a while now and it’s been great!

Same thought! I tried a NAS once and it was just a slower, more locked down version of a regular server I could build myself.

I’m not sure I fully understand the point of a NAS. I guess, is it supposed to be an off-the-shelf server for non technical people?

Depends on your major, I guess.

My university’s CS program basically required GNU+Linux (as I’ve recently took to calling it). It was great actually.

Hopefully you don’t have to use Photoshop, anon.