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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • It definitely would not be, regardless of whatever “done correctly” means. Solar noon at exactly 12:00 is only going to happen on a single line of longitude. If you have a timezone centered on that line and exactly 15° (one hour) wide then solar noon will be up to 30 minutes away from 12:00 depending on your east/west position in that timezone.

    It was exactly this realization that the numbers were arbitrary and 12:00 didn’t need to be solar noon that led to the creation of timezones in the first place, so that it’s not 4:14 in Norwich while it’s 3:52 in Birmingham and just travelling from city to city doesn’t mean you’re changing your watch constantly and it becomes actually possible to write a sensible rail schedule.

    Timezones are already a step toward an arbitrary standard time for the purposes of making communication easier and not needing to change your watch just because you moved around. UTC everywhere would just be another larger step in that already established direction.


  • I don’t see how dealing with that is any worse than dealing with time zones.

    Downside of UTC everywhere: you might have to set your alarm for a different time when you travel.

    Upsides: Never need to account for timezones in communication. Never need to change a clock, ever.

    They make sense because the numbers won’t be arbitrary.

    But they are. There’s no changing that. They’re arbitrary now. They’d be arbitrary if we had UTC everywhere. We’re not out here using sundials to set our clocks, 12:00 is not solar noon more often than it is.



  • I know someone who has a company with the word “technology” in the name, like “Smith Technology”. They use .technology because it’s literally the name of the company, which I think is good for the brand identity, but have run into issues where people just don’t think it’s a correct url because “smith.technology” looks like it’s missing its TLD.





  • I’d expect that many images are going to be somewhere near 50% grey if you average their luminance out overall. That’s just the average of every colour though. The fact that averaging a range of things tends toward a standard distribution isn’t particularly surprising. Again though, it’s not hard to get a diffusion model to generate something outside of that expectation.

    Prompt: “night sky”

    Image:

    Average colour:

    Average brightness: 21%

    Prompt: “lineless image of an old man drawn in yellow ink on white background”

    Image:

    Average colour:

    Average brightness: 90%


  • I’m saying it because it’s not only obvious with even a moments thought (you can literally just ask it for an entirely red image or whatever), but also because it’s easily provable.

    Prompt: “Under the sea”

    Image:

    Average pixel colour:

    Prompt: “a man with red hair wearing a red coat standing in front of a red background”

    Image:

    Average pixel colour:

    So I ask you the same question. Did you just say that because you felt like it was true?








  • I don’t know what it’s using specifically under the hood, but in Street Fighter 6 Capcom recently added a new AI opponent you can fight that they say is trained on actual player ranked matches and fights more like a human opponent. You can even have it try to mimic your own playstyle if you’ve played enough.

    It can do some odd things and its mimicry isn’t perfect. But it definitely doesn’t feel like the typical high difficulty CPU opponent which uses things like input reading to react faster than a real player ever could.

    …it also has been seen teabagging.