Iunnrais

Months aren’t 100% arbitrary. There’s 12.3ish lunar phase cycles in a year. It’s that “bit more” than 12 thing that trips things up though, and why the lunar month was abandoned for arbitrary 12 divisions. But the 12 wasn’t arbitrary… that’s a nod back to those 12 and a bit lunar months.

A day has a fixed, non-arbitrary definition: one rotation of the planet.

A year has a fixed, non-arbitrary definition: one orbit of the planet of the sun.

365.2422 days in a year is a precise and unambiguous ratio.

A month, on the other hand, is much more ambiguous and historically influenced. Basically, the idea of a month exists around the world because we have a moon, and that moon cycles through its phases roughly about every 29.53 days. That’s the “idea” of a month. The trouble is, it isn’t really connected with either the concept of a day, nor the concept of a year… and those matter. Day and night determine when we sleep and work. A year determines the weather and when we can plant crops.

Divide 365.2422 by 29.53 and you get 12… and a bit. Pretty darn close! But annoyingly not quite exact. And that really matters for farmers especially, but also for anyone wanting to know when it’s going to snow or when the sun is going to try to kill you with heat.

Some cultures fixed this with “leap months”… varying the number of months in a year every so often in order to resync the moon and the sun. But most people these days stick with a purely solar based calendar where the months are entirely divorced from the movement of the moon. There’s still 12 months, because tradition and also because it’s a useful length of time to talk about, but the 1st of the month is not a new moon for most people.

Of course, we have leap DAYS, which are the same sort of thing. Vary the number of days in a year to resync.

But compare to midnight and noon, which are definitely based exactly on the sun. This rarely needs adjustment, and when it does, we’re talking about “leap seconds”.

My smartwatch has literally changed my life. I got it because I needed to keep track of blood oxygen on a regular basis for a medical condition, and while the finger clip reader was okay I wanted something I had on me all the time. But the mere fact that I could see, on an ongoing basis, how many calories I was burning was extremely motivating to my adhd mind, and I started exercising, then tracking calories and dieting, I’ve built muscle, lost fat, and actually changed my lifestyle in general. And don’t tell me I could have done those things without a smartwatch— years of empirical evidence contradict that statement.

A question only a young person would ask. After you become an adult, it’s not creepy to hang out with other adults. Before you’re an adult is when you give a shit about other people’s ages, because it matter.

Is there something about farting in a bikini that’s different from farting in any other clothing?

Assuming that as an older millennial, I’m the parent you’re talking about, no. Porn almost never went on those. VHS and paper magazines mostly. Computer porn would be downloaded to a convoluted folder depth with misleading names on your hard drive, and would never be placed on removable media unless you had a CD burner, which was rare as fuck (but they did exist).

Seriously though, people used to make genuine mazes out of nested folders.

If you were in the era of dial up BBS systems, you still were far more likely to use a hard drive than a floppy. The reason floppies weren’t used is that even at low resolution with still images, not much would fit on the things, super inconvenient. Shareware, sure. Porn? Not likely.

Cassette just means a small case, compact enough that you can plug the entire case straight into your machine. A “normal” sized case would be one of those metal canisters that store 8mm movie reels, and you need to take the tape out of those to use them.

Don’t want no captain crunch, don’t want no Raisin Bran…

You have Batman Beyond and Batman Caped Crusader, but no Batman: TAS? The show that redefined Batman away from goofy Adam West style comedy and into deep character drama… some of those episodes still give me the chills to this day. That show elevated camp into something deep and truly moving.

I mean, the plugins are super useful. But in general it’s really good at quickly letting you flip through a bunch of files and link them together like a wiki on your local pc. Can markdown link to other files like that? Technically yes, but not using the same window and making the navigation so smooth.

But the plugins really do a lot of work.

Or North Korea. Or China. Take your pick of fascist dictatorships.

No, the difference is that if you double a kelvin number, you have quantifiably doubled the heat. If you double a Celsius or Fahrenheit number, you have not quantifiably doubled the heat… the number does not objectively count an amount of something.

Think meters. A meter measures an exact length. Two meters is double one meter.

Celsius doesn’t do that. Celsius is a scale between two amounts of heat.

The equivalent for distance would be if we had a scale where 0 degrees distance was equal to 582.7762 meters, and 100 degrees distance was equal to 721.5323 meters. Each degree between 0 and a hundred is then a slice of that range. Maybe for the people who designed such a scale there’s useful reasons to do so, but you aren’t measuring the quantity or amount of something, you’re measuring a range.

Kelvin measures molecular movement, just as hertz measures oscillations or cycles, or grams measure weight.

Nope, Kelvins are a countable unit, like meters. Celsius and Fahrenheit are not.

I genuinely enjoyed it more when I was younger, finding all the joke articles and whatnot. Now I enjoy it less, but I’m content to let others have their fun. No use whining about it, and why should I decrease someone else’s enjoyment, when all I need to do is sit back and ignore stuff that doesn’t matter anyway. Easy.

I get that lemmy hates AI, and I’m not going to try to talk you out of that, but please stop repeating this factually incorrect myth. LLMs are not stochastic parrots, despite what you may have heard. And they do think… to a degree. Note that they’re by no means everything CEOs and tech bros want them to be, but if you’re going to criticize them, please do it accurately.

They do know the meaning of words, but only in relation to other words. It’s how they work. It’s not a statistical thing like word frequency patterns— they’re not doing the same thing autocomplete does. Instead, they’re doing math on words in a several hundred-thousand dimensional array where placement on this grid indicates the meaning of the word— one vector direction indicates plurals, another indicates rudeness or politeness, another indicates frog-like, another might indicate related to 1993 ibm pentium CPUs, etc, etc, etc. It developed this array via training on terabytes of text, but it’s not storing a copy of that text, nor looking it up, nor copying anything from it… it’s defining words based on how they are used, then doing math on it to figure out what is the most appropriate thing to say next— not the most likely thing according to statistics, the most meaningful based on the definitions of the words it understands.

They really do not copy and paste. They do use definitions. They do think about the words in a very real way.

They don’t apply logical consistency and fact checking. There are hacks to make them talk to themselves in a way that following the meaningful definitions of words will more likely lead to fact checking and logical consistency, but it’s not 100% fool proof.

It was their self-descriptor until they learned other leftists didn’t like them much (because they’re authoritarian and supportive of fascist dictators such as Putin), and naming them using their self designated term meant they were excluded from other leftists. So they started taking offense.

To be clear, it seems you object to the concept of sequels and movie serieses (how do you pluralize “series”?) more than compilations?

Hahahahahaha no.

AI hate on lemmy is strong. Admitting that you vibe code is enough to get an avalanche of downvotes. (I didn’t downvote you, I just happen to know things how it is around these parts)

It is, and if I recall correctly he’s an eye surgeon. He has a YouTube channel that’s pretty darn funny even to a non-doctor.