namingthingsiseasy

@namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is your pet peeve in 2024?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Website redesigns. Just more whitespace all over the place, less information on the screen, and more trouble trying to get anything done.

  Github is especially bad about this. I’m so tired of only being able to fit about 50 lines of code on the screen at a time, or issues with a similar lack of information density. I can understand this paradigm for websites that you only use once every year or so, but for something that most people use regularly every day, it’s such a backwards anti-productivity trend. I hate it… hope it dies someday.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyday, as an American⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, another issue with what you’re suggesting is that people have to memorize several conversion factors as well. Inherently, you only have to be able to convert inches -> cm and pounds -> kg, but unless you want to do even more math in your head, you also have to remember feet -> cm, yards -> cm, miles -> cm, square feet -> square meters, cubic feet -> cubic meters (phew, that’s just all the length conversions), pounds -> kg, ounces -> grams, pounds -> grams, cups -> grams (for every fluid you might want to measure), litres -> gallons, litres -> pints, etc.

  Or you could just go through the one-time effort of actually using the metric system so you don’t have to carry this mental burden with you everywhere you go…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyday, as an American⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The problems with that are:

  1. hardly anyone knows the conversion factor

  2. other people aren’t going to do the math in their head

  That’s on them

  them == everybody in this case. Practically, nobody is going to do what you suggest - instead, they will ask people who use metric to do the conversion for them. And why should we be responsible for doing the work when they are the ones who refuse to use the system that 96% of the world has adopted?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyday, as an American⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How is this supposed to be considered using the metric system? If you tell someone that you weigh 80kg and he doesn’t have a clue what you mean, then you’re not really using the metric system, are you?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyday, as an American⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One is clearly more applicable for day-to-day life.

  And yet, 96% of the world uses the “wrong” system…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elder scrolls⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I hated the trend of flat buttons. Then they removed the buttons. Then they basically removed the entire scrollbar altogether.

  At this point, I’d happily go back to the age of flat buttons. That’s how bad things have gotten…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elder scrolls⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s really depressing how often I have to turn off CSS entirely just to view a webpage. I could of course always go into the inspector and turn off the bad CSS, but Gecko-based browsers fortunately have “View -> Page Style -> No Style” which is must easier and faster.

  And seriously, whoever invented the font-weight CSS property can burn in hell. Ditto for whoever decided that we should only be allowed to read light grey text on slightly lighter grey background.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elder scrolls⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In case you weren’t aware, there are extensions that you can use to restore the older (better) UIs. Here are a couple:

  • addons.mozilla.org/…/wikipedia-vector-skin/
  • addons.mozilla.org/en-US/…/classic-wikipedia/

  There are probably some for other browsers as well. I don’t use them though. I instead wrote myself a tampermonkey script to change it:

  if (!window.location.search.contains('useskin')) {
    var new_url = window.location.protocol
        + "//" + window.location.hostname
        + window.location.pathname;
    if (window.location.search == "") {
      new_url = new_url + "?useskin=monobook";
    } else {
      new_url = new_url + window.location.search + "&useskin=monobook";
    }
    new_url = new_url + window.location.hash;
    window.location.replace(new_url);
  }
  

  You can compare the available wikipedia styles on this page to see which one you like best: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=mono…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨temperature⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I could be wrong on this, but I think Kelvin is basically required for thermodynamic measurements. Entropy measurements, for example, depend on ratios between temperatures relative to absolute zero. You could still manage using centigrade of course, but you would have to offset all of your temperature measurements by 273.15

  Probably a lot of other physical applications that also depend on having an absolute zero reference, but that’s the only one I can think of for now.