this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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[–] Deebster@programming.dev 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

stacking prefixes is disallowed (e.g. 10 k km), and because using mega is both correct and more concise (e.g. 10 Mm).

If you're talking distances and you say Mm, I'm far more likely to assume you mean millimetres. It might be technically correct, but it's bad communication.

[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, he had me with him until I got to there.

Screw off telling people there's something wrong with using 10k km. It's widely accepted and far easier for normal people to understand. There are also plenty of scenarios where using a single, fixed unit (whether km or kg) is just better than using different units for different things.

At least scientific notation gives a clear numeric indication of scale. Even if you use the entire range of metric daily, you're taking half a second to compare any time there's mismatched units.

[–] lemmyng@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Screw off telling people there's something wrong with using 10k km.

Yeah, it's not even a double prefix like the article implies. It's 10 with a suffix, and m with a prefix.

Also, no one outside of scientific papers is going to type the degree symbol for temperature because it's not a common feature of keyboards.

[–] LwL@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Of english keyboards. Which honestly annoys the hell out of me because I am very used to german keyboards which do have it, but I switched to UK layout at some point because I generally prefer it. It's like the one thing I miss.

[–] borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

Do you mean physical computer keyboards? If you’re on a Windows or Linux machine I’m pretty sure there’s an alt code for it, but I never remember what any of those are. On a Mac computer you can hit option+0 to get the ° symbol.

On Apple devices with on-screen keyboards you just long-press zero to get the the ° symbol, that’s how I’m typing right now. I’d assume android has the same feature but idk I haven’t used an Android enough to the point I needed to type ° in 6 years or so.

To the other persons point, this is all on American English keyboards, but I don’t see why there would be any difference between that and a UK English keyboard, or any other keyboard language with a Latin-script alphabet for that matter.