Nick Taylor

@cstross The UK has also been on the metric inch since like the 1930s. Saved our bacon in WWII because American-machined parts *weren't* a few thou per inch out. Of course, in practice both the US and the UK had been on the metric inch for a while before then because the (I think Swedish) chap making the gauge blocks got fed up with having to maintain two product lines and split the difference between the two inches.

@cstross @ElyseMGrasso @Knitronomicon @Cadbury_Moose Until we metricated our unit definitions the US "pint" made more sense than the UK one: theirs was based on a length cubed, ours was based on the volume of a mass of pure water at a defined temperature (fine), which wasn't its maximum-density point (why?!).

@cstross @Knitronomicon @Cadbury_Moose Volume is tolerable for liquids (you can bake the density into the instructions), and a bit shakey for granular materials (like, say, flour and sugar, quite common in recipes). And then you have salt. There are, it turns out, two main kinds of salt in the US: the fine-grained free-flowing stuff one might put on chips, and "kosher" or "kashering" salt which is these little hollow affairs like some kind of industrial fleur-de-sel. And they *still* insist on measuring it by volume!

@DreadShips@mastodon.me.uk That sounds like a really expensive meeting; who paid for it?

@benji_w @alecmuffett Much stronger effect since possession of CSAM is a strict-liability offence here.

@alecmuffett @benji_w Fair, and I guess "the Online Safety Act is ridiculous" is actually a winnable fight.

@publius @stib Fascinating. I agree camera threads *should* be 1/4 Whitworth; it seems your equipment is compliant and the equipment I've tested isn't.

@bedast@beige.party @howisyourdog@cupoftea.social I remember checking their summarizer and concluding that it was remote; might have been a competitor rather than ChatGPT, but it was the same idea. The on-device translation is separate, and actually good and useful.

@hazelnot@sunbeam.city @soph@grrl.me The "block" function on Bluesky is extremely strong, which helps a lot with that. In practice the labellers are pretty helpful: they let users bolt on e.g. pronoun display if they want that, or "actually this post links to a substack article but there's no way for you to tell that since any domain can be a surprise substack link". Lists intended to block users are less helpful: the administrators of those lists seem to succumb to the Moderator's Madness quite rapidly.