The US being stuck in imperial is such a meme nowadays with "freedum units" and the like. It's yet another odd thing that makes it easy for the rest of the world to laugh at the US. In these isolationist times I doubt this will change soon though, but it'd definitely help international collaboration.
Everyone who wants to collaborate internationally is already doing it. Science in the US is entirely metric. Construction and domestic measurements are the two biggest holdouts and honestly they’re both negligible. Given the proliferation of global manufacturing, most businesses are converting at the end before retail for US customers.
If the government was competent, they could rip off the bandaid and everyone would adapt within a year or two, but we need to wait at least 3 years for that to even begin to become a possibility again.
Honestly, I don't think anyone would raise much of a fuss over changing distance measurements to metric. Both centimeters and inches are easy enough to eyeball or rule-of-thumb, meters and yards are basically the same, and larger units are only relevant for speed limits and travel planning. Metric lacks a good "foot", but I guess people would get used to eyeballing things in ~50cm increments instead.
Weights are even easier as pretty much everyone uses grams as the smallest daily unit and most people can convert to and from metric on the fly for ounces, lbs, kgs. Liters aren't uncommon, and ml<->gram equivalence for water is well-known. Traditional kitchen volumes probably wouldn't be displaced because metric has no answer for those in first place.
Temperature is where metric will fail to gain adoption because Celsius totally sucks unless your daily life consists only of boiling or freezing water at sea level. No advantages over Fahrenheit except maybe arguably for science, because it's Kelvin with an offset.
Now sure what sucks on Celsius, water freezing and boiling have been some of the most important scientific and just plain existence facts of mankind since we evolved. We humans have 10 fingers so its split by decimal system.
Since we humans operate 99% of our existence in a narrow band between 0 and 100 degrees celzius, I'd say its more important than starting from absolute 0 and dealing constantly with big offsets.
0 or 100 or -100 or 10 Fahrenheit is what? From Gemini: "0°F was the lowest temperature achievable with a mixture of ice, water, and salt (brine), while 96°F was set as the approximate temperature of the human body (blood heat), chosen because 96 is easily divisible by many numbers, allowing for finer divisions" - rather insignificant things.
In Celsius, my daily life uses values from ~ -20 to +30 for the weather, but from ~0 - 90F. For cooking both are equally arbitrary, as the only place I set or read a temperature when cooking is candymaking, setting the oven, or cooking large amounts of meat.
> Metric lacks a good "foot", but I guess people would get used to eyeballing things in ~50cm increments instead.
Perhaps as a compromise we could adopt the meter but divide it by halves, quarters, and so on. Binary fractions are so much more universal than arbitrary base ten ;)
In a country where every single facet of life is being increasingly politicised, you think this wouldn't cause a fuss?
Oddly enough if any government could just push and shove this through it might be Trump. I bet 20 years later you'd have a sizeable constituency who could be convinced that the change from imperial to foreign units was the beginning of the fall and decline and that everything could be fixed if you went back.
Oh, you bet they would. Nothing causes old white people to riot like mild inconvenience.
That's only mildly sarcastic. For many people, it's become a part of being American, especially on the conservative side of the isle. Now, I personally live in celsius and work comfortably in kilometers, liters, and grams. However, it has become a weird point of pride for some Americans.
The unit itself doesn't actually matter. Even industries with the least precision set their stuff up with so much precision that the unit you use basically doesn't matter.
Your machine may spit out widgets that are plus or minus an inch. But when you set up the machine you set it up to the 1/16 regardless. Swapping all that to metric doesn't actually change anything other than the number the guy setting it up dials it in to.
1/16” is just over 1.5 mm, so yes, the guy setting the machine in millimeters is giving you more precision. In the real world measurements aren’t just abstract figures you can move around losslessly.
I have a socket set in half-millimeter sizes for the absolute plague of cheap bolts and nuts that are being manufactured with obscene levels of slop.
He's not giving you more accuracy though. A machine that's accurate to 1/32" is accurate to .75mm. If those cheap bolts were in US customary they would still need to be in smaller increments.
The guy buying the widgets doesn't care because he's expecting a widget that's plus or minus dozens of the unit the machine is being set to. The setting is just as precise as it is in order to set the fat part of your output curve over the middle of your quality control pass range.
The machine might not even be calibrated in a direct measurement, it might be calibrated in a secondary measurement. Like tons of force or rpm or cycle speed or something that then translates to the dimension of your output part.
The units on machines mostly only exist for calibration. Beyond that they can just be made up "my amp goes to 11" type scales because they're so divorced from the outputs, either in precision (or are literally indirect as described above) that you "just have to know" that if you want a "X<unit>" widget you'll actually set the machine
Tons and tons and tons of stuff in our world is even intentionally spec'd out in this manner. A 14" tire rim is not 14, there's a tolerance. A 3" pipe isn't 3". These are all just nominal sizes. Just about everything in our world is nominally sized. A nut and bolt manufacturer doesn't care whether they're making 12mm or 1/2 on a given day. Those are just nominal sizes, arbitrary names, in their minds. It doesn't matter whether the factory runs on metric or imperial or something else because they're just shooting for an arbitrary number.
The only time your unit really matters is when interfacing with other parties and it only matters insofar as you need to know what each other are uses.
I believe 1/2" pipe is exactly the same as DN15 pipe. 1/2" and 15mm are both just nominal sizes. Calipers will only help you if you happen to know the pipe schedule.
Most likely the current administration will pass executive orders banning the use of metric system, and then force other countries to switch to imperial or face heavy tariffs.
I'm curious how many people actually use all this stuff themselves. It seems like an extreme niche, and more often than not will have people paying for apps they will never use.
Maybe I'm old skool... but for the last 30+ years I've been using a combination of photoshop, illustrator, FCP, after effects (back when it was CoSA...), some audio editing and mixing in quite a bit of code as well. While others on my team specialize in one or two domains, I've managed to keep my skills in many.
Back in the day I was considered a 'MultiMedia' creative. I don't even know what to call myself these days.
I find your comment a bit funny on multiple levels. "Linux" does not force anything on you right? It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
>It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
well you just framed it perfectly; it's still forced on the end-user regardless of whether or not you want to call it 'linux' or 'the community that controls and steers linux" .
It's not forced if you were getting it all for free anyway and can walk away at any time. "They've stopped giving away old thing for free and are now only doing new thing" doesn't put you in the position of a captive who has no freedom. You can complain, you can develop your own solutions, you can leave, but I find it over the line the number of people in the X11/Wayland conversation whose position amounts to looking at people who are working for free, and demanding that they do a specific kind of free work without compensation or help. It's all people working on their free time, or companies sponsoring the developments they need. It's hard to make demands as an end user who isn't paying or even helping.
Oh sure there's absolutely places where this is true. But there's so many many counter examples. Sway, Niri, Hyprland desktops... Top tier incredible experiences begat as small personal passions. So many incredible tools that have become must-have-daily-drivers for folks, alike this modern shell tools thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292835
The narrative that everything is corporate and greed is, imo, a deep deep dis-service. Incredible things are happening on the edge, and there's nothing else on the planet remotely resembling the conjunctive discollaboration here. Folks have incredible leverage from existing open source works, & add their own sparkle, time and time again. (Nearly never does this box us in.)
For sure there are big projects too, with huge corporate influence and millions of users.
But it is a deeply rotten proposition to me to try selling some corrupt world case, that this land here is just as rotten and poisoned as the application/apppliance-ized rest of world. That there's coersion. There's some being left behind the pack, some, but so little. "Linux" is still the best freest most augment-intelligemce computing out there by a light year, and it's trends are healthy.
(Wayland in fact has improved & strengthened that stance, freed us from a nasty monolith that everyone had to use, and given us actual freedom of implementation. Wayland is part of the liberation, the addition of choice & liberty. It's wild to me that people seek those old chains.)
Do you have anything to argue that with? I'm all ears, would be neat to see.
I already mentioned quite an array of projects that I find inspiring. I can't say I know of anything in particular coming from BSD land. ZFS has adherents for sure but there doesn't seem like there's any innovation or creation or downstream net new coming out of that.
It'd be cool, but I guess the hodgepodge of different solutions in that space would make it really hard. For example, many mods for GW2 don't work in linux if you're on something like Hyprland due to them having to act as overlays. Not sure if that's a wayland issue or just a typical hyprland thing though
You're right, but a plugin for a common compositor like Plasma's KWin would still make it accessible to a large number of users. Shouldn't be too hard to do either. Maybe I'll do it this weekend!
Not sure if that's satire or not but how would you even identify the party to sue? What do you do if they're based in a country where you can't sue them ofer relatively trivial matters as this?
You could start by subpoenaing the registered holder of the IP address.
In general, you can ask a lawyer for your options. Chances are good there are more than zero. But only if you can afford a lawyer.
If you're getting scraped from a country where you don't do business, you can block the country. It's not good to block a country, but it works as a temporary measure. If they really want your data, they will move to a country where you do business, which means a country where you can get a lawyer. Assuming you can afford a lawyer. If they're using rotating IPs, likely some of them are from your country. You might show a judge: "Hey, look, we're getting so much traffic, from a wide variety of IP addresses but it all seems to be the same person on the other end, which would make it illegal DDoS. Can we trace back some of these?" and if you're lucky, the judge might say yes.
We feel this at work too. We run a book streaming platform with all books, booklists, authors, narrators and publishers available as standalone web pages for SEO, in the multiple millions. Last 6 months have turned into a hellscape - for a few reasons:
1. It's become commonplace to not respect rate limits
2. Bots no longer identify themselves by UA
3. Bots use VPNs or similar tech to bypass ip rate limiting
4. Bots use tools like NobleTLS or JA3Cloak to go around ja3 rate limiting
5. Some valid LLM companies seem to also follow the above to gather training data. We want them to know about our company, so we don't necessarily want to block them
I'm close to giving up on this front tbh. There's no longer safe methods of identifying malignant traffic at scale, and with the variations we have available we can't statically generate these. Even with a CDN cache (shoutout fastly) our catalog is simply too broad to fully saturate the cache while still allowing pages to be updated in a timely manner.
I guess the solution is to just scale up the origin servers... /shrug
In all seriousness, i'd love if we somehow could tell the bots about more efficient ways of fetching the data. Use our open api for fetching book informations instead of causing all that overhead by going to marketing pages please.
In principle, it should be possible to identify malign IPs at scale by using a central service and reporting IPs probabilistically. That is, if you report every thousandth page hit with a simple UDP packet, the central tracker gets very low load and still enough data to publish a bloom filter of abusive IPs, say a million bits gives you pretty low false-positive. (If it's only ~10k malign IPs, tbh you can just keep a lru counter and enumerate all of them.) A billion hits per hour across the tracked sites would still only correspond to ~50KB/s inflow on the tracker service. Any individual participating site doesn't necessarily get many hits per source IP, but aggregating across a few dozen should highlight the bad actors. Then the clients just pull the bloom filter once an hour (80KB download) and drop requests that match.
Any halfway modern LLM could probably code the backend for this in a day or two and it'd run on a RasPi. Some org just has to take charge and provide the infra and advertisement.
The hard part is the trust, not the technology. Everyone has to trust that everyone else is not putting bogus data into that database to hurt someone else.
It's mathematically similar to the "Shinigami Eyes" browser plug-in and database, which has been found to have unreliable data
Personally talk to every individual participating company. Provide an endpoint that hands out a per-client hash that rotates every hour, stick it in the UDP packet, whitelist query IPs. If somebody reports spam, no problem, just clear the hash and rebuild, it's not like historic data is important here. You can even (one more hour of vibecoding) track convergence by checking how many bits of reported IPs match the existing (decaying) hash; this lets you spot outlier reporters. If somebody always reports a ton of IPs that nobody else is, they're probably a bad actor. Hell, put a ten dollar monthly fee on it, that'll already exclude 90% of trolls.
I'm pretty pro AI, but these incompetent assholes ruin it for everybody.
As talked about elsewhere in this thread, residential devices being used as proxies behind CGNAT ruins this. Not getting rid of IPv4 years ago is finally coming to bite us in the ass in a big way.
Same, I have a few hundred Wordpress sites and bot activity has ramped up a lot over the last year or two. AI scrapers can be quite aggressive and often generate a ton of requests where for example a site has a lot of parameters, the bot will go nuts seeming to iterate through all possible parameters. Sometimes I dig in and try to think of new rules to block the bulk, but I am also wary of AI replacing Google and not being in AI's databases.
A client of mine had this exact problem with faceted search, and putting the site behind Fastly didn’t help since you can’t cache millions of combinations. And they don’t have the budget for more than one origin server.
The solution was if you’ve got “bot” in your UA Fastly’s VCL returns a 403 with any facet query param. Problem solved. And it’s not going to break anything, all of the information is still accessible to all of the indexers on the actual product pages.
The facet links already had “nofollow” on them, now I’m just enforcing it.
I see a ton of random recent semi reasonable user agents now, and some of them are even sending the sec-ua, reasonable accept headers and the more obscure headers.
I hate relying on a proprietary single-source product from a company I don't particularly trust, but (free) Cloudflare Turnstile works for me, only thing I've found that does.
I only protect certain 'dangerous/expensive' (accidentally honeypot-like) paths in my app, and can leave the stuff I actually want crawlers to get, and in my app that's sufficient.
It's a tension because yeah I want crawlers to get much of my stuff for SEO (and don't want to give a monopoly to Google on it either, i want well-behaved crawlers I've never heard of to have access to it too. But not at the cost of resources i can't afford).
Personally I'm interested in this proposed flatness. I understand that it's the aim, but at the end of the day someone approves vacations, manages budgets for projects and is the person that has to have hard conversations with an employee right? Someone will have higher mandate for hard decisions?
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