Ooh, so close. There is a NumPy lib.

I’m not sure. That’s why I asked. I wasn’t sure what you had in mind with the “most of the Internet” phrasing.

Going back to basics, “The Internet” is just a big network connecting lots of small networks. So “most” would be counting physical machines connected (or logical hosts? Does a single physical machine running 32 VMs count as 1 or 32? Oops, we’ve muddied the waters already!).

But…bandwidth matters, too. The point of the Internet is the communication between systems, no? Video compression has come a long way, but it still uses a ton of data. At the same time…watching a movie on Netflix is still doing just one thing.

Opposite side of that coin is traffic. If you’re looking at this from the standpoint of running a website, you’ll be concerned with how many requests are coming in. Lots of sites used to get ‘slashdotted’ when an article mentioned them and suddenly they got 100x the requests they could handle. Or email…one email doesn’t take much, but billions of them get sent every day.

Or maybe something else?

How would you measure what “most of the Internet” is? Number of hosts? Share of bandwidth? Amount of traffic? Something else?

This is essentially what I came here to post. Search, if not poisoned by surveillance capitalism, would handle the current WWW just fine.

Way to miss the point.

You would weep at the coat the library pays to provide that service. It certainly isn’t cheap. Free…so long as you ignore your taxes.

Oh, I’m nowhere near average in this respect. Believe me, I know I’m tremendously privileged to have the level of stability that I do.

The point I was trying to make is, even with the relative stability I do have, I’ll still lose my house if I lose my job and can’t find another one quickly enough.

… by 1500 BC (look up the battle of Megiddo between Egypt and Kadesh).

I’d say any warfare is an indicator of the population being too big for mutual aid to provide social cohesion.

Does it matter if you have more than the average person* if your house is effectively over quicksand?

Most Americans have more than the average person planetwide, but we’re one job loss away from being homeless. There’s no real stability in the job world, so our lives are mostly relying on luck**.

I’m paranoid about this type of thing, so I:

• Live in a cheap house - purchase price about 60% of what the bank would have approved.
• Drive an old car. I bought it in 2012 with a low-interest loan. No car payment since 2017.
• Save aggressively. Max retirement accounts and keep up a healthy emergency cushion.

*I’m taking “average person” here to mean “has more wealth than 50% of people on Earth” (wow, such a high bar!)

**Not entirely luck, but I’ve read too many “lost my job in tech to layoffs in 2023/2024 and am now homeless” accounts to believe in any guarantees in the American economy.

What, Thor is switching to swords now?

I don’t agree. It’s easy to backseat drive the chariot now, but at the time? A mile as one thousand paces? That seems sensible when you’re measuring distance for men marching and horses or oxen pulling wagons. I can’t really speak to their monetary system, I’d have to read up on it more. And for numbers, well, you can hardly fault them for not using something that didn’t exist yet.

For units in general, though, there are definite benefits to a base 12 system over base 10: You can easily deal with halves, thirds, and quarters without introducing decimals.

Oh, and I did chuckle a bit at your Lego remark. I’m glad you phrased it that way :D

Sorry, what do the ancient Romans have to do with it?

And, ok, so we’d be talking numbers in the 5-10 oz/mi range. Why is that better?

Status quo: “How far can I go with a unit of fuel?”

Flipping it: “How much fuel does it take to go 1 unit of distance”

It just seems arbitrary to me. What am I missing that makes the status quo backwards?

Edit: I’m leaving this up, but nevermind – after posting this reply, I read your replies to others in the thread. I think I see. Linear units vs. “confusion units” (lol, cute term!).

Would you prefer we talk about .04-.07 gallons per mile?

At the same time.

I have the opposite reaction. I feel like reddit is easier to curate for good things.

I still look at communities like DIY, personalfinance, Timberborn, etc over there. Some of these are topics where Lemmy doesn’t have much coverage.

*Well, this prompted me to search, and I found a couple of equivalents here. Lower traffic, though.

Ever tried dal?

Yes, and I have to confess that it’s probably my least favorite Indian dish. But this thread is making me think I should give it another try – the soup I made last night is basically a dal, isn’t it?

It also makes me think I should explore more lentil recipes!

The recipe technically calls for a chili pepper of some sort, but we usually sub in a bell pepper.

Ooh, great idea! I’m not sure offhand where to get sumac. I don’t recall seeing it at Aldi. But lemon juice is definitely worth a try for this soup.

I used red lentils. The ones we have are pre split.

We’ve used green lentils before. I recall pre-soaking them at some point, but then we started getting the red lentils.

I love that the joke answer aligns with the physical answer here. Water weighs around 8 lbs per gallon while butane weighs about 5 lbs per gallon.