What’s the point in having an AI run the search and present the found answer for you, when you just ran the search yourself and gets the AI finding presented?
As this point AI helpers are just a layer that hides the details from the original search. It’s useless for this. AI is wonderful for lots of stuff, but this just isn’t it. I used to laugh when people used the Google search box to find Google so they could search in Google, but that is exactly what AI is doing for us now.
Plus the insane power consumption for such a marginally useful feature. Especially given that it’s on by default for everyone using google (as I understand)
It’s almost like the feature is not ready but they need to show off to their investors anyway. At the cost of user experience and the environment.
At least with ChatGPT you have to consciously go to their website and use, rather than being the first result of a fucking internet search.
Yes, the search engine AI is a very expensive and shitty filter.
Unfortunately with SEO going nuts these days, it might be necessary to have some kind of spam filter for searching the web just to avoid some of the enshittification created by AI in the first place. Like, the AI goes to Quera and Reddit for answers instead of the marketing links, so at least the answers are less commercial.
Obviously these “human” sources will eventually or are already shittifyed too, with half the posts there also being marketing in one way or the other.
I dislike it, but flooding the web with useless crap may be the key to making some better alternative…
More eyes on your website, means less on other websites, making your adverts more valuable.
And when it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter, because you run the advertising on the other websites too. Bonus: you can penalise rankings for websites that don’t use your advertising network.
Was having a related conversation with an employee this morning (I manage a software engineering organization). He asked an LLM how to separate the parts of a date in Excel, and got a pretty good explanation of how do it with the text to columns wizard, and also how to use a formula to get each part. He was happy because he felt it would have taken him much longer to figure it out himself.
I was saying I thought that was a good use of an LLM - it’s going to give a tailored answer - but my worry is that people will do less scrubbing of an answer coming from an AI than one they saw on a forum. I said we should think of it like a tailored Google search.
For comparison, I googled “Excel formula separate parts of a date” and one of the top results was a forum discussion that had the exact solutions the LLM gave, using the same examples. On the one hand, to get it from the forum you had to wade through all the wrong answers and discussions. On the other hand, that discussion puts the answer given in the context of a bunch of others that are off the mark, and I think make people less likely to assume it’s correct.
In any case, it’s still just synthesizing from or regurgitating training data.
I think LLMs are better for more fluffy stuff, like writing speeches etc.
Excel solutions are often very specific. A vague question like separating a date can be solved in many ways, using a variety of formulas, the text-to-column wizard, VBA, import queries or even just formatting, all depending on what you really need, what the input is and what locality is used and other things.
The text-to-column method is great, because it transforms whatever the input is into a date type, making it possible to treat it as and make calculations as an actual date. It’s not always the right solution though, for instance if the input is ambiguous.
It’s fine that he learned to use this method, but I wonder what he’d ask the LMM in a case where it isn’t the right solution and what it’ll come up with then. He didn’t actually learn to separate a date from the input. He learned to use the text import wizard.
In my experience it’s preferable to learn these things on a more basic level if only just to be able to search more specifically for the right answer, because there is a specific answer. Having a language model run through a bunch of solutions and presenting the most popular one might just be a waste of time and leading you into a wild goose chase.
You might have missed where I said it explained both the text to columns wizard and a formula. He used the formula, which is what he was looking for. He’s a top notch software developer, he just doesn’t use Excel much.
But I agree with your broader point. I keep having to remind people that the “LM” part is for “language model.” It’s not figuring anything out, it’s distilling what an answer should look like. A great example is to ask one for a mathematical proof that isn’t commonly found online - maybe something novel. In all likelihood, it’s going to give you one, and it will probably look like the right kind of stuff, but it will also probably be wrong. It doesn’t know math (it doesn’t know anything), it just has a model of what a response should look like.
That being said, they’re pretty good for a number of things. One great example is lesson plans. From what I understand, most teachers now give an LLM the coursework and ask it to generate a lesson plan. Apparently they do an excellent job and save many hours of work. Anything that involves summarizing information is good, especially as that constrains the training data.
Gorillas will tear off your face and testicles AFAIK. Just imagine the depraved shit a human would do to you assuming they could get away with it without repercussion.
Gorillas are WAY more chill than chimpanzees. Just dint make eye contact and be respectful to the gorilla and it will leave you alone. They know that they are capable of fucking you up, and they know you know.
LOL not sure if this is because Windows warns you about dumb shit or because Linux will totally just allow you to nuke your entire OS with a single command.
Windows error messages are usually something to pay attention to if they generate a popup. But you can ignore most errors and warnings in the event viewer.
Linux is the same. If you get a popup, look into that, but if you see warnings or errors in a logfile then they can most likely be ignored if the app is working
I dual boot and use the command line a similar amount in both. cmd and powershell in windows are super useful for troubleshooting things that don’t work, or setting configuration options that are just not possible from the GUI, like disabling the hiberfil
The how is that they are a user that has never had to troubleshoot their own machine. At least that’s what I am getting from reading all their replies. They seem to honestly believe there is no use case for cmd in windows.
feel free to pronounce the word “user” as the slur intended
Well I never used command line in 30 years of Windows.
That’s 30 years of using closed source software from strangers (Or do you have many good friends at Redmond WA USA ?) :-)
It’s pretty much a requirement for Linux that you copy and paste random commands you don’t understand from strangers on the internet.
Maybe decades ago it was. Nowadays that’s not a requirement as there’s GUI applications for a lot more things than before. And as a Linux user I simply find it much more convenient and faster to share some commands with another person than making screen shots and creating a howto of a few pages or making a video. Also documentation has improved. For the average Linux user the Arch Linux wiki is a nice resource, even when not using Arch Linux.
That’s 30 years of using closed source software from strangers
…ok?
Or do you have many good friends at Redmond WA USA ?) :-)
I don’t understand.
Maybe decades ago it was.
No it still is. Look up any software for Linux. There will be links to download the software for Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and if there is a Linux version it will just put the command and not even explain what it is or what to do with it, because they just assume if you’re using Linux that you’re familiar with the terminal.
Do a web search for “how to <anything> in Linux” and tell me it doesn’t send you into the terminal to do it.
Websites offer that but you can usually find those in your favorite package manager Downloading software from shady websites is the Windows way of doing things.
Now, to be clear: this discussion is about having to use the terminal and that’s what people answered. You still find so many resources referring to the terminal because it’s often just the most convenient and effective way to do something.
I certainly prefer it over clicking through settings or running dedicated tools to do something that could be solved by a single line. And I was an exclusive Windows user like 5 years ago.
Websites offer that but you can usually find those in your favorite package manager
Most of the time the only thing you’ll find in package managers for mainstream software is unofficial, and many times broken.
Downloading software from shady websites is the Windows way of doing things.
Then…don’t do that? Go to the official source of the software? It’s not like Google or Apple repositories aren’t regularly packed with malware pretending to be something they’re not…
To be fair I never downloaded 20 sketchy looking zip files from some ODM manufacture website just to get my hardware working. I also didn’t need to reboot my computer 40 times while installing drivers, software, and updates.
I didn’t have my motherboard, mouse, and fan controller auto install junky apps that never works and advertised new products constantly. I didn’t have to try to uninstall adware just to find out you can’t uninstall half of it. I didn’t have to Google some esoteric regedit voodo just to add features back or disable anti-features.
I don’t get full screen ads for OneDrive and office 365 begging me to switch to a Microsoft account every other update. I don’t have to go to each and every manufacturers website to search for updates. Or create an account, login to it, and have it run in the background 247 just to not work when an update needs to be applied.
Have windows install updates in the background while playing games, or doing CPU intensive tasks like transcoding / video editing(often crashing the application).
Having to use the terminal on my Linux install every once in a blue moon crosses the line though. I might switch to windows and deal with all that instead.😂
I was just having fun with it. It really took a lot to make me switch to Linux in reality. For me anyway it was more the better polish from wayland and the ability to play games that made me finally switch. All my tools were already there which I understand most people can’t say.
I never liked windows much after 7. Mostly used it like a flathead screwdriver, I curse when I have to use it over a Philips (slippery lil fuckers) but it’s the first tool I grab when I need a pry tool because it’s always there. I have like five of those damn things in my drawer and a few more in my toolbox.
I have found apps on Windows you can’t remove without commands, settings that can’t be changed (commands or regedit), and any bulk file actions. However we will say bash = bash
Don’t even need a command. I’ve seen people brick their windows install messing around with registry keys. Most of my coworkers and friends think I’m some sort of wizard because I follow the instructions to the letter if I have any reason to run regedit.
Windows constantly says “this could harm your computer.” Just about any time you install software it does.
Remember when Linus Sebastian blew up Pop!_OS? As a Windows user, “This is likely to break your computer, do not do this unless you absolutely know what you’re doing. To proceed, type “Yes, do as I say.”” is something to walk right past.
I’ve done big forensic write-ups of it in the past and mapped it to the FAA’s accident chain model. It just so happened that he was using a distro with a weird forked DE (Pop!_OS) and just so happened that the version of the Steam package in the apt cache from when the install image was made was bugged in such a way that it would uninstall Xorg, and it just so happened that Pop!_OS didn’t run an apt update when launching their GUI app manager.
When Linus saw “failed to install Steam” he turned the petulant child up to 11 and started bitching about how you always have to use the terminal in Linux, and instead of googling the error message to find out “do an update and try again” he found a page that told him how to sudo apt install steam. Most instructions like that tell you do to an apt update before an apt install, so I don’t know if he either aggressively skimmed, deliberately ignored the update command because he’s used to how painful Windows updates are, or if he found a source that didn’t include it.
APT spat out a lot of stdout about all the packages it was going to remove, with a highlighted plaintext warning at the end which he failed to read or failed to heed.
Linus’ bad attitude was a major contributing factor to the incident.
this condition makes “planetness” into a local condition. so theoretically, we can throw enough junk into space and stop anything we want from being a planet.
pluto just got unlucky in terms of the amount of trash it has in its way. its not fair :(
Bad astronomy and fake news below please ignore me.
also Pluto lovers should note that orbital dominance takes longer the farther out you are, due to the size of the orbit itself and the sheer amount of time it takes to make a trip around, limiting interactions with neighbors.
Pluto will eventually own it’s orbit and whatever species has inherited the earth by then may decide to grant it full planet status again!
You made me curious about the timeframe and it turns out I had it completely wrong.
Pluto’s lack of orbital dominance is a matter of size not time, it’s already had the required time it’s just too wee to get it done. Pluto will never be a full planet!
The phrase refers to an orbiting body (a planet or protoplanet) “sweeping out” its orbital region over time, by gravitationally interacting with smaller bodies nearby. Over many orbital cycles, a large body will tend to cause small bodies either to accrete with it, or to be disturbed to another orbit, or to be captured either as a satellite or into a resonant orbit. As a consequence it does not then share its orbital region with other bodies of significant size, except for its own satellites, or other bodies governed by its own gravitational influence. This latter restriction excludes objects whose orbits may cross but that will never collide with each other due to orbital resonance, such as Jupiter and its trojans, Earth and 3753 Cruithne, or Neptune and the plutinos.[3] As to the extent of orbit clearing required, Jean-Luc Margot emphasises “a planet can never completely clear its orbital zone, because gravitational and radiative forces continually perturb the orbits of asteroids and comets into planet-crossing orbits” and states that the IAU did not intend the impossible standard of impeccable orbit clearing.[2]
Trojans and Greeks orbit Jupiter’s LaGrange points in a stable orbit and so they are governed by Jupiter’s gravity. You could say they’re really weird moons orbiting semi-stable points Jupiter creates.
Arenyou gonna start calling Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Orcus planets?
We went through this 150 years ago ehen the asteroid belt was discovered. Every astronomer wanted credit for discovering a new planet, so at one point there were 15 before all the astronomers got together and said it was untenable.
OS upgrades vs security updates is a whole different ballgame. We should not confuse the two.
Windows forces major upgrades in many cases, sometimes rendering the device inoperable because OS upgrades carry inherent risks. Forced upgrades are simply irresponsible. We need that consent to let the user back up files beforehand as a bare minimum, even overlooking the ethics side of user consent. Is MS going to fix my parents PC when they break it?
Forced updates? I see the argument, but I have to insist on user consent at all times. By default is okay. Explicitly violating the human’s will seems wrong. Software should serve people. But I can understand the argument even if I don’t agree with forced updates.
And that is why I’ve got my dad on Mint. He would not dare to even do a point upgrade himself. Until two days ago he was on 20.2 or smth. But he does the small updates quite diligently, like I told him. System admin dream of such users.
Windows has forced updates because people like your parents would otherwise never update and then still blame Microsoft for their computer breaking because of bugs.
I’m not so sure about that. FOSS is unlikely to gain a direct profit motive, and if it does, there will necessarily be versions with those features removed. How can you stop me from turning off ads or updates when I control the entire operating system? That’s kind of the whole point of free and open source software—the user is in control. Myself or someone with the appropriate skills can modify the code not to do those things. If that results in a better product, everyone will switch to it, killing those features permanently.
I have no problem with an open source AI if it proves useful, but it will be running on my machine under my terms. In fact, I already have an LLM running entirely locally.
It’s hard to enshittify FOSS as long as good enough people willing to contribute to de-shittify stuff exist, but that is not the main thing that “defines” any trend.
The layman that tends to use stuff that is marketed (which is unfortunately enough of the people) will be affected by for-profit orgs trying to set trends in their favour. That is what will turn out to “define” the terms. Consider how Apple managed to keep their cult following for so long and how there are still enough people who consider “Windows” as the common name for Operating System. Even though the more technically minded people understand the differences, it doesn’t change the fact that people’s perception will be defined by what’s more in front of them, until they individually realise their ignorance and decide to investigate.
When you hate something so much you have to find weird corner cases to support your views. Even then the way described isn’t how someone who knows that they are doing would do.
The best way for an unprivileged user to manage a service is for that user to run it. That way you inherit the correct permissions / acls / selinux contexts.
What if multiple users have to manage that service?
Edit: nvrmnd, pretty sure the runnit solution won’t allow this either, your answer is correct. What about while the service is already running? Wouldn’t your solution require a restart?
If the service is already running it has to be stopped as a system service and run as a user service. In order to ensure that the service inherits all the correct permissions / acls / se linux policies the service needs to be launched from the limited permissions context.
With the systemd approach you’re not just passing a control handle around. You’re ensuring the process is running under an appropriate security context.
If you want to let multiple users manage the user systems service, I would probably go with sudo and systemd user files. You could create a group which has sudo access etc. The important idea is that an unprivileged user controls an unprivileged service.
What about this makes it “the systemd approach”? runit supports user services too. These are just two different tasks that are needed in different contexts. Sometimes what you need is to “pass a control handle around” to a privileged service. And sometimes you need to actually make a service unprivileged.
pretty sure the runnit solution won’t allow this either
I’m no expert, but I think you could make a special group, set the supervise directory to be owned by that group, and add all relevant users to that group? Either way, as I explained in a different reply, running the service as a user vs letting that user control a root service are completely different things, and one is not always a substitute for the other.
Lol. Lmao even. I needed to do this because I wanted to learn the miryoku keyboard layout , and I wanted a way to quickly switch between Miryoku and standard QWERTY. The best way to do this that I could come up with was to bind a special key on my keyboard to toggle kmonad on and off. So I wrote a service for kmonad and gave my user permission to manage it. Running kmonad as my user wouldn’t work, because kmonad needs root to create a virtual input device.
Luckily, I am running Void, so the solution was a single well-documented command. Out of curiosity I decided to take a look at what this would look like on systemd distros, leading to this meme. Honestly, I had to do a double take by the time the guy started talking about Javascript.
I feel kind of useless typing this out because you’re just gonna ignore it anyway. In my post, I am talking about needing to do X. Your response is “why are you doing X, you should do Y”. Why am I not surprised that you’re a systemd user? Do you also use Gnome by any chance?
Hey. There is no reason to feel useless. Everyone has value. And the best part about Linux is that we all can make our own choices. If people hate systemd they don’t have to use it. That’s ok. Void linux I think is actually a pretty cool distro. It reminds me of the BSDs for some reason.
I use systemd because I like how it works and I think it’s well designed. As for desktops I am a huge fan of sway. Gnome isn’t bad on a laptop or tablet though. What do you use?
I’m on bspwm right now, but I’ve been thinking of switching to wayland (in particular, hyprland). I’ve got nothing against gnome BTW. I have a friend with one of those laptops that turns into a tablet by flipping the keyboard to the back, and he also says Gnome is the only DE that “just works” for touchscreen, even though he uses KDE on his main laptop and desktop.
How are things on wayland by the way? From what I understand, it has partial support for running X11 apps, right? Do you use any X11 apps, or were you able to find wayland-native counterparts for everything?
[void] reminds me of the BSDs for some reason
I’ve heard this comparison a lot, though I don’t know what it means, since I’ve never used BSD haha. Maybe I should give BSD a try sometime.
And the best part about Linux is that we all can make our own choices
How are things on wayland by the way? From what I understand, it has partial support for running X11 apps, right? Do you use any X11 apps, or were you able to find wayland-native counterparts for everything?
Most of the time, you wouldn’t even notice if an app is using xwayland or native wayland… except for apps written with electron/chromium embedded framework (chromium, steam client, spotify, vscode, etc). They’re pretty glitchy on xwayland so you’ll have to figure out if they accept arguments to use wayland natively, but not all of them support wayland natively yet.
and I wanted a way to quickly switch between Miryoku and standard QWERTY. The best way to do this that I could come up with was to bind a special key on my keyboard to toggle kmonad on and off.
Well that would require learning the kmonad config syntax, and I was just looking for a quick solution… but yeah, adding a QWERTY layer is a better solution in the long term, I’ll probably do that some time
Your response is “why are you doing X, you should do Y”
Because they’re right, you shouldn’t do X. I know that’s not a satisfying answer for most people to hear, but it’s often one people need to hear.
If the process must run as root, then giving a user direct and unauthenticated control over it is a security vulnerability. You’ve created a quick workaround for your issue, and to be clear it is unlikely to realistically cause you problems individually, but on a larger scale that becomes a massive issue. A better solution is required rather than recommend everybody create a hole in their security like yours in order to do this thing.
If this is something that unprivileged users reasonably want to control, then this control should be possible unprivileged, or at least with limited privilege, not by simply granting permanent total control of a root service.
This is ultimately an upstream issue more than anything else.
Wait, aren’t most desktop environment support switching keyboard layout these days? For example, gnome can do that with super+space or via the language switcher in the top bar. Using a user service to do this seems overkill.
Miryoku isn’t a regular layout. It has things like keys that change what they do depending on whether you tap them or hold them. Maybe it’s theoretically possible to implement it as a standard XKB layout, but it would not be fun. Usually, Miryoku is implemented in your keyboard firmware. But if your keyboard doesn’t support flashing custom firmware (e.g. builtin laptop keyboard), then you have to use a software solution like kmonad, which is a daemon that has to run as root.
As a sidenote, even for some “standard” keyboard layouts there needs to be background process. For example, Chinese and Japanese have too many characters to fit on a keybaord, so they use something called an Input Method Editor. But those usually don’t need root, in contrast to kmonad.
I guess YMMV with this because this really annoyed me and I just don’t see “why aren’t I finding the piece with the bird on it even when there’s only 100 pieces left?!” for 20 minutes as something fun.
But at the very least, offer some normal puzzles too!
It’s more ‘if we just sit on the internet all Sunday and don’t talk to each other, that would probably not be a healthy relationship’ thing, If I ran out of internet, there’s a very well-stocked bookshelf.
I sympathize with the back pain part. I used to be able to spend hours on a puzzle, maybe even get through an easier 1000-piece on a lazy Sunday. Now my back can handle maybe 45 minute stretches before I have to straighten up for a while.
In the case of Arch the backdoor also wasn’t inserted into liblzma at all, because at build time there was a check to see if it’s being built on a deb or rpm based system, and only inserts it in those two cases.
I just got into tea and have had a rough time finding a brand to buy that is loose leaf. They always end up being tea bags like this. Any suggestions for brands?
You should probably try looking for local tea shops. They tend to just import the tea directly from distributors or even producers and bag it themselves. This might not be the cheapest option but easily the highest quality one.
If none are available nearby, hey, business opportunity!
I have been really disappointed by the times I’ve ordered from a shop online (even one that came highly recommended on forums) that I hadn’t previously visited in person. So now I default to a shop that I stopped by on a trip to Chicago once: www.coffeeandtea.com. They have a good supply of the basics (eg English breakfast tea) that are decent quality and very well priced, perfect for everyday tea. For special occasion teas, I was very impressed by a place in Portland, OR I visited: thejasminepearl.com. A lot more expensive but quality to match.
Nowadays I try to make a habit of stopping by tea shops when visiting new cities, and taking note of which specialty teas each has, their price points, etc. I’ve about five or so that I rotate ordering from at this point.
Loose tea isn’t very common on supermarket shelves. If you live near a store that has a bulk section, then they might have loose tea in bulk. I end up ordering online from Stash or Harney & Sons
Celestial Seasonings and PG tips are good grocery store brands with paper bags, but for loose leaf it’s worth seeing if you have a local tea shop. If there’s nowhere nearby, there’s some great online sellers. I’m a fan of Adagio and David’s tea.
I’ve actually had good luck at a local Indian market. Also, places that are specifically tea retailers or online markets will be more likely to have it.
Tire dust? Tires are generaly made from a kind of rubber, not plastic. A great majority of micro plastics that end up in enviroment and in your body are shed from plastic fabrics. If you’re really worried about limiting plastic consumption check your clothing tags for polyester and nylon. Return to cotton, hemp, and linen.
Tyres are unfortunately plastics in this day and age as well.
As for the share of microplastic pollution, both rank about equally as high: 35% for clothes, 28% for tyres (…europa.eu/…/microplastics-sources-effects-and-so…) - this as a share of directly released particles that make it into the ocean.
Note the interesting fact of fishing nets, plastic bags and bottles making up the vast majority of plastic in the ocean, however.
If it makes you feel any better, there’s so much microplastic everywhere that there was going to be plastic in that water regardless of what the tea bag was made of.
And there’s not even really anything you can do about it. Reverse osmosis should be able to get rid of microplastics but the fucking containers for the filters are plastic and the lines running between them are plastic so they’re just going to reintroduce microplastics even after filtering!
There was a recent study showing that boiling water could actually break down and remove a surprising number of microplastics so I guess for making tea you might be a little better off but still
That’s a little hyperbolic. There’s a lot of mechanics at play in generating microplastics. Fabrics have microscopically thin strands of plastics. It should be no surprise that rubbing up against thousands of tiny strands every time we move and wash synthetic fabric clothes releases many tiny particles. Plus clothes have to deal with UV degradation making the plastic more brittle.
The plastic components in an RO system should be specced to not leach plasticizers. They should have smooth walls and laminar flow. There shouldn’t be much to abrade the plastic surfaces and shed particles. They may not be perfect, but water from an RO system will have orders of magnitude fewer microplastics. So an RO system still “does something about it.”
We do need to address the problem, but I wouldn’t want people to avoid beneficial remediation just because it has some plastic components.
obviously still better than not doing it but it’s just annoying and frustrating because they don’t make any out of stainless steel construction at least not that I can find. I was able to get stainless steel food grade corrugated piping because they use it in the Solar industry for solar hot water heating. Finding true stainless steel faucets instead of just stainless coated brass is possible although a little bit expensive. I’ve gone stainless for pretty much everything in the kitchen, including reusable straws as well as leftover food containers both the container and the lid. Because it seems to be basically the only material not actively attempting to kill us in some way.
So it’s not as if I’m not actively reducing my exposure to it as much as possible, but it’s really frustrating how impossible it is to escape from entirely
Some people would rather be poor in a house than poor on the streets. This ain’t getting fixed in our lifetime make the best of your life you’re able to
I know shitpost and all that but this isn't actually true, as in it can't be verified. It was one small mention in a book (Threshold Resistance) by A&W owner Mr. Taubman. He basically said he wanted to know why his same priced 1/3 burgers weren't outselling competing 1/4 pounders...from a competitor...that I'm sure you can guess. So, he hired a marketing firm who put together a little focus group in the 80s. Some of those focus group members supposedly didn't know that 1/3 lb. is bigger than 1/4 lb. burgers.
Keep in mind that there's no evidence or any firm mentioned and the bias surrounding the author that is writing a book about his experiences including a failed venture.
All we know is it is one man's anecdote and it has been used for 39 years so far to make fun of Americans for supposedly not understanding fractions.
I work in a customer facing position in the US where factions of an inch are used for measurements frequently in the design of a product. I deal with people who don’t know 5/8 is smaller than 3/4 or that 3/8 is smaller than 1/2 on literally a daily basis.
People are dumb and I absolutely believe the burger anecdote.
You know I don’t work with fractions of an inch on a daily basis… Or even monthly. But inevitably a couple times a year it’s relevant. Every single time I have to take 3/4 multiply it by 2 and get 6/8, then I have to subtract 1/8 to get to 5/8. Repeat ad nauseum to get to whatever time fraction is needed.
It’s frustrating and slow and makes me feel dumb.
That said last time I did it, I measured a 1/8th difference between cabinets we ordered from IKEA and the space they went in and I’ll tell you what, I felt like a genius when it all just fit, perfectly.
Now imagine how good you’d feel if you used Roman numerals to do that
On a serious note, I once heard that an important reason maths was hard for Romans is because of a wrecked writing system. So maybe not using fractions other than fractions of 10 is the way to go
I work with people who can’t count on a daily basis - This doesn’t mean that nobody can count, it just means that I get calls/emails where someone made a mistake and they need help correcting it. I get to see all of these instances occurring which creates a focus on it and in turn, a bias - if I only get calls/emails of people not being able to count, but no calls/emails about people not being able to spell, then the bias I have is that people suck at counting and are good at spelling.
My point is that there are plenty of people that do understand it, but the people that don’t stand out and create a bias in your perspective.
JC Penny, some years ago, tried to change their pricing scheme, from the typical "$29.99 +tax" to flat "$30, tax included"
Their sales dropped so hard they reverted in two months.
Americans are born, bred, raised to be fucking stupid, and forcefully shoved into shitty educational systems that make them that stupid. The design of American cities is built for people to be stupid and isolated.
There's a reason other countries refer to the people that live in them as citizens, and we get branded as consumers.
There's a level of respect from the top down that is sorely lacking
It is a little more complicated than that. Yes consumers are trained to expect sales. It drives an increase in purchases. However, JC Penny is a sort of mid retailer. It isn't high-end and it can't support price competition to the bottom. Much like Kohls that basically lives on having things constantly "on sale" while all they really are doing is pricing below MSRP which is meaningless, especially when it is specifically designed to be underpriced.
They didn't simply make "$29.99 + tax" into "$30, tax included" but they removed MSRP markings that were higher than their 'sale' prices. They removed the ".99" from prices and generally lowered them to under the MSRP always though not necessarily down to their 'sale' prices to overall bring prices down everywhere.
It's "Everyday Pricing" initiative to lower overall pricing couldn't compete with stores specifically designed to keep prices down and it certainly didn't have the reputation of being upscale for any merchandise. Therefore, the only way to survive is to make consumers believe everything is on sale, always. Essentially fooling the customer into believing that they are getting a deal on better products for a cheaper price.
If someone wants to buy nice clothes, they will buy nice clothes and pay more for them. Underpricing them could actually hurt sales. If someone wants a 'deal' then they are going to go to low price competitors. Mid tier retailers are always going to have a tough problem to solve, unless you fool the consumer.
That marketing gimmick isn't centralized to just the US or even North America. It works anywhere in the world for a mid retailer.
Perhaps, you believe that this makes the consumers stupid but that would be a universal generalization rather than an US cultural one.
I do love when people ascribe basic psychology to Americans and no one else. Only Americans walk into a room and forget why they went in there, everyone knows that!
My father is a lawyer, and this happened with a judge, who agreed with him, but ended up saying something along the lines of “he deserves more than a third to have his fair share, so he’ll have a quarter”
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