WilloftheWest

A pint is 568ml.

Edit: the extra 30ml might be accounted for with the patented Guinness widget, a little ball of nitrogen gas that ruptures and forms a foamy head when the can is cracked.

GPT4 is wrong and it doesn’t require a price per litre comparison to prove it.

4 cans at 440ml cost £4.50. Therefore 12 cans at 440ml cost £13.50, £1.50 less than 12 cans at 330ml.

The fact you made such a connection says a lot about you.

I agree on a personal level. FOSS software is much more convenient for my usecase of writing papers/typsetting notes, some automation, writing a program that works for me, and browsing/videos.

On the level of someone working in academia, it can be incredibly inconvenient if not outright impossible to implement. I can manage if I come across a bug in some FOSS software in my personal usage. An enterprise encountering an error with some utility whose support forum is a discord server: completely unacceptable. The entire printing service being offline because CUPS is temperamental: completely unacceptable.

Enterprises are the core customers of these inconvenient pieces of software with subscription based models.

On a phoneline service that I have to call about twice a month, you also get a frequent click and a second-long pause in the music, that makes you think you’ve connected to an operator. Given how the service is outright malicious to its users, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was hard coded into the system to keep callers on edge.

That’s the thing: you’re proving the idiom in the way that you’re arguing. Naively, one would expect that comparing fruit is easy; after all, they’re both fruit. Two nations have supposedly, in an official capacity, made the same statement (which I don’t believe without you providing a source, and yes the burden is on you).

The thing is that these are all superficial observations on complex entities. The idiom of comparing two fruits is a common idiom in many cultures, and it’s not for want of an internet commenter pointing out that they’re sweet, have seeds, and are similar colour.

General point: practice making pithy arguments based on well researched points. I’m struggling to see an actual point in the drivel you’re writing. It isn’t a reading comprehension issue; I read and write dense academic articles for a living. Short, pithy sentences are simply better writing.

There's no reason 2 fruits can't be compared.

I find it hard to believe that you’re not familiar with the famous phrase “comparing apples and oranges,” which is specifically about attempting to compare incomparable items.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Sorry I had to get that out.

Cringe. You’re an anonymous person interacting on the internet, not the main character of a sitcom.

Pad thai isn’t even that spicy. Who’s ordering a super spicy pad thai?

You know you’re never going to get any hard evidence other than surface-level stuff that they can get from their bigot blogs, because bigots hate actually engaging with media.

This is a great observation. I just generally think a world that poses questions such as “why haven’t wizards fixed this” is more interesting than a world with arbitrary precision measurements and walk-in cancer curing services in every hamlet.

Some good points. I'm just going to continue this discussion because it's interesting and it helps me prepare my games to consider these things.

1: Universal answers don't necessitate universal acceptance, and it can make for more interesting lore when that's the case. As an example: in the lore of Legend of the Five Rings, it's common knowledge in the Empire that the official map of the Empire has a massively inconsistent scale, with journeys of similar charted length having up to a threefold difference in travel time. Savvy travellers know to plan accordingly, but no one would ever question Imperial doctrine, as the charting of the Empire was an act of a very real and tangible living god. This is where I got my praying at every temple comment; it's common for people to avoid accidentally badmouthing the Empire by saying "I took longer than expected as I took every opportunity to honour my ancestors at every shrine on the road."

1b: The pantheon of the Forgotten Realms is ever expanding and there are gods in that pantheon that are opposed to Mystra, as well as luddite gods who are oppose the gods of innovation such as Gond. Gondians certainly promote the advancement of science, and Mystrans and Oghmans promote the advancement of magic to a very certain extent, but there are gods in the pantheon who would task its worshippers with direct opposition of these missions, if for nothing else than to piss off their rival god.

2: This comes back to point 1. Different states will have their own standards of measurement, often using the same name, and the usage of these standards are very often more political than logical. A famous example from history is Napoleon's height. Napoleon was "5 foot 2 by the French measurement and 5 foot 6 by the English measurement," which made him a French adult man of average height. It was a common political tool to report him in the British Press as 5 foot 2, thus implying that he was short of stature.

Imagine the compounding issue of different species interacting in the Sword Coast. A human-majority patriarchal city state may define an inch as the average length of the the second knuckle of an adult human male's middle finger, while an elvish-majority patriarchal enclave may define it exactly the same but for an elf's finger. These slight discrepancies aren't an issue until they can be exploited for political gain; an elvish embassy may be established at a distance no closer than a mile to the Palace of the Magistrates, but there's roughly a 10 human-yard difference between an elvish mile and a human mile.

If someone casts a spell asking for a measurement and they are told "10 miles," is that 10 miles from their perspective, 10 miles from the perspective of whoever invented the measurement spell, 10 miles according to some third "universal" perspective, or something else entirely?

3: Again from my previous comment, the precise limitations of spells are assumptions and generalisations made for the purpose of codifying into a game. In the actual fiction, spells are quite variable dependent on the caster and their abilities. The only general assumption we can actually make is that a set of repeatable actions yield roughly the same result: if you rub a glass rod with a bolt of fur and sing the chorus of Tubthumping backwards, lightning appears. The reason that in the current edition of the game we have somewhat concrete descriptions of spells is that we as the players require a certain level of abstraction in order to play the game; The GM shouldn't need to have an idea of wind speed, the aerodynamics of the flier, and all other forces in order to make a quick decision to determine how the flier flies. Some randomness of outcome is still evident on the modern game rules, such as the damage from spells being random and spells like sleep affecting a random number of creatures. Older editions were a lot more meticulous with this.

Edit: specifically tackling Wish, assuming even a perfect casting would not yield a perfect map. Check out the Coastline Paradox for a real world example of how natural bodies such as coastlines fail to have well-defined length. No amount of arbitrary precision measurement is going to change the facts that coastlines and waterways have fractal dimension.

4: At least in 5e rules as written (and I dislike this and usually houserule it when forced to play D&D), with the exception of protection scrolls, reading a spell scroll requires caster to have the given spell on their spell list.