this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
568 points (94.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43947 readers
863 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The kWh is a silly unit. Joule (J) is the one true unit of energy.
Also, common time units suck as much as inches, pounds, feet and whatever nonsense units you Americans still use. Just use seconds with the appropriate SI prefix instead.
Cubic meters and tonnes suck too. Just use kl and Mg instead.
I think the time one is a good unpopular opinion. For example "day" is one of the most common time units there is. I really can't see anyone advocating for a system that is unrelated to day/night cycle.
If night was to fall, sun was to rise and it wasn't a new day yet? And the days ended at different times on different days? Absolutely no one would like that and we'd go back to using days almost instantly.
With that issue always in mind, you're still bound to the earth's rotation for every time-related issue (and a similar one around seasons also looms, for the earths orbit). And you're back at square one.
Well, we could always switch to another time unit that uses 1 day as the base unit. Then you would just use md, nd, Gd, Md and all the other prefixes to get to the scale you need. That would be fine for most purposes.
However, the problem is that a day isn’t exactly 86.4 ks, since orbits and rotations are wobbly and messy. If we define the day as a unit today, it won’t be the same a thousand years later. Perhaps the people of the future could use that for common purposes, but scientists would need to use a more precise version that has a crazy litany of decimals at the end. Using the Earth as a foundation for any kind of unit is just asking for trouble in the long run.
Interesting. I think joules are dumb and hate seeing them in games like factorio. I'm sure joules are better in applications that don't concern the average person but I'm a random idiot not a scientist at nasa. Just show me kilowatt hours so I don't have to do math in my head. 1 joule is 1 watt second already there's no point in making things more complicated.
I can see the convenience in the Wh unit, because hours are so common and people prefer to think in terms of hours.
Joules and watts look nicer and are naturally fully compatible with each other. Non-technical people usually get very confused with kW and kWh, so switching to joules would create a clearer distinction between energy and power. Many energy production facilities also give their annual energy production in MWh per year, which mixes two time units in the same package!
Let's make a shitty unit trade. We'll change all watt hour units to joules in exchange for completely banning bits per second as a unit of bandwidth speed. Converting megabit per second to the actually usable unit of megabytes per second in my head is far more infuriating than any amount of joule shenanigans. Any takers?
Oh, I totally forgot about the chaos surrounding bits and bytes. Personally, I don’t really care which one we use, as long as its unified. Mixing and matching Mb/s for transfer and MiB for storage is truly infuriating. Yes, even the prefixes need to be unified.
I don’t make programs in low level languages, such as assembly, so I don’t really see the benefit of using base 1024 prefixes. If anyone here can convince me why non-binary prefixes are great, I’m listening. As far as I’m concerned, prefixes should be based on 1000, just like in SI.
Having 8 bits in a byte is just another historical relic, and I see no reason to keep it. Systems have changed many times since the adoption of that term, and back in the early days a single character of text took exactly 8 bits. I guess that was important at the time, but why would it be today? Programmers out there can tell us why we need to have two units for data.
Maybe it's because I'm used to kWh, but kWh is very useful in terms of electricity usage and when designing electric systems to hooked onto a common grid, especially things like building wiring and stuff.
That is not an unpopular opinion