Seriously... I hate my own damn headlights! People flash their high beams at me as if I have mine on, but they're just the stock headlights... I've been seriously considering going to a mechanic to have dimmer lights installed lol
A lot of vehicles have a beam dip adjuster in the cab. Mine pops out when I press the center of the light control selector.
Officially, they are to correct for a heavy load in the back. Unofficially, if you tweak them, you can flip between longer range, and polite as required.
If you watch your lights, there should be a fairly sharp cut-off at the top of their coverage. If that line ever hits a window or mirror, it will look like you are flashing them. If it's too high, either fix it yourself (generally quite easy) or get it fixed.
Aim them yourself. You'll spent more time finding a good spot to aim them then actually doing it.
If they're LEDs or HIDs they're probably just a screw you turn to aim them. If they dont then it's basically the same thing, but in a less convenient spot. Look up the proper aiming procedure for your car, or just wing it by finding a car in a parking lot.
I know the feeling. I had a rental car once for two weeks and I was more than once road-raged because of the lights. Everyone thought I was high-beaming it, but nope.
My cars low to the ground and only has halogen lamps, so if I'm ever flashing high beams at an SUV with overly bright lights, it's only so I can continue to see the road. LEDs are insane and the governments too busy facilitating record defense contractor earnings to do anything about it.
That's what sealed-beam headlights used to be before composite housings which are proprietary to a given vehicle were legalized.
In fact, sealed-beams are still widely used in commercial vehicles because of their standardization to a point where they can be picked up anywhere and they're just gonna work.
On my car I have matrix headlights. I think every car should have them it’s honestly awesome technology and it’s a lot safer than normal lights. Hard to explain how they work just go look up a video and see for yourself
No; personally i find those annoying as hell when a car with those is behind me. Having partial high beams on either side from behind, that also come on and of with oncoming traffic, is really distracting. Never mind the "less good" implementations, that blind you through your side mirrors.
Not well at all when it comes to avoid blinding bicyclists, that's for sure.
Just another tech developed by the car industry pretending there are only cars in the road.
i'm not normally in support of taking control away from owners, but automating headlights seems like a big one. make radar and/or lidar, along with LED headlights, a requirement on new vehicles and have them automatically reduce brightness when a vehicle approaches. my old mazda would at least automatically turn the high beams off if a vehicle was a certain distance away from me.
OMG, light pollution in general has become my current "white whale," and the gods awful headlights on these ridiculous cars makes the most of it!
We should be able to see the stars at night, I don't think we have to sacrifice a dark night for the sake of "safety," maybe use a different color of street lamps, or get the lights on the walkway with just enough to find your way around
I know we need various sizes for various tasks, but I shouldn't have to dig through 50 different screwdrivers or ratchet heads and still not have one that'll work.
There are reasons why you can't have Torx in some situations. For example, sanitary machine designs. Preference is a flanged hex head. If flush mount is required, then slotted is best (even though they do suck for every other reason)
Interesting flex. Apollo Guidance Computer was working with Metric SI units internally.
Calculations were carried out using the metric system, but display readouts were in units of feet, feet per second, and nautical miles – units that the Apollo astronauts were accustomed to.
But then you've got a space that's 5' 7 3/8" and you need a clearance of 7/32" on each end, so your piece should be...uh... 5' 6 15/16" long. So much easier than metric, right?
In metric it would be 1711mm (or 1.711m) and you'd need to take 5.5mm off each end, so it's 1700mm. (For the record, I picked random numbers in imperial and only did the metric conversion afterwards, I just lucked into the nice round number here.)
I dunno. You need how many sig figs you need in whichever system, but switching between a factor of 12 for the feet, base 10 for the inches, and the equivalent of binary decimals for the partial inches sure does take getting used to. I've finally gotten used to it enough that I can do it in my head, but I prefer to work on metric for most things.
I acknowledge that machinists just use thousandths of an inch, which does greatly improve working with that system, but it also introduces a third kind of measurement that can't easily be interconverted with the other two. I dunno. It just feels like we're doing way too much work propping up this archaic system when literally everyone else in the world is using something simpler and we could just be on the same system.
If you only need integers, why are the measurements of your home hardware and tech specified in 1/8ths and 1/16ths of an inch? Stick to whole inches or shut up.
Can you quickly calculate how many gallons of water receptacle with dimensions of 5 inch x 3 feet x 1 yard can hold? Extra points if you can also calculate how many pounds it weight when filled.
Sure, you can search for alternative sources, hope that the PDF is not just image-scans but indexed and searchable text, and that it has a jump-able table of contents, and that it has not been altered and is up to date. Or you can go through public implementations and try to replicate, infer, and follow implementations or third-party descriptions of the standard. But all of that is error-prone and time and effort investment.
It shouldn't be like that. A standard should be public so that anyone can implement it, from either side. So anyone can verify and compare against the reference, and call out implementation misalignments.
An open phone standard, and no, I do not mean the 'Open Handset Alliance' that doesn't even live up to its name, I mean like an ATX-equivalent standard for mobile devices.
An open-source ISA already exists in RISC-V, maybe that hypothetical ATX-for-mobile-devices standard could standardize around that for starters, as for an OS, it could standardize around non-Android Linux and maybe even some BSD mobile OSes instead of Google pulling some MS-in-the-'90s crap for Android like they're doing right now.
That effect is vastly overblown and doesn't really matter.
Sure, if we only started driving today, we should pick the best side from all perspectives, but changing that now will just be extremely expensive for a very limited gain.
The same goes for switching any island nation from left to right.
But that's just control. A tradeoff since there has been some evidence that reaction time, attention and accident avoidance work better the other way. Like sure, I might have more control over a knife by cutting towards myself (granny cut for apples and such), but it's still inherently more dangerous that the opposite side in any case besides 'everything goes perfectly'.
But that's less of a factor that just being more attentive (and primed to react) to action on your right hand side if right handed. It's 'sticky' for me at least: I can switch to driving on the left relatively easily, but the reverse takes more effort, even though I have spent more time driving on the right in my lifetime.
Interesting, as somebody who on a somewhat regular basis runs a lathe and occasionally a Bridgeport at work I could not imagine using metric. Mostly because our old machines are all standard, but also because a thousandth of an inch (industry standard unit for measuring clearances) is .0254 mm so now clearances begin to involve more math. Call it lazy but I'm not converting everything on my machines lol. We build engines and some parts and everything we do has to be in SAE.
Every single one of my machines is set up to run metric so I don't have to constantly convert 64's and 8's and thou's fractional units between denominators, which is exactly why I'd rather type .0254mm than 1/1000. I absolutely cannot stand using different fractional denominators or that a foot is divided by 12, but everything else isn't. You've probably used it for years and are used to it, but approaching it with a rational mind seems like unnecessary work and risk of miscalculation.
Every number I use can easily be interchanged for another unit.
All it comes down to is set up honestly. Our old clearing lathe is all in standard, so trying to machine anything with metric units means a bunch of conversions, each one an opportunity for error. Easier just to do it in standard when the machine over double my age is already set up for it! Plus the thread cutting portion i would have no idea how to convert. I'll keep doing it in standard until my boss wants to covert 🤷
Men's clothes sizes are just as likely to be ill-fitted, it's just that men aren't held to the same standard of fashion. A lot of men don't mind wearing something a size too big or cinching their pants up with a belt. Nobody bats an eye.
I fill out a lot of forms and it's ridiculous. Sometimes I'll be at the bottom of the page, and I'll get a message saying that I can't continue until I fill out a 'must answer' question. Sometimes the programmer was clever enough to make it so I'm directed to the question, but more often than not I have to scroll through the entire form to find where I made my mistake.
And, when I have gotten to the end, it would be nice if there was a chance to review everything.
I'm not even going to start with the forms that make you use the calendar tool that takes longer than just entering the date.
Go to your browser settings and click "reject 3rd party cookies". This will block all cookies, except for the domain you are visiting. But it might break some things and have to readjust for some domains.
Otherwise use ublock and noscript, prevents your browser from loading things you never wanted.
The j-hook is fine. What is NOT fine is how difficult it can be to remove the damn wiper blades after they've been outside for awhile and things get dried up. There's got to be a better way
Oh man, I use a shopping list app, which lets you sort the products into aisles, so that you can just walk through the store and complete the checklist top-to-bottom as you visit each aisle.
Packaging. With everyone buying online the profusion of different types of packaging is wasteful. Packages are processed by machines and in many cases the packaging gets caught on things, gets stuck in conveyor belts or just slides right off. A huge number of items have to be manually processed because of the packaging. Standardised packaging would make automation much easier and lead to faster, cheaper processing. Unfortunately marketers want to use the super shiny slippery packaging with their brand all over it.
If your wine boxes are slippery they deserve to get dropped.
Women's clothing sizes. My size varies wildly depending on the store and every woman I know says the same thing. It can be really upsetting and at best it's a massive PITA
before transitioning i literally never knew my pants size because it was different for every brand. now that i shop in the men’s section post transition, i can now buy pants without needing to worry if they’ll fit. it’s the same measurement every single time no matter what brand. men’s sizes for pants work like 30x35, with the first number being the waist and the second being the length. plus, pockets! we seriously need better women’s clothes.
I have definitely run into men’s sizes that are the same size, brand, and style but fit different. Sometimes the cuts are off. And different brands cut differently, so while there may be more consistency than women’s sizes it definitely has a lot of inconsistencies as well.
I've got a pair of 36 and 46 that both fit. Usually shoes are fairly normalized, like an 11 usually fits across the board for me, but I got a pair of dress shoes one time and needed an 8. I put on an 11 and they were like clown shoes.
Dress pants for me are a shot in the dark. I'll find 40" waists that I cant put my hand in my pocket and then I'll find a 36 that both hands fit in fine and fit well. And I never get anything listed as skinny, I just always assume my phone would just bend around my leg at that point.
The brand name doesn't even matter, same brand will have different fits even in the same pant "style."
Tshirts are a shit show because I'm not skinny anymore. If it is going to not show my stomach when I raise my arms I'd need like a 3XL, but if I get a 3XL it is extremely loose everywhere because a large or XL is a more proper fit width wise.
weight measurements in baking recipes (instead of or in addition to volumetric measurements)
password requirements. Not using the same password for different sites, just using a formula, but it's hard when some sites require the use of characters that others forbid, or some sites cap password length at a character limit lower than other sites require as minimum.
Police education requirements. In North America, there are like hundreds of different police forces with vastly different requirements. Some will hire highschool dropouts while others require a university education.
False. Police agencies are the only institutions legally allowed to discriminate based on intelligence when it comes to hiring. Jordan v. City of New London set the precedent that its okay for police forces to refuse to hire a person because they are too smart. The reasoning in court was that those who are too intelligent face the risk of finding the work boring or becoming distracted by issues outside of the scope of their work. What that means from a practical standpoint is that they want dumb, obedient candidates for police positions rather than logical critical thinking individuals who might actually follow the law over orders from superiors. Its the same thing in the military too.
In the face of the facts, university education is probably more often a disqualification for actual law enforcement.
As I said, it varies depending on the police agency. The RNC in Newfoundland requires a university education. I noted in my comment that I was referring to all of North America
Oh they have standard training. That one guy who goes around training them all they will have the best sex of their life after they kill someone. See, nothing to worry about perfectly trained!
Battery interfaces. We have a huge variety of batteries for a huge variety of devices. However, when you open the proprietary shell of these batteries what you often find inside is standardized 18650 cells. They have been playing us for absolute fools.
We, as consumers, really do need to step up our battery knowledge. I would say, general electronics should be a mandatory requirement. Heck it should be a major part of the curriculum.
That's true, but it's also a bit more complicated - you can't just jam a handful of 18650 cells together and have it work. They need to be matched with cells having similar capacity and internal resistance and depending on the operating characteristics the tolerance can be quite low.
So it is possible to make your own packs or repair ones, but you have to test each cell in the existing pack, as well as test each cell your want to replace in and make sure that they're all in tolerance to each other.
It's a similar problem to lead acid batteries. 2V cells are arranged in a way that will deliver 12V at sufficient current for a particular application. However the solution we have landed on is completely different to li-ion because you can take any suitably sized car battery from one brand of vehicle and put it in another. The reason for that is the interface is common to virtually all cars. This technology pre-dates enshitification. There is no good reason to tie any battery to any device other than it helps the shareholders. They are busy inserting barriers to re-use and modularity everywhere in technology, particularly software.
The ENG field has had two battery mount standards in the form of the V-mount and the Anton Bauer Gold Mount for decades now, and both are interchangeable; you could swap a Gold Mount plate for a V-mount plate or vice-versa.
And on the consumer front, Sony's Infolithium might as well be standardized as there's lights which use Infolithium packs and you can buy generic battery packs in that format and still be able to power your Handycam from the mid '90s, for example.
Those are some good examples, more of that please. Most of the lithium powered devices I'm using currently are power tools and they are exclusively repackaged 18650 and 21700 cells. It's really not much of a technical challenge to make these things standardised but if there is no regulatory pressure it's easy money for the OEMs and more toxic waste for us.
ENG has even standardized on a DIN plug for power delivery since forever as well; anything from camcorders to monitors or studio cameras uses a DIN plug for external power. Cathode Ray Dude goes over this stuff quite a bit in some of his earlier vids.
Good news on the EV charging part, at least in North America. Most (if not all) manufacturers have agreed to switch to NACS, and most have adapters to work with either connector. There will be a long tail as the old connectors fade away, but the future is looking standardized.
Some amount of screw head variance is "I want to make it harder for users to open my product so they are less likely to break it" (e.g., Nintendo GameCube controller used tri-wing screws)
Also the very existence of "security" styles is presumably to keep laypeople out of high security areas.
But I agree there is some change that could be made. Philips in particular leaves a lot to be desired; it's so easy for them to strip.
philips in particular leaves a lot to be desired; it’s so easy for them to strip.
Which is why Canada uses Robertson in construction, which allows a screw to be driven pointing up.
Phillips heads are designed to cam out to prevent over-tightening. Many who strip Phillips screws are actually using Phillips drivers on JIS (Japanese Industry Standard) heads. They look similar.
Account metadata. I should be able to keep my contact info, personal data, friend list(s), notification settings, etc. on a server (personal or trusted) and use that account on different websites. There's no reason for these sites to all keep a separate incompatible record of these things!
It looks like it is going to get solved with license plate readers, but toll road transponders. Make everything EZ Pass, that is what it was designed for.
Before it was called infotainment, it was standardized. Your vehicle had either a DIN or double-DIN sized deck and replacing it meant getting a new deck in the right size and the wiring harness for your vehicle.
Now, every vehicle uses their own specific sized HMI, the computer(s) driving that is buried somewhere else in the vehicle, and it's so tightly coupled to the car's specific CAN/ethernet interfaces using signalling that's only somewhat standard across manufacturers so even integrating a third-party head unit into all of that would likely mean losing a whole bunch of features.
Most people just use Android Auto/Carplay now anyways
I really wish we could go back to double DINs ☹️ there should’ve been a standardized consortium like matter devices for cars. I’d kill to put a Tesla infotainment screen in anything else.
A voting test would just become voter suppression and electoral tampering. Even if it was implemented in good faith (doubt), it would still be full of implicit biases from whoever made it
And even if you kept it about really basic civil questions, that would disenfranchise people who had terrible educations or childhood situations - a demographic with a big overlap with poverty and race etc
Human rights
Education
Levels of medical care
Income / maximum wealth (wealth caps)
Min and max.
Just set a ratio cap. If you really think this system makes everyone better off then it should be fine.
Headlights that don't blind oncoming vehicles
Seriously... I hate my own damn headlights! People flash their high beams at me as if I have mine on, but they're just the stock headlights... I've been seriously considering going to a mechanic to have dimmer lights installed lol
Your headlight level adjuster might be stuck or broken. Have your mechanic check that it works.
If people regularly flash their lights at you over it, you probably should.
A lot of vehicles have a beam dip adjuster in the cab. Mine pops out when I press the center of the light control selector.
Officially, they are to correct for a heavy load in the back. Unofficially, if you tweak them, you can flip between longer range, and polite as required.
If you watch your lights, there should be a fairly sharp cut-off at the top of their coverage. If that line ever hits a window or mirror, it will look like you are flashing them. If it's too high, either fix it yourself (generally quite easy) or get it fixed.
Aim them yourself. You'll spent more time finding a good spot to aim them then actually doing it.
If they're LEDs or HIDs they're probably just a screw you turn to aim them. If they dont then it's basically the same thing, but in a less convenient spot. Look up the proper aiming procedure for your car, or just wing it by finding a car in a parking lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDudMM4J-ZE
I know the feeling. I had a rental car once for two weeks and I was more than once road-raged because of the lights. Everyone thought I was high-beaming it, but nope.
My cars low to the ground and only has halogen lamps, so if I'm ever flashing high beams at an SUV with overly bright lights, it's only so I can continue to see the road. LEDs are insane and the governments too busy facilitating record defense contractor earnings to do anything about it.
If you're in Canada, they're developing standards and they're asking for feedback. There's a survey to fill out on the Transport Canada site.
https://tc.canada.ca/en/corporate-services/consultations/canadian-experience-vehicle-headlights-glare-night
They won't do shit unless the US does it first. Government loves to consult and ignore.
That's what sealed-beam headlights used to be before composite housings which are proprietary to a given vehicle were legalized.
In fact, sealed-beams are still widely used in commercial vehicles because of their standardization to a point where they can be picked up anywhere and they're just gonna work.
On my car I have matrix headlights. I think every car should have them it’s honestly awesome technology and it’s a lot safer than normal lights. Hard to explain how they work just go look up a video and see for yourself
No; personally i find those annoying as hell when a car with those is behind me. Having partial high beams on either side from behind, that also come on and of with oncoming traffic, is really distracting. Never mind the "less good" implementations, that blind you through your side mirrors.
Not well at all when it comes to avoid blinding bicyclists, that's for sure.
Just another tech developed by the car industry pretending there are only cars in the road.
Just don't make headlights stupid bright.
Reminds me of the Simpsons episode, where they design the "perfect" family vehicle - and it costs too much for a middle class family to afford.
Meanwhile, it's impossible to find and affordable car with manual transmission, locks and windows.
The headlights themselves should be mounted at a standard height. Taller vehicle? Mount the lights lower on body.
No second headlights on trucks either
i'm not normally in support of taking control away from owners, but automating headlights seems like a big one. make radar and/or lidar, along with LED headlights, a requirement on new vehicles and have them automatically reduce brightness when a vehicle approaches. my old mazda would at least automatically turn the high beams off if a vehicle was a certain distance away from me.
OMG, light pollution in general has become my current "white whale," and the gods awful headlights on these ridiculous cars makes the most of it!
We should be able to see the stars at night, I don't think we have to sacrifice a dark night for the sake of "safety," maybe use a different color of street lamps, or get the lights on the walkway with just enough to find your way around
Please, I don't want to lose the Night!
Nuts, bolts, and screw heads.
I know we need various sizes for various tasks, but I shouldn't have to dig through 50 different screwdrivers or ratchet heads and still not have one that'll work.
I replace crappy ones when I remove them.
I'll tolerate Phillips, but slotted gets replaced with torx. Phillips get replaced if they get damaged.
Torx are pretty great
Everything should be torx
There are reasons why you can't have Torx in some situations. For example, sanitary machine designs. Preference is a flanged hex head. If flush mount is required, then slotted is best (even though they do suck for every other reason)
Why would slotted be better than, say, Phillips for flat mount? Most of the flat heads on the equipment at work is either a Phillips or hex
For sanitary applications, slotted is better because you can clean out the slot easier than the cutout for a Phillips head.
Torx Plus*
Best of luck with that mate. Do you know how many different cross-shaped drives there are already?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives
And if you really want to get upset about confused standards you should read the section of the Talk page about why JIS B 1012 was removed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_screw_drives
Meanwhile, there’s Robertson, the superior 4 pointed driver over Phillips.
Those are already standardized though…
There are 14 competing standards. We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases.
Congratulations now we have 15 standards.
I think that was the joke yes
Relevant XKCD
I'll just be happy when we phase out imperial and other weird thread types. Metric standardisation is a godsend over what came before.
The heads are a lost cause. They serve too many different purposes, with differing, competing, requirements.
Or the crappy BMW design.
Yes. Everything Robertson.
Feet, yards, inches should be replaced by the metric system.
Metric ftw!
There are 2 types of countries in this world: 1. Those that use the metric system and 2. Those that put a man on the moon ;)
Funny thing is, NASA uses metric.
But their independent contractors use imperial and convert back and forth. This is how the Mars Climate Orbitor was botched.
Interesting flex. Apollo Guidance Computer was working with Metric SI units internally.
Apollo Guidance Computer | Wikipedia
and how did that Mars landing go?
When you can divide a meter evenly by 2, 3, 4, 6 we will talk. Until then take your crappy base 10 measurements and stefu!
It can be done just like for feet and inches, look:
Yet I only need an integer when using the imperial system, and I don't have to repeat 3 into infinity.
But then you've got a space that's 5' 7 3/8" and you need a clearance of 7/32" on each end, so your piece should be...uh... 5' 6 15/16" long. So much easier than metric, right?
In metric it would be 1711mm (or 1.711m) and you'd need to take 5.5mm off each end, so it's 1700mm. (For the record, I picked random numbers in imperial and only did the metric conversion afterwards, I just lucked into the nice round number here.)
I dunno. You need how many sig figs you need in whichever system, but switching between a factor of 12 for the feet, base 10 for the inches, and the equivalent of binary decimals for the partial inches sure does take getting used to. I've finally gotten used to it enough that I can do it in my head, but I prefer to work on metric for most things.
I acknowledge that machinists just use thousandths of an inch, which does greatly improve working with that system, but it also introduces a third kind of measurement that can't easily be interconverted with the other two. I dunno. It just feels like we're doing way too much work propping up this archaic system when literally everyone else in the world is using something simpler and we could just be on the same system.
⅓m is 1.093504 feet or 13.12205 inch. I don't see how it's more convenient.
Work in a machine shop for a week and get back to us
The entire planet's machine shops do fine.
1x1x1 metre cube holds 1000L of water, and weighs 1000kg.
Uh? Done. What happens now?
What machines do u run in what country?
You only repeat 3 to the number of significant digits necessary.
Isn't that grade 4 math?
If you only need integers, why are the measurements of your home hardware and tech specified in 1/8ths and 1/16ths of an inch? Stick to whole inches or shut up.
50cm
33.3 cm
25cm
16.7cm
So you imagine that USians somehow can divide inches with infinite precision?
Easy.
Can you quickly calculate how many gallons of water receptacle with dimensions of 5 inch x 3 feet x 1 yard can hold? Extra points if you can also calculate how many pounds it weight when filled.
I just want existing standards to be public and accessible, not locked behind
400600 € ISO. That defeats the whole point of standards.Btw, is there no torrent for should-be-free standards?
Sure, you can search for alternative sources, hope that the PDF is not just image-scans but indexed and searchable text, and that it has a jump-able table of contents, and that it has not been altered and is up to date. Or you can go through public implementations and try to replicate, infer, and follow implementations or third-party descriptions of the standard. But all of that is error-prone and time and effort investment.
It shouldn't be like that. A standard should be public so that anyone can implement it, from either side. So anyone can verify and compare against the reference, and call out implementation misalignments.
An open phone standard, and no, I do not mean the 'Open Handset Alliance' that doesn't even live up to its name, I mean like an ATX-equivalent standard for mobile devices.
An open-source ISA already exists in RISC-V, maybe that hypothetical ATX-for-mobile-devices standard could standardize around that for starters, as for an OS, it could standardize around non-Android Linux and maybe even some BSD mobile OSes instead of Google pulling some MS-in-the-'90s crap for Android like they're doing right now.
You need an equivalent of ACPI in the x86 space to catch on in ARM/RISC-V if you want a general purpose OS to be viable on phones
There's sort-of kind-of SystemReady in ARM but it's a far cry from the standardization of ACPI on x86 desktops
Europe:
Power plugs
Train gauge and electricity
Online payment without credit cards
World wide:
Driving on the right
Driving on the left you mean. It's better since most people are right-handed.
Yeah, so use your left hand to steer and right hand for everything else.
Prioritise everything else over where the car goes? Madness.
Weaves wildly onto the pavement full of school kids but accurately adjusted the aircon
That effect is vastly overblown and doesn't really matter.
Sure, if we only started driving today, we should pick the best side from all perspectives, but changing that now will just be extremely expensive for a very limited gain.
The same goes for switching any island nation from left to right.
Using your dominant hand for gear shift makes more sense than the alternative. Disagree?
No one has manuals anymore.
Even if you're in an automatic, and shifting between P, R and D. I'd much rather do that with my dominant hand. Wouldn't you?
But that's just control. A tradeoff since there has been some evidence that reaction time, attention and accident avoidance work better the other way. Like sure, I might have more control over a knife by cutting towards myself (granny cut for apples and such), but it's still inherently more dangerous that the opposite side in any case besides 'everything goes perfectly'.
But that's less of a factor that just being more attentive (and primed to react) to action on your right hand side if right handed. It's 'sticky' for me at least: I can switch to driving on the left relatively easily, but the reverse takes more effort, even though I have spent more time driving on the right in my lifetime.
I really want everyone to use the metric system. Imperial is just awful to use for most design and machine purposes.
Interesting, as somebody who on a somewhat regular basis runs a lathe and occasionally a Bridgeport at work I could not imagine using metric. Mostly because our old machines are all standard, but also because a thousandth of an inch (industry standard unit for measuring clearances) is .0254 mm so now clearances begin to involve more math. Call it lazy but I'm not converting everything on my machines lol. We build engines and some parts and everything we do has to be in SAE.
Every single one of my machines is set up to run metric so I don't have to constantly convert 64's and 8's and thou's fractional units between denominators, which is exactly why I'd rather type .0254mm than 1/1000. I absolutely cannot stand using different fractional denominators or that a foot is divided by 12, but everything else isn't. You've probably used it for years and are used to it, but approaching it with a rational mind seems like unnecessary work and risk of miscalculation.
Every number I use can easily be interchanged for another unit.
The QWERTY keyboard has entered the chat.
"We've always done it this way..."
All it comes down to is set up honestly. Our old clearing lathe is all in standard, so trying to machine anything with metric units means a bunch of conversions, each one an opportunity for error. Easier just to do it in standard when the machine over double my age is already set up for it! Plus the thread cutting portion i would have no idea how to convert. I'll keep doing it in standard until my boss wants to covert 🤷
Women's clothing sizes
It's creeping into men's sizes, too.
Depending on the maker, I'm a Large, Extra Large, 2XL, or sometimes 3XL.
And I can fit into some mediums.
I don't want to hear about your psychic sex life, bud
:-)
There was a post recently.
[paraphrase] Guys who make jokes about their big dicks are usually assholes, but guys who joke about how small they are are usually cool and fun.
Reply = I have a medium dick. It can contact the dead.
Men's clothes sizes are just as likely to be ill-fitted, it's just that men aren't held to the same standard of fashion. A lot of men don't mind wearing something a size too big or cinching their pants up with a belt. Nobody bats an eye.
All online forms.
I fill out a lot of forms and it's ridiculous. Sometimes I'll be at the bottom of the page, and I'll get a message saying that I can't continue until I fill out a 'must answer' question. Sometimes the programmer was clever enough to make it so I'm directed to the question, but more often than not I have to scroll through the entire form to find where I made my mistake.
And, when I have gotten to the end, it would be nice if there was a chance to review everything.
I'm not even going to start with the forms that make you use the calendar tool that takes longer than just entering the date.
Forms itself should be a thing of the past. They mimic paper based patterns which makes no sense for lost use cases in 2026.
What we need is standardized APIs through which you can share specific personal info if you wish to do so. E.g. SOLID implements this.
If additional info is needed a basic conversation with an agent could take the place of a form in due time (for those who wish to use this).
Civil rights
powertools' batteries.
Printer cartridges and razor blades
I haven't printed anything at home in years. Just easier to go to the shop/library and pay them.
https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-safety-razors.html
Old fashioned double side safety razors. No gimmicks, less waste, and cheap.
That was the name of my third album.
Sounds like the name of a colab album between Weird Al and HIM
The “reject all cookies” button
The cookies being rejected should've been the standard. Instead they gave us shitty popups that didn't solve anything.
Go to your browser settings and click "reject 3rd party cookies". This will block all cookies, except for the domain you are visiting. But it might break some things and have to readjust for some domains.
Otherwise use ublock and noscript, prevents your browser from loading things you never wanted.
Job ads.
To hell with all the bullshitting.
Title. Basic duties. Salary. Upload resume.
Windshield wiper arms. Everything should be J-hook.
The j-hook is fine. What is NOT fine is how difficult it can be to remove the damn wiper blades after they've been outside for awhile and things get dried up. There's got to be a better way
See, if everything was j hook, blades wouldn't have their own array of adapters, some of which get stuck even on j hooks.
If you have trouble, just break the plastic off. You're replacing it anyway.
Nothing, we have enough standards already!
https://m.xkcd.com/927/
We should really standardise standards
We’re really all over with Spinosaurus.
It's crazy how much it evolved in just a hundred years. Even crazier that it's still evolving at all after being extinct for 100 million years.
Grocery store layouts.
https://youtu.be/RxMR1TMec04
Oh man, I use a shopping list app, which lets you sort the products into aisles, so that you can just walk through the store and complete the checklist top-to-bottom as you visit each aisle.
This would be excellent for that.
Packaging. With everyone buying online the profusion of different types of packaging is wasteful. Packages are processed by machines and in many cases the packaging gets caught on things, gets stuck in conveyor belts or just slides right off. A huge number of items have to be manually processed because of the packaging. Standardised packaging would make automation much easier and lead to faster, cheaper processing. Unfortunately marketers want to use the super shiny slippery packaging with their brand all over it.
If your wine boxes are slippery they deserve to get dropped.
Instant messengers.
Women's clothing sizes. My size varies wildly depending on the store and every woman I know says the same thing. It can be really upsetting and at best it's a massive PITA
before transitioning i literally never knew my pants size because it was different for every brand. now that i shop in the men’s section post transition, i can now buy pants without needing to worry if they’ll fit. it’s the same measurement every single time no matter what brand. men’s sizes for pants work like 30x35, with the first number being the waist and the second being the length. plus, pockets! we seriously need better women’s clothes.
I have definitely run into men’s sizes that are the same size, brand, and style but fit different. Sometimes the cuts are off. And different brands cut differently, so while there may be more consistency than women’s sizes it definitely has a lot of inconsistencies as well.
That’s my anecdotal experience though.
I've got a pair of 36 and 46 that both fit. Usually shoes are fairly normalized, like an 11 usually fits across the board for me, but I got a pair of dress shoes one time and needed an 8. I put on an 11 and they were like clown shoes.
Dress pants for me are a shot in the dark. I'll find 40" waists that I cant put my hand in my pocket and then I'll find a 36 that both hands fit in fine and fit well. And I never get anything listed as skinny, I just always assume my phone would just bend around my leg at that point. The brand name doesn't even matter, same brand will have different fits even in the same pant "style."
Tshirts are a shit show because I'm not skinny anymore. If it is going to not show my stomach when I raise my arms I'd need like a 3XL, but if I get a 3XL it is extremely loose everywhere because a large or XL is a more proper fit width wise.
all clothing sizes. 34 means 34 inches, but it's 30-32 inches in asia.
size 12 shoes are different between US, EU and UK. Why the fuck.
weight measurements in baking recipes (instead of or in addition to volumetric measurements)
password requirements. Not using the same password for different sites, just using a formula, but it's hard when some sites require the use of characters that others forbid, or some sites cap password length at a character limit lower than other sites require as minimum.
Yep! Or at least put the fucking formula by the login to prompt which one you used when you registered
Make it automatically readable for password managers
Police education requirements. In North America, there are like hundreds of different police forces with vastly different requirements. Some will hire highschool dropouts while others require a university education.
False. Police agencies are the only institutions legally allowed to discriminate based on intelligence when it comes to hiring. Jordan v. City of New London set the precedent that its okay for police forces to refuse to hire a person because they are too smart. The reasoning in court was that those who are too intelligent face the risk of finding the work boring or becoming distracted by issues outside of the scope of their work. What that means from a practical standpoint is that they want dumb, obedient candidates for police positions rather than logical critical thinking individuals who might actually follow the law over orders from superiors. Its the same thing in the military too.
In the face of the facts, university education is probably more often a disqualification for actual law enforcement.
As I said, it varies depending on the police agency. The RNC in Newfoundland requires a university education. I noted in my comment that I was referring to all of North America
You think think its practical to have the same training for police in Mexico and Canada?
"Congratulations, you're everything we've come to expect from years of government training."
Oh they have standard training. That one guy who goes around training them all they will have the best sex of their life after they kill someone. See, nothing to worry about perfectly trained!
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/jun/05/architect-of-controversial-killology-police-traini/
That man is very gross. It's even right there in the name.
Battery interfaces. We have a huge variety of batteries for a huge variety of devices. However, when you open the proprietary shell of these batteries what you often find inside is standardized 18650 cells. They have been playing us for absolute fools.
We, as consumers, really do need to step up our battery knowledge. I would say, general electronics should be a mandatory requirement. Heck it should be a major part of the curriculum.
That's true, but it's also a bit more complicated - you can't just jam a handful of 18650 cells together and have it work. They need to be matched with cells having similar capacity and internal resistance and depending on the operating characteristics the tolerance can be quite low.
So it is possible to make your own packs or repair ones, but you have to test each cell in the existing pack, as well as test each cell your want to replace in and make sure that they're all in tolerance to each other.
It's a similar problem to lead acid batteries. 2V cells are arranged in a way that will deliver 12V at sufficient current for a particular application. However the solution we have landed on is completely different to li-ion because you can take any suitably sized car battery from one brand of vehicle and put it in another. The reason for that is the interface is common to virtually all cars. This technology pre-dates enshitification. There is no good reason to tie any battery to any device other than it helps the shareholders. They are busy inserting barriers to re-use and modularity everywhere in technology, particularly software.
Button cells should be standardised to only two sizes.
They are a health hazard, a live cell can eat through the stomach of a toddler very easily.
The main reason this occurs is because people buy those multiple size packs because every device has a different size.
The ENG field has had two battery mount standards in the form of the V-mount and the Anton Bauer Gold Mount for decades now, and both are interchangeable; you could swap a Gold Mount plate for a V-mount plate or vice-versa.
And on the consumer front, Sony's Infolithium might as well be standardized as there's lights which use Infolithium packs and you can buy generic battery packs in that format and still be able to power your Handycam from the mid '90s, for example.
Those are some good examples, more of that please. Most of the lithium powered devices I'm using currently are power tools and they are exclusively repackaged 18650 and 21700 cells. It's really not much of a technical challenge to make these things standardised but if there is no regulatory pressure it's easy money for the OEMs and more toxic waste for us.
ENG has even standardized on a DIN plug for power delivery since forever as well; anything from camcorders to monitors or studio cameras uses a DIN plug for external power. Cathode Ray Dude goes over this stuff quite a bit in some of his earlier vids.
Units of measurement. Imagine if there was one universal way of measuring something, be it temperatures, weights, pressure..
We're close on this one but there's a couple of holdouts.
EV charging, a free (as in freedom) decentralised e2ee protocol for chat and calls, p2p mesh networks and (opensourced) SDI on consumer equipments.
Good news on the EV charging part, at least in North America. Most (if not all) manufacturers have agreed to switch to NACS, and most have adapters to work with either connector. There will be a long tail as the old connectors fade away, but the future is looking standardized.
Board game box sizes
Proportional wealth distribution.
Screw heads
Some amount of screw head variance is "I want to make it harder for users to open my product so they are less likely to break it" (e.g., Nintendo GameCube controller used tri-wing screws)
Also the very existence of "security" styles is presumably to keep laypeople out of high security areas.
But I agree there is some change that could be made. Philips in particular leaves a lot to be desired; it's so easy for them to strip.
Which is why Canada uses Robertson in construction, which allows a screw to be driven pointing up.
Phillips heads are designed to cam out to prevent over-tightening. Many who strip Phillips screws are actually using Phillips drivers on JIS (Japanese Industry Standard) heads. They look similar.
Batteries. Phones, laptops, other random ecrap.
Treatment of oligarchs
Phone battery sizes. Also RIL interfaces (the "phone" chip with it's own OS).
Weights and measurements
Account metadata. I should be able to keep my contact info, personal data, friend list(s), notification settings, etc. on a server (personal or trusted) and use that account on different websites. There's no reason for these sites to all keep a separate incompatible record of these things!
Ah but see, how are they gonna sell your data if that happens?
Won't somebody think of the corporations???
Cannot stand Duo and Microsoft Authenticator. Proprietary MFA clients should be ridiculed.
Hyperbolic and lacking nuance? Yes. But I came here to shout into the clouds, not to be fair.
Everything that has not yet been standardized.
Equality
Equity
It looks like it is going to get solved with license plate readers, but toll road transponders. Make everything EZ Pass, that is what it was designed for.
Packaging!!
Car infotainment
Social security numbers > more secure identification
Doctors offices
Before it was called infotainment, it was standardized. Your vehicle had either a DIN or double-DIN sized deck and replacing it meant getting a new deck in the right size and the wiring harness for your vehicle.
Now, every vehicle uses their own specific sized HMI, the computer(s) driving that is buried somewhere else in the vehicle, and it's so tightly coupled to the car's specific CAN/ethernet interfaces using signalling that's only somewhat standard across manufacturers so even integrating a third-party head unit into all of that would likely mean losing a whole bunch of features.
Most people just use Android Auto/Carplay now anyways
I really wish we could go back to double DINs ☹️ there should’ve been a standardized consortium like matter devices for cars. I’d kill to put a Tesla infotainment screen in anything else.
A voting test would just become voter suppression and electoral tampering. Even if it was implemented in good faith (doubt), it would still be full of implicit biases from whoever made it
And even if you kept it about really basic civil questions, that would disenfranchise people who had terrible educations or childhood situations - a demographic with a big overlap with poverty and race etc
They tried this already.
Women having class.
Standardize not holding women to ambiguous and hazy hierarchical standards like “class” 🙄
Standardize letting women just be people and minding your damn business. Like wtf is this answer?
I was expecting like the metric system, or the number of continents but no.. I’m going to go outside and rip ass so hard today, just for you buddy. 👍
RIP, class 😎