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Common mistakes when using the metric system (www.nayuki.io)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes. This is a hill I'll die on.

The byte isn't even the base unit. Wanna talk about 1000 bits? Fine, that would be totally useless and confusing, but at least it would be consistent. Using decimal prefixes to describe binary numbers is just nonsensical. It's like trying to round off calendar days to a decimal approximation. Is the metric year 300 days? Fuck no, that's dumb,and so is saying a kilobyte is only 1000 bytes. The prefix is just a short hand, it's obvious that it's precise meaning can and should change based on the unit, especially when forcing a decimal number system fails to be useful.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

I'm with you.

For me it was all the marketing shenanigans where you bought a 500GB drive and it had not 500GB but some multiple of ten * 500 bytes that started it all.

Leg them use kibibytes or whatever stupid name grrrr

/Rant off

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

1 kibibyte is 1024 bytes

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Why should we change?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Yeah, not cool with trying to retroactively change definitions of units.

1000 bytes isn't meaningful. 1024 is.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

stacking prefixes is disallowed (e.g. 10 k km), and because using mega is both correct and more concise (e.g. 10 Mm).

If you're talking distances and you say Mm, I'm far more likely to assume you mean millimetres. It might be technically correct, but it's bad communication.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, he had me with him until I got to there.

Screw off telling people there's something wrong with using 10k km. It's widely accepted and far easier for normal people to understand. There are also plenty of scenarios where using a single, fixed unit (whether km or kg) is just better than using different units for different things.

At least scientific notation gives a clear numeric indication of scale. Even if you use the entire range of metric daily, you're taking half a second to compare any time there's mismatched units.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Screw off telling people there's something wrong with using 10k km.

Yeah, it's not even a double prefix like the article implies. It's 10 with a suffix, and m with a prefix.

Also, no one outside of scientific papers is going to type the degree symbol for temperature because it's not a common feature of keyboards.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Of english keyboards. Which honestly annoys the hell out of me because I am very used to german keyboards which do have it, but I switched to UK layout at some point because I generally prefer it. It's like the one thing I miss.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Some of these are annoying and wrong, but some are acceptable and the author is being overly pedantic. But I guess in the strictest environment (e.g. a scientific paper) even the acceptable deviations should be avoided.