Man, if you told me a couple months ago, that I would stop using Reddit, I wouldn’t believe you. I’ve been on it over a decade. It took Spez ONE MONTH to undo everything and make that a reality.
While it would he handy to have everything integrated, it's not always vital. We don't need to convert kilograms to seconds very often. Artificially enforced systems have always had trouble replacing older anachronistic ones that are otherwise still useful. Ask people in the UK about their cars' efficiency and you'll often get an answer in miles per gallon.
There's nothing magical about 10, either, other than the accidents of evolution that left us with ten fingers. Base 12 is also extremely convenient, and comes from Sumerians counting with their thumb against each of the three joints on 4 fingers. Go through that process once for each finger on the other hand, and you get 60. And of course, in any industry where things are packed into packages, like nearly everything we buy, dozens fit better than tens. 60 divides very neatly into many convenient and geometrically simple fractions, and a lot of what we do with circles benefits from this.
We probably would have been better standardizing on a base unit that's a power of two, which has more mathematical weight than ten does.
I was writing a reply but you said most of it, so I’ll add here. There has also been attempts and/or proposals for decimal time, but the base 12 system is quite rooted. For example during the French revolution: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Furthermore, there's something to be said for units that are "the right size" as it were. It's hard to measure the distance from your house to the store in parsecs for example, unless you own 1:1 scale copy of the millennium falcon.
A day cycle is a time unit that has been thrust upon us by physics and biology, and we have to then split it into useful segments, and base 10 honestly does a poor job of that. You end up having to describe most things as 0.5 decimal minutes or 2 decimal minutes depending upon how you want to round them, since very few things actual sit close to the amount of time described by 1 decimal minute.
Whether that's because our culture thinks in "minutes" or not is debatable, but the point is that trying to move to such a system is nearly impossible, at least at the moment.
As you said there is really nothing special about 10 and you could easily redefine prefixes to whatever base you want.
In base 12 a day has 20 hours, an hour has 50 minutes and a week has 120 hours. The numbers are as arbitrary as before. Except the 0th index is always 0 in these cases.
While the origin has been explained well, a base change really doesn’t solve the underlying problem with time as we define it. I don’t think this has a good solution and probably doesn’t need one.
So tired of being advertised to. The hilarious / depressing thing is that these companies make a few dollars per user per quarter, so basically our privacy is sold for $5. Id rather just donate that to a lemmy instance.
An example, if there are like 10+ different communities for “technology”, do I really have to subscribe to all of them just to get the same experience I would have gotten on /r/technology?
r/technology was never the only technology subreddit. There was retro, retrotechnology, who knows perhaps something like bambootechnology, cartechnology, etc. So you never had that experience. You had the same experience you would and do have here, except there it was tinted with a veil of capitalism to keep you submissive. What you are seeing now, is the normal, always has been (insert “always has been” meme). The “big pharmas” of the internet are actually the outlier.
As for the task of “clumping” those communities, I’d surmise in the “content fetching” form that would be the task of a community aggregator, like lemmy itself if eventually a “lists” feature is added, or if communities are allowed to follow each other. Or, if we keep the cross-aggregation separate from the content posting, so that it’s possible to do both or either witout requiring a super VPS, maybe a webring could do it. I remember webrings from the 90s. They were cool.
Wish we could make slice catch on. Not only for the reason you mentioned, but it also implies that what you are looking at is a part of a whole. So communities are a slice of lemmy.
The short answer to why we use it is that we inherited it - base 12 of hours/months from the Egyptians and base 60 of second and minutes from Mesopotamians (who got it from the Sumerians).
Egyptians used base 12 a lot for a similar reason that we use base 10 a lot. We use 10 because we have ten fingers, and they used 12 because one hand has 12 knuckles (they'd count on one hand). But it was handy because there are 12 lunar cycles, so it helped keep things more consistent.
Base 60 is also handy because 60 is first number divisible by the first six counting numbers and by 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. If you use 60, you have options! Note that we also use 60 for angles and dividing up the globe.
Yep. Your four fingers have three knuckles each. You count along them with your thumb. Then each count of 12 is counted with an extended finger on your other hand. Extend all five fingers and you have 60.
I accidentally came upon this same system messing around during long periods of boredom, and now I do all my counting this way. I also include the base joint of each finger so I can count 4 per digit
Yes, 60 is pretty much a goldilocks number that is small enough to be easily graspable for most humans, but still a highly composite number (11 factors!) so it is neatly divisible into many smaller units.
As someone who used those during their peak, I’m well aware of the risks of getting unwanted stuff, not to mention that you’re fully exposed within the network.
I have been using it behind a vpn and so far never had a problem. I have never had so many “thank you” from any other old school p2p software
I find Elden Ring a bit frustrating because of the complete lack of any way to keep track of quests. I've resorted to using a notes app. Even then, I'm sure I've missed off finishing some of the earlier stuff from before I started taking notes.
First off, lol if you think Reddit wasn’t full of politics every bit as much if not more than Facebook.
Second, what’s happening is the opposite. The older users, the ones that remember a pre-facebook internet, the ones that are not pre-programmed to accept whatever the app in the app store tell them, they are the ones leaving.
The young are actually increasing on Reddit because it’s pandering to less tech literate, more TikTok-focused userbase now with the official app. The type of users that need algorithms to tell them what to do because they’ve long since failed to learn to actually use technology smartly.
The type of user that was shocked to learn there was such a thing a third party app.
Those are what reddit wants, and it’s what they’ll get.
I’m GenX and find myself slowing migrating away from the internet entirely as it relates to social interaction and entertainment.
I still need it for bill paying and whatnot, but I’ve grown exhausted from the ubiquitous hate and vitriol of users and the ever increasing greed and attempts at overall control of my existence from the platforms.
I’m starting to feel like some crazy anti government prepper, but towards the Internet and corporations rather than the government.
kbin.life
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