85
No Google, that is not how you convert meters into feet.
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
85 points (84.6% liked)
Mildly Infuriating
35455 readers
98 users here now
Home to all things "Mildly Infuriating" Not infuriating, not enraging. Mildly Infuriating. All posts should reflect that.
I want my day mildly ruined, not completely ruined. Please remember to refrain from reposting old content. If you post a post from reddit it is good practice to include a link and credit the OP. I'm not about stealing content!
It's just good to get something in this website for casual viewing whilst refreshing original content is added overtime.
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means: -No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
7. Content should match the theme of this community.
-Content should be Mildly infuriating.
-At this time we permit content that is infuriating until an infuriating community is made available.
...
8. Reposting of Reddit content is permitted, try to credit the OC.
-Please consider crediting the OC when reposting content. A name of the user or a link to the original post is sufficient.
...
...
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
Reach out to LillianVS for inclusion on the sidebar.
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
There's no correct and incorrect here. The help page (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/3284611) doesn't even mention which word you should use, and it of course depends on the language you use. As a German speaker, I naturally use "in", and that always worked for me (I use this a lot), except for this example.
I see that that works. In this particular case obviously better than "in". I guess I'll use this in the future, but I'm sticking with that this is a bug, not something inherently wrong with using "in".
"in" is the abbreviation for "inches" and Google will most always interpret it that way from an English language point of view. Additionally as a vernacular you usually only say "meters in feet" when your wanting to do a single unit conversion such as "how many meters are in a foot?". Google's language processing tends to be heavily slanted towards common English in which case some differences like that will never be considered how you want.
Considering you're right that that's exactly what is happening here I can't push this too hard, but I definitely think it's very common and standard English to say "what's 17.21 metres in feet?" and of course very common especially in metric countries to abbreivate metres to m. It's also a logically odd request to want to know what 17.21 million inches are in feet with no "to" or even "in" (the in having been used up here by being assumed to mean inches) to give the query meaning. That would read as "17.21 million inches feet".
Google is capable of supplying a unit conversion answer for you with the "in" construction for the query "17km in miles" for example so it understands "in" in the way many of us would expect it to but weirdly assumed that 'in' meant inches and that the query is constructed with no grammatical indication that a conversion is even being requested which is a bit of a funny leap. It's understandable that this might perhaps not have been anticipated exactly, in as much as perhaps it's not surprising that it doesn't somehow have the capacity to evaluate the likelihood of such a request over the more "common sense" interpretation but whether or not it's understandable that this mightn't have been foreseen I think we could reasonably call the resulting interpretation as undesireable for almost all human beings that might ever use this tool and it's probably fair to call it a bug in that sense.