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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • I’ve already seen this exact same claim these days, so now I decided to try and find out what’s happening exactly.

    https://www.dw.com/en/indiadropsevolution/a-65804720

    Apparently, it happened last year, not just now, as you said, and I’m sure I’ve already seem someone else (maybe on Lemmy, maybe on reddit) also describe it as a very recent event.

    However I can’t find absolutely anything else regarding the topic. So I tried googling in Hindi instead, with the help of some machine translation.

    https://www.aajtak.in/education/news/story/pythagoras-theorem-has-vedic-has-roots-karnataka-panel-proposes-to-sanskrit-as-a-third-language-1496805-2022-07-10

    This is the only piece of news I’ve managed to find, again not very recent, and not nearly as dramatic as the DW article makes it out to be. Some official has described the Pythagorean theorem as ‘fake news’ because that same theorem had already been developed in India before Pythagoras, i.e. the point is that the name is a misnomer. They say nothing about removing the theorem.

    The reduction of teaching of the periodic table and evolution that DW mentions is also explained in the PDF that the article links as mere reorganisation of the topics due to the circumstances (difficulties in teaching during corona). They don’t suggest actual removal of the topics. (The PDF is an official explanation from the Indian “National Council of Educational Research and Training”.)

    I’m getting the impression DW is just fearmongering. Ideally there should be some article with exact and complete quotes in Hindi. I know that media freedom in India is not great (esp. considering the situation with Wikipedia), and it’s probably not easy to get to the bottom of it, but this story looks very suspicious.










  • And that’s more or less what I was aiming for, so we’re back at square one. What you wrote is in line with my first comment:

    it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines

    The point is that there isn’t something that makes AI inherently superior to ordinary search engines. (Personally I haven’t found AI to be superior at all, but that’s a different topic.) The difference in quality is mainly a consequence of some corporate fuckery to wring out more money from the investors and/or advertisers and/or users at the given moment. AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.



  • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comWhite Jesus
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    17 days ago

    Christianity developed in the Roman Empire?

    I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the pictorial representation of Jesus, not when Christianity itself developed. Christian figurative art in Rome was rare and undeveloped, I highly doubt you have on your mind some examples of Roman portrayal of Jesus that actually support your idea. That’s why I described what I have found to be the situation in the middle ages, when the typical iconography zook shape - to the best of my knowledge, but maybe I’m talking with an actual art historian in which case you should have no problem with proving me wrong with examples.

    I’m also confused about how you actually imagine the development of the supposedly racist Roman images of Jesus went about. At which stage did that happen, before or after Christianity became the state religion? Were Romans racist against the Middle East populations before Christianity too? Were Romans from the Apennine peninsula racist against them based on their darker skin colour, while themselves certainly being darker-skinned than e.g. Gauls?



  • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comWhite Jesus
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    19 days ago

    Frankly this comes off almost as a conspiracy theory. Christian art in Europe developed its typical imagery when the vast majority of Europeans could have no direct contact with non-Europeans, before colonialism or coherent ideas about racial identities, when far-off lands were thought to be occupied by one-legged giants…


  • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comWhite Jesus
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    19 days ago

    The comparison with your own childish vs adult drawings is simply off the mark. A more similar comparison could be provided by how artists depict the Vikings. It is well known today that the helmet with bull horns is made-up, and was probably never used by actual Vikings. Yet tons of people still portray them with such helmets, and most non-artists still have that same association in their minds. Why? Because a child growing up and developing their observational and artistic skills is not the same as a culture with its century-old symbols and images.

    Admittedly the depictions of Jesus in art today are frequently done by more or less amateurish artists and are meant to be traditional in their style, which additionally makes them less likely to move away from the inherited imagery.


  • they’re a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it

    This is what I’ve seen many people claim. But it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines. Why is that information unavailable to search engines, but is available to LLMs? If someone has put in the work to find and feed the quality content to LLMs, why couldn’t that same effort have been invested in Google Search?




  • Also, the first woman? Props to her but I’m quite surprised no one else has done that

    Yeah, it’s indeed false. I didn’t even research it actively, but Wilson on her Twitter profile mentioned an Italian translator who translated Homer years before Wilson.

    (To be sure, I just checked Italian Wikipedia. It was Giovanna Bemporad, her translation was published in 1970.)