Ask Lemmy

Decimate means 1/10th destroyed, lost, whatever. I don't care that the dictionary says that meaning is obsolete. I get that the meaning of words changes over time, but it has the prefix deci. 1/10th. You don't get to decide something that starts with 1/10th means near total even if it's a scary sounding word.

This is my anthill and I'm dying here.

"Road Works" usually means it doesn't.

A kilobyte is 1024 bytes. Yes, I know "kilo" means 1000 - I don't care since it's obvious from context.

Back in the day, using base-10 prefixes for base-2 stuff was considered fine. 1024 is close enough to 1000, after all. It only changed when some dickhead realised that, by insisting that a kilobyte (and the bigger units) was 1000 bytes, they could sell you less hard drive space without lowering the number on the box.

If you don't believe me, look at your RAM. Nobody's ever sold RAM by the "gibibyte".

The way the US spells things is stupid

Probably stereotypical, but I find well done steaks to be a total waste.

I rarely cook steak, but when I do I go to a butcher and get something quality and fresh. Normally I don't care how other people enjoy their food, but when I take the effort to get quality steak and someone at a family get together asks me to cook until the steak is grey in the center it just deflates me. Logically I know that if everyone is happy with their food it doesn't matter, but personally having to mangle a steak so it has the taste of ground beef just goes against every cooking instinct I have.

I've learned that when certain people are coming to a holiday cookout to just cook burgers or BBQ instead. Everyone is just as happy with what they get.

There should be more mature games.

I don't mean like sex games, I mean like games intended for adults that can have mature content and mature stories without it being heavily watered down.

Games should have as much leeway as the film or book industry when it comes to mature content - Though I guess that's getting murky too lately.

People rip on US electricity standards all the time, from voltage, via frequency, to the NEMA plugs, and for good reasons. But the most disgusting thing about it all is this:

US breaker panels are fugly. Sure, they work just as well as those from the rest of the world, but they're aesthetically displeasing.

Two representative pictures I found of an average panel just now;

US:

EU:

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

People shouldn’t be able to be told what color to paint their house. More people should experiment with wild colors inside and out.

Your mom's not that fat.

Pineapple on pizza is fine. If you don't like it, you don't have to eat it.

Quantum leap means the tiniest jump and not at all what it's (internationally) used for.

Sometimes a game being a little unbalanced can make it more fun.

Horsepower is a stupid way to measure how powerful a car is. What is this the 1800s?

Latin root words that end in -or should use the suffix -trix when applied to women. So a woman aviator is aviatrix, administrator is administratrix, etc.

Dear Australia, I utterly love you, but please tell me how many vowels do you need to shove into the word No? It's almost become the longest word in Australian English.

There is only one R in the word familiar.

Stop saying fermilliar.

Steak is overrated. I'd take a smash burger over a steak 9 times out of 10, and that 1 time out of 10 will just be because I'm in the mood for peppercorn sauce.

It's "by accident" not "on accident", you uneducated fools.

Saying "bless you" for sneezing is the most bothersome human interaction (to me) that serves literally no purpose but people pretend that it does to justify doing it out of habit. And, oh boy, have I gotten so much shit for it.

I don't say "bless you" when someone sneezes, because it's an archaic tradition based on superstitious nonsense.

People pronouncing processes (and biases) like they rhyme with "chimpanzees", instead of "addresses".

Since the English language has done words that borrow the Greek and make an -eez sound, like crisis to crises, people seem to think process is Greekified. It doesn't follow the same pattern at all.

English is hard enough as it is without inventing extra rules to try to make us sound smarter. Meanwhile, I try to de-Greekify the language with octopuses, syllabuses, and cactuses - all valid plurals in English.

Source: Bachelor's degree in English

This verges on actually mattering, but knives on magnetic strips should be blade down.

Pros:

• when grabbing the knife you are holding it in the safest way possible automatically with the blade pointed down rather than blade up like fucking Chucky.

• If you botch grabbing it, it falls away from your hand/arm rather than toward/on top of it.

• the handles hook over the strip and are more secure

• the handles are all on the same plane, and again if you dislodge a separate knife unexpectedly it falls away from your hand/arm

If you’ve never worked on a holiday you shouldn’t be allowed to go to stores and restaurants on holidays.

Limeade is better than lemonade by a country mile.

With the caveat that both store bought limeade and lemonade are absolute trash compared to fresh squeezed.

Fresh squeezed limeade is just divine.

D&D is not as good as it is popular. It's a very idiosyncratic game that's mostly focused on a particular kind of play, but people treat it like it's a general purpose tool.

Clearly people can have fun with it, and that's what really matters. I'm still convinced many of them would have more, easier, cheaper, fun if they picked up a different game.

Folding laundry is a complete waste of time and effort. If it's been through the wash it's clean, it's not going to be any cleaner just because you spent half an hour doing laundry origami.

Peeling vegetables is such a waste of food, nearly all vitamins and minerals are stored in the skin.