• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 10th, 2023
  • Brainsploosh@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•Whoever invented the 12-hour clock never doubted that people will always know if it's day or night
    91·
    2 months ago

    Although the 12 hours aren’t divided in day/night are they?

    And depending on where/when you’re at, it can easily be light out at seven and seven, even in the same day.

    What the 12 hour clock does well is to track when the sun goes up or down relative to the only convenient time marker: midday. It also does so in a pleasingly symmetrical way: it gets light and dark at about 8, rather than 4 hours before and 8 hours after midday.

    I’d argue if you want to track time, rather than record the ends of daylight, a linear scale for the whole day makes more sense. If it should be reset daily or not, be divisible by 24, 86400, 100, 1000000, a second or whatever is mostly a choice of convention. If you have constant access to a clock, Internet time seems convenient, for humans without clocks we use daylight and units like hours and 5-minute increments.

    For that the 24 hour clock seems simple and convenient, although it would be nice to be able to calibrate without a watch (is it two or three hours before midday? How many more hours until wake-up time?). 24 hour time isn’t perfect, but it’s much better adapted to modern life than the 12 hour clock.

  • Brainsploosh@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•[Serious] If a human is trained by AI slop and then they make something with their own hands, is it still art?
    3·
    2 months ago

    1. Yes it’s your art, you used AI as a tool to create your concept, from your original ideas. If the tool is trained to reproduce others’ work (such as generative and LLM), it’s another story.

    2. A painting doesn’t belong to the brush factory nor pigment maker, but neither is the brush or the paint the artistry of it. The greys of AI tool usage is when the tool takes away the art, statement, concept and/or craftsmanship. A photographer can create art with a camera, but they can also be used for stuff that is clearly not art.

    3. To my mind, the art comes not from the school or medium, but from the artist challenging, provoking and/or expressing something human. With skill you can delve deeper within the human condition, conceptualise deeper truths, and with mastery of tools and/or craft become the better at conveying it.

    An AI, not having an understanding of human-ness can never create art, only mimic it. Studying AI art can thus surely be used as an inspiration for technique and/or reflection, but trying to replicate generated images will probably be a difficult path towards creating art.

    Then again, I would contrast art and creatives. Many ad creatives, fonts, decorations, and even wall paint swatches have very little artistic value to them, even though they require creativity and craftsmanship to realise.

  • Brainsploosh@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program
    24·
    4 months ago

    And I’m showing you, with sources, that you are wrong on both your points.

    It can be reliably and reproducibly measured that diversity is more profitable. It’s as “always” as tylenol helps against headaches, trains for travel, google for searches, gravity for keeping you on the ground. Yes, there technically are times these don’t work, but it works more often than not, and typically there’s other factors when it doesn’t.

    And similarly, yes you might not always pick the best candidate, but applying robustly provable best practices will lead you to doing it more often.

    Do you go through anything else in life in this manner? That if you can’t do it perfectly, you’d rather not try? I’d wager not, as trying gets you closer to your goals, even when not meeting them immediately.

  • Brainsploosh@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program
    37·
    4 months ago

    It seems evident you’re not giving an informed opinion.

    The Trump administration has deemed presentations of employed women and poc as part of DEI.

    I find it hard to see that describing your employee diversity is discriminatory. And the law is quite settled on this not being discriminatory. Changes are being forced by executive order, many of which have been illegal under the current administration.

    Diversity has repeatedly been shown to be more profitable than homogeneity, in both academic and gray literature. Besides being good for societal cohesion, fairness, stability, happiness, and moral virtue.

    The best candidate is indeed best, but there are too narrow and outdated ideas on how to identify the best candidate, and humans have a bias to choose/hire for safety and similarity over actually relevant criteria, which is why we have the problem in the first place.

  • Brainsploosh@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program
    67·
    4 months ago

    Please provide proof that this is in use at the PSF.

    Quotas for minorities are a very outdated practice and were used to break the most entrenched norms (women in C-suites).

    More modern practices include preferring diversity between equally qualified candidates, ad retargeting and messaging efforts, and inclusive norms at workplaces.

    Also, diversity is profitable, it increases both innovativeness and productivity. It seems uniquely stupid to kneecap the economy to benefit your cronies. Then again, maybe that’s the whole point of the GOPedo platform: rob the commons.