old profile: /u/[email protected]

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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.



  • The video is half an hour long and I really don’t feel like watching it all to find out something that could be said in one or two paragraphs of text, so I ignored it at first. As I expected, the video deals with a bunch of more or less relevant topics that you or OP didn’t mention at all. It actually is a bit interesting, I’ve watched a part of it, and I do have to admit that US fire trucks are bigger than those where I live. The problem is that their deadliness is a consequence of several other factors, and only indirectly of their size. What you and OP decided not to do is to communicate that point with any nuance, and all that I could read from your comments is that, by some logic, getting hit by a 10-metre truck is much safer than getting hit by a 15-metre truck. OP complained about the driver “right-hooking” the cyclist, you just said the trucks are too big, do I really have to watch a half an hour video to understand why your comments don’t sound nonsensical?














  • 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.