Nice! I’ve been looking forward to this.

My musket says otherwise!

Brits who say “Microsoft are doing a thing” are poking knitting needles into my ears every time!

It’s not plural. Microsoft is a company. A. One!

It doesn’t matter that it’s a company of individuals. Next your going to tell me my person is plural because I’m made from many cells. “CrayonRosary are mistaken about language!” No!

Bonus: Math is singular, too, because mathematics is singular. It’s not the plural of mathematic!

We overthrew your rule specifically because of this one language issue!

But there is a smallest unit, which is called a bit. Data can be broken down into smaller, countable units.

That’s not a particularly compelling argument. There’s a smallest unit of sand, too, but we still use a mass noun for it.

Besides, dictionary researchers agree it’s both a mass noun and a plural noun. People use it both ways. Here’s what Merriam Webster says about it. (I’m going to rework it to reduce the wordiness because it was so dense!)

Data leads a life of its own quite independent of datum, of which it was originally the plural. It occurs in two constructions:

1. as a plural noun (like earnings)
   • taking a plural verb and plural modifiers (such as these, many, a few), but not cardinal numbers
   • serving as a referent for plural pronouns (such as they, them)
2. as an abstract mass noun (like information)
   • taking a singular verb and singular modifiers (such as this, much, little)
   • being referred to by a singular pronoun (it).

Both constructions are standard. The plural construction is more common in print, evidently because the house style of several publishers mandates it.

So OP’s post is only half right, if even that much. In common speech, data is a mass noun, but many scientists and publishers still treat it as a plural noun. I would even venture most do.

Working as a programmer, most people I’ve interacted with use it as a mass noun, but not all. Language evolves, and the mass noun version is just as acceptable in most circles, but it certainly isn’t worthy of a “you should know” or “today I learned it’s actually a mass noun.”

What’s a tree?

It’s not about being normal. This data is for scientists. The denomination was a deliberate choice given the various sizes of the data. It might be as low as single digits in some cases.

We use decimals all the time. We’re not dumb. But when making direct comparisons of values, it’s a simple fact that comparing 5 to 20 is easier than comparing 0.05 to 0.2. This is a scientific fact. It’s easier for your brain to parse. You can’t deny that. Go ask a psychologist. In addition, the data is cleaner. It’s easier to print “5” than “0.05”, and then you mention the denominator under the graph or table of data.

Every engineer and scientist in the US uses metric, and it doesn’t matter what the average person uses. Proper home cooks find bread recipes with metric weights for ingredients, for example. Woodworkers use feet and inches. People who use the Imperial system are just people using what they know. It’s entirely moot to this conversation. I don’t know why you keep bringing up fractions and the Imperial system as if that adds any weight to your argument about the actual topic at hand. The topic being scientists using a deliberate unit of measure to make it easy to print values and compare them at a glance.

Who said anything about fractions? Whole numbers are easier than decimals and fractions.

And no, this isn’t just a US thing. I’m certain your country uses things like “parts per million”.

Because it makes the numerator whole numbers for all data for easy comparisons by human minds. Comparing 300 to 5 is easier for people than comparing 30 to 0.5. It’s the same reason machinists use inches per minute over inches per second. It’s so values are between 1 and 600 and not between 0.0176 and 10. It’s easier to reason about whole numbers than decimals.

Cry me a fucking river.

Turns out, that is how it works.

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Me too, honestly.

Since you mentioned VSCode. I wanted to bring up VSCodium. It’s a fork of VSCode with no telemetry. Yes, it’s a full fledged IDE, and probably too much if you just want to markdown editor, but I use it for much more than that, and I think it’s great.

This is why I didn’t read it.

South Korea is the leading consumer and producer of farmed Codium (commonly known as cheonggak)

Search for that.

The full name is VScodium. https://vscodium.com/

Codium is a genus of edible green macroalgae.

Please don’t force touch design in me!

Are you sure your aren’t thinking of osmotic laxatives? Miralax, for example, is polyethylene glycol.

I have not. I use Fusion for CAD and CAM for a CNC router.

I’ve been learning GIMP to replace Photoshop in preparation. So far, so good, but there are still things about GIMP I just dont get. Like, it’s seems impossible to paint onto a fully transparent layer because the paint tool doesn’t modify the mask as it goes. I don’t even want that layer to have an alpha channel, but it seems like you have no choice if you want a transparent layer.

If you try to paint on a transparent layer, you just get… nothing. It’s so trivial in Photoshop to make a new layer and just paint into it, and I can’t figure it out at all in GIMP. (I really should ask in a forum, but I also feel like I shouldn’t have to.)

Being able to script in Python to simulate Photoshop actions is both awesome and crappy. It’s awesome because of how powerful it is, but crappy that I can’t just whip up an action in seconds to make a quick, repeatable edit.

I guess I’ll have to use a VM to run Autodesk Fusion. ☹️