Date formats. Can never tell if dd/mm/yyyy, mm/dd/yyyy, yyyy-mm-dd…
This is why I always use letters for the month when I can. There’s no confusing 3 Oct 2023.
March 8th, 2023?
Yes, very good, you used the letters just like they said.
Only way I’d do it is by pissing everyone off. DD/YYYY/MM
Let there be carnage: DD/YY/MMMM
how about YYMDMDYY
YMDYYDMY
YMCA
IFTSAT
YTMND
Yeenage Tutant Minja Nurtles D
The yyyy-mm-dd format (ISO 8601) is the only one that is unambiguous, because no one so far in history has ever used the yyyy-dd-mm format (at least until some xkcd-reading jokester probably will start using it just out of spite). I use ISO 8601 everywhere. It has the additional benefit that filenames get sorted correctly in lexographical order.
Many years ago, I came across a forum that formatted dates yyyy-dd-mm. That was such a traumatic memory that I still remember it.
As someone that works with huge amounts of data with dates in varied formats… PLEASE let this be standardised. :')
I was gonna reply the “S” in “ISO” stands for “standardization” but apparently ISO doesn’t stand for anything.
I was expecting a KFC situation, but no:
Because ‘International Organization for Standardization’ would have different acronyms in different languages (IOS in English, OIN in French), our founders decided to give it the short form ISO. ISO is derived from the Greek word isos (ίσος, meaning “equal”). Whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of our name is always ISO.
ISO-8601 has the answer for computers, and maybe humans too. It’s the last way you mentioned for everyday use.
I think this abides by the idea of this post, but I would standardize language across the world. Whether it is an existing language or a new language doesn’t really matter or maybe a mix of the biggest existing languages.
I remember reading a book where in the future everyone spoke a combination of English and Chinese. They seem pretty incompatible though.
Gonna have to disagree there.
Each language is a culture and each is special, different from every other, and removing or transforming them changes that.
What a dystopian nightmare!
Is it? When migrant workers are able to speak the same language as the natives, they would be able to integrate faster and look out for one another better.
Right now, large corporations make use of migrant workers who are unaware of their rights in host countries to undermine the working rights of the host workers. A diverse workforce is much less likely to unionize, and large corporations know that.
It’s such an interesting idea, isn’t it? Theres a lot to gain but also, a language can mean a lot to people: identity, community, history. If we’re at A, I can look ahead and see the benefits of getting to Z, but I have no idea what all happens in between.
CEO compensation vs employee compensation.
CEO pay has skyrocketed in comparison to the pay of the employees, this needs to change.
Why is that an issue? If they are the founder of the company I think they deserve it, and if not, there must be some logical reason why they pay that person so much…
I’d bet most people can get behind the idea that those in leadership positions or saddled with greater responsibility should be compensated more. The issue for me is the magnitude of that compensation.
I think they’re saying it’s an issue specifically in reference to how employee wages have grown in comparison. If we look at previous decades, you’ll see that CEO and other executive level pay has increased substantially, and has absolutely left employee pay in the dust. That isn’t to say people shouldn’t be paid more for a good or important job, but we should probably be keeping a watch to ensure those with plenty don’t take even more from those with little. And if those at the top are taking more, historically, than their fair share, then that needs brought in line.
This is a very good response. Thanks for writing.
If they are the founder, they are likely not a public company yet and can grant themselves stock at great rates. Most do-ers aren’t CEOs, they are busy doing.
Faucet water pressure. Not so strong so that it doesn’t make me wet but strong enough to feel confident that I actually washed my hand.
Here’s a more technical one: health information
It’s a huge pain trying to transfer health information, between patients, doctors, different clinics, hospitals, etc. If you try and move far enough, your records might get transferred as a bunch of PDFs or scanned images on a CD.
There is no good standard that ticks all the boxes, so it’s not just a matter of getting everyone to agree. A solid standard that addresses all the needs would be amazing, and it would help improve healthcare so much.
People would get control over their own health information (as much as appropriate without causing unnecessary harm), and we could properly use health tracking data from biometrics devices for personalized care. We could do large scale studies using properly anonymized data, and we wouldn’t have proprietary systems to try and work around.
Best of all, you could go to a new clinic/hospital/ER and you wouldn’t need to enter the same information all over again (likely missing clinically relevant data along the way).
I completely agree. All the different EMR systems make doing any research just that more tedious. And like you said it’d be so nice to just walk into a health care facility and not worry about paperwork
Have you tried the OpenEHR standard? What’s wrong with it?
I should have worded it differently, it’s possible there is a best standard that I don’t know enough about. I don’t know enough about OpenEHR, but that’s something I’ll read more about :)
FHIR is an excellent standard.
Some EHRs are pretty good about this nowadays. Epic, for example, allows you to share info across health systems. The user has to enable it though, which is a problem due to low adoption among older patients.
Also, this will be less of a problem in coming years due to increasing consolidation of health systems.
I can’t speak to much of this, but I have a friend who works on the technical side of health insurance. Specifically he is helping with FHIR. I did some HL7 work a long time ago which lets health systems talk to each other. FHIR is supposed to be a more comprehensive offshoot (I asked if it was HL7 on steroids and wasn’t corrected).
Unfortunately, I may have misunderstood. My career took me a different path than his so I’m way out of date on it.
Our system of measurement. There can be only one!
To rule them all!
because murica everything is now meassured in bald eagles.
how tall are you? 2.5 BE how much is your weight? 27 BE How old are you? about 1 BE
converted from facts here https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/facts/bald-eagle
There already is a standardized measurement system that is used allover the world.
Except for the USA, of course. But that sounds like an USA problem to me.
While I agree in general, stuff like the nautical mile serve a purpose. I think units that are based on practicality should still be allowed. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-we-measure-roads-in-regular-miles-and-not-nautical-miles
If it is based on some kind of arbitrary definition and conversions between units of the same measuring system is hard we should do away with it.
Recently had a Stress strain chart which had lbs/inch² as a unit. Also measuring anything small in imperial is just cursed. 5/16 * 10^-2 inches. Wtf. Also mil and thou. Just adopt metric already.
I don’t understand the purpose of a nautical mile. It’s just a certain number of metres, right? Originally worked out as some percentage of the distance around the equator.
Why not use the standard measurement for distance?
Because maps for naval navigation are based on degrees latitude and longitude. So if you travel at sixty nautical miles per hour in latitudinal direction on this globe you will end up one degree further away from where you started. Angles are important in naval applications as well as aeronautical because ships and airplanes can and mostly do travel in straight lines.
One nautical mile is equal to 1.852 km good luck using that kind of number and converting it to meaningful information on the fly.
With digital systems it is of course not as important anymore (also they are using the metric definition and converting it to nautical miles internally) but courses are still plotted by hand on maps (eg. as a backup solution if your digital system goes belly up). Having a measuring system where one unit corresponds to something meaningful with little need to pronounce decimals all of the time seems like a good idea to me.
So for example you can travel 111.12km in latitudinal direction or 60 nautical miles which is equal to one degree latitudinal distance.
60 is properly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 12 and so on so it makes quick mental calculations easier.
The unit just makes sense for the application it is designed for.
I’m trying to understand what I’m missing.
I might be getting my latitude and longitude confused- but I think that one degree of latitudal (east-west, right?) travel would result in a different distance depending on how far north or south I am? I’m thinking of it like walking around the equator, as opposed to walking in a circle around Santa’s house, which is obviously directly on top of the north pole.
But if I travel one degree of longitude, no matter where I am the distance would be the same, right?
I’d replace all the CSS, HTML and JavaScript APIs mess and replace it with something like low-level API/interface that frontend frameworks could compile to.
And why not expand it to OS level? Then we could have very low-effort cross-platform native and web apps.
And why not expand it to OS level?
That sounds like an even more security nightmare than it is now.
Well, there is wasm and this proposal: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16
That’s really nice, with WASM garbage collector .NET Blazor could be a lot faster
Math notation.
Fucking file formats in the scientific community. Way too many ways to do something in science and every place has their own way.
Can we agree on .hdf/.h5?
Didn’t have any knowledge about this but I will definitely note this for future projects!
check out the linux community, whole chat about file formats rn
Advertising
Yep. Above a family business, or on an advertizing board along with other adverts. I should be able to not see an advert if I don’t want to.
Computer devices. Installing Arch Linux and syncing most Important directories with Syncthing so you can work on every device and be sync around the world.
Singular front panel connector plug.
Screw drives.
The law throughout all countries in the world
I’ll cheat the question a bit.
I’d like all critics to have standards and to hew to them. I don’t mind if each critic operates by different standards, so long as all critics can articulate their standards and are consistent in their application.
Most movie critics, for example, are offering their reactions to movies. They may review a movie. But nearly all of them are utterly inconsistent (hypocritical?) in their work. They explain their bad review of a film because of X and then praise another film despite it being just as much X as the film they loathed. If they address this conflict at all, it is with a great deal of handwavium - “This film makes it work.”
If critics had standards, it would be possible to really compare the things they critique. Without those standards, each thing gets its own bespoke write up. Very entertaining, but useless when we want to know which is better or worse.
