I believe analogy with smartphone will be best for this case.
In 2010s iphone was the king, all those Chinese devices ware cheaper but not even close to smoothnest and usability of US tech, now after 15 years later everything is changed, now iphone feels like old grandpa to Chinese tech. Same will happend to LLM's just much faster.
No one is claiming that OS is as good. They are saying it isn't that far behind SOTA commercial products. So why pay exorbitantly just to get something only a few percent better than the free option?
But there have been very good open source office apps for decades and few enterprises use them, so perhaps this is just the nature of B2B purchasing committees and 'nobody getting fired for buying IBM.'
Because failures compound. My productivity has substantially improved since I switched from open models to a Codex subscription, because it doesn't need hand holding, and it doesn't pull stupid tricks occasionally.
Join the club! I did as soon as the Microsoft acquisition realizing this would be only a matter of time… with more projects (finally) leaving that ecosystem, I might finally be able to delete my last account with Microsoft.
In industry, we have. At home, most households have little or no use for US dimension tools such as wrenches. You can service a bike with all metric tools.
"Going metric" raises the question of whether we adopt metric measures for our existing standards (such as pipe threads) or actually adopt the ISO sizes. The latter would cause a brief but massive inventory management problem, that nobody's ever willing to put up with, even if there's a long term benefit.
I believe we made a mistake in how we tried to teach the metric system. I learned in first grade: Metric is easy because it's just math. Most people heard "math" and freaked out. Metric was taught as a bunch of conversions and units. Inches were taught as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.
I remember talking to a machinist, and he said: "I hate the metric system because there's so much math." That was 30+ years ago. Today, machinists just read mm or inches from the same digital readout or CAD program.
My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.
I'm fine with math, but that doesn't make it less annoying.
The real advantage of metric is that you only have to do math once to calculate something. A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg. It's just easy. A deep lake over a few square km? O(1) GT. Understanding orders of magnitude is a useful trait in a democracy.
You hit the nail on the head here though:
> My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.
Like any language, as long as you're translating you're loosing. Post signs in km and report temperature as C and everyone will understand it in less than a decade. A few years after I had a metric thermometer in my car C seemed easy.
It's not like the US failed to think of this. In the 80s they were posting signs in km. But back then there was a real economic cost to conversion for factories and machines. Now that's mostly gone, what remains is cultural resistance.
We have a saying in the US, "a pint's a pound, the world around." As the other post mentions, not everything has the same density, but a lot of stuff is pretty close to water.
The ironic thing is that an Imperial pint of water weighs more than a pound.
Estimate as water and fudge it a bit. Conveniently the fudge factor is just the specific gravity and is already tabulated as such in a lot of fields.
But it turns out that water is a pretty good bet most of the time:
- Settled snow is around 0.25
- Dried wood is around 0.5
- Soil is around 1.2
- Rock is around 2.5
Which is pretty good if you want to answer "how much does that truck / ship / mountain / lake weigh?".
Of course there are some anomalies: Tungsten is around 20, but it's not like imperial units help here, and the name literally translates to "heavy rock".
> "Going metric" raises the question of whether we adopt metric measures for our existing standards (such as pipe threads) or actually adopt the ISO sizes.
You adopt ISO sizes FFS. They are international standards. You really want to invent a whole new set of incompatible 'standards'?
You think the US is the first to go through this? Australia, Canada, and the UK went metric in the 1970s (we also decimalised our currencies). Yes it was challenging for some adults but mostly pretty easy for kids. People adapted. Industries adapted. Now we hardly think about it except when dealing with Americans or in some historical contexts.
For the piping example, you have all the installed infrastructure that's in the old "IPS" (straight) and "NPT" (tapered) sizes. So now a plumber needs to carry additional fittings or carry conversion fittings. Easier to just stay with what we have.
Of course it's easier to stick with what you have in the short term. Change is difficult. You do it for the long term gain. If you had done it 50 years ago like the rest of the English-speaking world you wouldn't be in this mess.
Half of our houses were built 50 years ago. Even if we had a 'tough but fair' autocrat simply declaring we're moving all newly-installed everything to metric standards, we're going to have to have both kinds of pipes on the truck for 50 more years. That's 2x the inventory to manage for every trade that works on any kind of construction or servicing of equipment.
We can still do a better job teaching metric to kids, without needing to tear down every building to replace all the 2-by-4s with "50x100s." But yeah, that means dealing with the fact we don't have everything following the standards and our pipe threads, screws, etc. will always be different to yours.
Didn't France go metric a few centuries ago? Anyway, I suspect there are at least 10 times as many buildings, and 10000 times as many machines deployed, in 2026 America than the number you'd get by adding every European country's stats at the year they really seriously standardized metric.
You can make a better case that we were fools to not stay the course in the 1970s than a case that we should try it today. Even the 70s seem more like the very tail end of a window. 1776 would have been a great time to do it!
To some extent yes, but I just think it would be a greater hit to the overall GDP with more mechanised things in existence. Maybe I'm wrong, I just think that in the farther back you go, the greater the share of the economy that wouldn't be dramatically impacted by a metric changeover. Like, farming was somewhat a greater share of the GDP then than now, and a lot of goods are weighed and sold in bulk, not really all that hard. A farm would need to replace irrigation pipe and retrofit their scales, but not demolish and build new farms. A car factory, on the other hand... it would take a while for all those machines to naturally be replaced.
Exactly: the entire world has a standard, and the US is doing its own weird thing.
The long-term gain is being able to sell your stuff to the rest of the world, and being able to import stuff from the rest of the world without paying a Weird Format Tax.
Would you rather manufacture stuff for 8 billion people, or for 340 million?
You could also argue that North America should convert to 50hz 220VAC for electric services, so that one line of products could be sold to the entire world. But the switching costs would be huge and manufacturers generally have no problem making the few changes that are needed to make products for export, or when possible designing their products to accept either standard.
Cutting metric or imperial threads in a pipe fitting is a programming code change in a CNC machine, and maybe using a different cutting tool. Easily done for an order that's going to be exported.
So I don't think manufacturing is a big concern, and not the reason we've stayed with old standards in many cases.
k what's your quote on replacing every screw and bolt in America (and of course tapping new metric threads for those screws and bolts to go into). Also replace every pipe in every house.
There would need to be like a minimum 50-year transition where everything will be worse (keep both of everything in stock because both old and new need maintenance) and we'll probably have more confusion and mistakes over what units were being used during that half-century.
I love metric. I think it's awesome. But I'm not sure what anyone expects anymore. We attempted the same half-assed conversion Canada did in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter was President and people were pretty sane. We did only a little bit worse than they did[1] though. It boggles the mind to imagine a US populace as determinedly political and polarized as they are now adopting even a slightly inconvenient lifestyle change just because the government said so. Therefore, "you guys should just adopt metric" seems less than productive.
The UK continues to live on in a weird metric-imperial mash up. Beer is still measured in pints, lots of food (but not all!) is measured in pounds, distance and speed limits are sign-posted in miles, but the sizes of most things in life are in cm, mm and meters.
Imperial measurements do have the benefit of more even divisors than metric.
Pretty common to talk about measurements of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 of an inch and find those graduated on a ruler. Or 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/8 of a cup for liquid measures, etc.
But then machinists generally work in thousandth or ten-thousandths of an inch.
The problem is that fractions suck to do math with. Rather than doing basic addition you have to do a divisor conversion and then do an addition. Heck, the third-pounder burger failed because a significant fraction of the American consumers believed it was smaller than a quarter-pounder!
And most of the kitchen stuff is a chicken-and-egg problem: the US used 1/2 cup because that's what it is used to, the rest of the world has recipes calling for 50g of flour. If the US was used to weight-based measurements everyone would have a kitchen scale with 0.1g precision lying around, instead of a bunch of measuring cups.
The only evidence we have for the “Americans were too stupid to understand that 1/3 was bigger than 1/4” story is from the memoirs of the A&W CEO at the time referencing some unnamed market research performed by some unnamed firm. A person who has a vested interest in explaining why their failure to turn around a sinking company was due to external factors beyond their control. It also implies that in a culture where every kitchen has at least one set of stackable measuring cups in 1/4, 1/3 and 1/2 sizes, and a culture where you would order meat from the deli counter at your grocery store in 1/4 or 1/2 lb increments was suddenly and completely incapable of remembering their basic fraction sizes when comparing the cost of a hamburger. Personally while it makes for a cute story, I really just don’t believe it.
You sound like an 8th grader asking the teacher when will we ever use this in real life type question. Fractions aren't that bad when like anything in life you are practiced in using them. Let's see what's faster in a kitchen, scooping something by measuring cup or trying to get a specific weight by 0.1g precision? I'm home after working all day trying to feed myself and mine. I'm not trying to win a start for my restaurant by the Michelin man.
These incessant arguments of "why is someone doing something different than what I'm used to so stupid" are funny if not tiring. Why not ask why are there so many different spoken languages in the world instead of just speaking like me? We could go into if Rust is better than Go, or why Romulans are better than Klingons. The problem is that nobody wants to understand the differences and just want to rag on the person opposing their views. Yawn
I'm pretty sure my reasoning was in my comment. Nobody making dinner wants to weigh things out. That's why there are measurements like 'add a pinch', 'just a skosh', or similar. Pretty much the only people I know that measure would be bakers.
The point you're not willing to accept is that there's no dying need to be that precise and using "cup-ish" measures is good enough and works just fine.
I'm a fairly experienced machinist, though it's not my occupation. At the present time, machinists have the least problem with metric. The unit conversions are built into all of the machines and measuring tools. You press the inch / mm button. The ruler has inches on one side and mm on the other.
Everything is standardized on IEEE floating point. ;-)
It's a headache to maintain collections of parts and tools such as taps and dies for both standards.
The biggest shift is simply the obsolescence of old stuff, and emergence of new stuff. And industries have adopted the practice of reducing the overall variety of parts needed. I work in the development of industrial measurement equipment, and where a design might once have had 30 different sizes of fasteners, now it's 5, all metric. Designs rarely need nuts and spacers any more. Washers are integrated into the screws. No more "philips" or flat head screws. And so forth.
Threaded holes and rivnuts. Now a rivnut is a part, but the fabricator keeps it in stock instead of us. More shaped stampings and castings so that spacers aren't needed. Reducing parts also reduces handling of parts. Probably CAD makes it easier to design these things in.
At where I work, we use hex head (trying not to say Allen). I see lots more Torx in products as well.
The U.S. uses metric pretty much everywhere that is important, in most science, engineering, and medicine. Specific trades and common household things remain imperial due to inertia and no one really caring. It is much more accurate to say the U.S. has a dual system. We learn metric in school like everyone else.
Because I don't want to deal with a hundred of anything, and I don't want to deal with decimal points. I want everything I measure to be near single digit numbers. Hence, inches for common dimensions like a "2x4". I can handle something being 5 1/4 inches. How the hell large is 133 mm? Humans are not good at intuiting numbers far from unity.
Miles are great. The typical highway speed limit is about a mile a minute. You can easily lower bound how long it will take to get somewhere if you know how far it is in miles.
In cooking, I often need to halve quantities in recipes, hence pounds and ounces. Watching cooking channels give metric quantities is absolutely baffling to me. You see things like 175 mL. That is 2 sigfigs too many.
Yes. I see the 6 and I think: pretty tall, just a bit taller than me as a baseline. Then the 3 indicates another bit more. At no point am I adding the quantities to achieve a total. It’s two pieces of information in something akin to a binary search.
I do woodworking and framing and approach is similar. Measure out to 6 feet first, then move out 3 inches more. It’s iterative refinement. To measure lengths I always do a few bisections like 3 feet, 2 inches, and 3/4 plus a sixteenth. I can remember a sequence of 3 or 4 integers for about a minute, long enough to transfer the measurement. Give me something like 135mm, and I’ll forget in a few seconds.
Don’t take up baking then, where the difference between 175 mLs of water and 200 mLs of water can be the difference between unworkable dough and the perfect pie crust.
Because you have to ask what benefit will it serve in exchange for the effort? In places werwere it really matter we already do, and conversions are pretty simple otherwise. Sometimes fractional units are just slightly easier for a specific task, and having used them our whole lives they are second nature.
To me asking why we don't have a single measuring standard is similiar to asking why we don't all agree on a single language. Sometimes it would be easier, sometimes it wouldn't, but in the end it doesn't matter all that much.
Points are not American, they are used for typography in Europe and everywhere else equally as much as in the US.
The metric system is poorly suited for font sizes. Most designs require a series of sizes within a small range: a typical book or poster might use 9pt for footnotes, 12pt for main text, 16pt for subtitles, and 24pt for titles.
Aesthetically speaking the most attractive ratios of sizes are small ratios like 3:2 and 4:3. Using points it is very easy to construct an attractive range of font sizes like my example above. It is difficult to imagine how this would look in a metric system that's not a mess.
My countrymen are shockingly dumb. Presented with something rational like 24-hour time, they prefer to not learn and be confused all the time instead of adopting the better way. Unless it's mandatory, such as in military or aviation, then they are happy with it and feel like part of a special in-group.
Clearly we should just use seconds, hectoseconds, kiloseconds and megaseconds, and stop worrying about whether our time lines up with the celestial movements.
And here I thought maybe time zero would be the big bang, but alas, that is too celestial, so I guess January 1st, 1970 it is. Or whatever that is in the metric calendar (10 months per year, 10 days/week, 100 days/month)
It's a bit difficult to use the Big Bang as time zero when the current uncertainty of when it actually happened ±0.02 billion years, which is what, a thousand times longer than all of recorded human history.
We could use the birth date of that jewish prophet, except we'd still be off by a few years. Oh well, in a few centuries no one will care, and we'll just use Unix Epoch.
I use superpowers for several months now and it really does help. But still 90/10 rule applies, 10% of time it will produce stupid decision. So always check spec.
yes, this is pretty much just rerouting Claude to call Deepseek's Anthropic-style-compatible endpoints instead of its own defaults
Once removed, it'll work just like before
In 2010s iphone was the king, all those Chinese devices ware cheaper but not even close to smoothnest and usability of US tech, now after 15 years later everything is changed, now iphone feels like old grandpa to Chinese tech. Same will happend to LLM's just much faster.
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