@civodul Matlab comes to mind. I know it's not open source, but that's beside the point here.

@clacke I'm not impressed by Harari. He's just making stuff up and stating it with extreme confidence. Worse than Dawkins.

@clacke Oh, chemistry pedantry. I was hoping for some ridiculous etiquette pedantry about the proper way to hold a salt shaker.

@clacke There's pedantry about table salt?

@clacke I abandoned it at some point. It was fun for the first couple of seasons, then it descended into a generic "shadowy group has Big Plans" plot, the zombie aspect becoming mostly irrelevant.

@bean Stroustrup should be very careful talking about programming languages.

@clacke @adwright Could be a bit of both.

@clacke @adwright Maybe it's easier to rise to the top if you're in a safe constituency.

@clacke The whole thing being fiction means there are two options:
1. The script writers are following some guidelines that call for this naming convention.
2. They just started doing it for no particular reason.

If it's in some guidelines, those might of course include an in-universe explanation that has never been explicitly mentioned on screen.

@juliank @ifixcoinops My previous workstation was a 6-core Intel something from 2010, and it was fine for web browsing and such. However, replacing it with a 16-core AMD EPYC with 128 GB RAM and NVMe storage made a huge difference for OpenEmbedded builds. Faster storage also makes a noticeable difference when working with large git repos like the Linux kernel. The new system also uses half as much power when idle (more under full load).

@clacke What's the real reason?

@geoffl @Arcaik @j_bertolotti @johncarlosbaez I think it's fine to use a power of 10 (or whatever radix your number system has) scaling factor for convenience, at least in casual situations.

@johncarlosbaez It could have been worse. Imagine if a Frenchman, say, had been working on the same things at the same time, only with the opposite convention, and French physicists then stubbornly stuck with it to this day while everybody else followed Franklin.

@Arcaik @geoffl @j_bertolotti @johncarlosbaez It probably varies between languages, but at least in Swedish, decimetres are quite often used in casual speech when giving an approximate size of something, e.g. "I guess it was a few decimetres, maybe half a metre."

@geoffl @clacke @johncarlosbaez @j_bertolotti @Arcaik I'm going to start confusing people by using unusual units like decigram and hectometre. Or deka- anything (except decadence).

@clacke What now?

@ken_fallon @clacke Please provide alt images with your text.

@ainmosni Maybe it would be a good idea to stop saddling men as a group with what basically amounts to a variation of original sin.

@clacke I'm told I look young for my age. Maybe you do too.

@szescstopni @neil That has been studied: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/04/spiders-lsd-drugs-experiment-1971