Except you missed a bug in the “check if it’s sorted” code and it ends up destroying every universe.

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.

Or we’ll realize that the specific numbers are arbitrary and use UTC everywhere.

Also, this is tangential to the rest of our conversation, but I appreciate the dedication to the comment chain required to actually set up something with similar composition to the red man image and take a picture of it. Even has some black in the image in roughly the same size and area as his sweater. :D

For what it’s worth I agree that AI images will generally have “tells” that give away their nature. It’s just they aren’t quite so straightforward as being able to check that average values are within a range. It would be nice if it were that easy though.

While I do dabble with AI image generation I’m not a lunatic who calls themself an “artist” for doing so, nor do I think being a “prompt engineer” is any kind of expression of creativity or skill. I think the people who do are completely self-deluded.

Odd. I tag your red at 78%. And for what it’s worth this RGB to HSV converter agrees with that number taking your colour hex as C92D20. I certainly don’t know enough about it to offer an explanation as to why it might be different.

edit: Ah, I think it’s HSV vs HSL, which I’m just now learning are different things. :D

I’m not sure what you mean by the saturation being around 50% across the board. If I peek the HSB of all of the averages only that first teal-ish one appears to be around the mid point for saturation.

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?

It is absolutely not true of all AI images. I’d be surprised if it’s even true about most AI images.

• Striped white and blue
• Male
• Casual clothing, nondescript
• About the size of a softball
• Round wooden table

All of this came before I was asked about it.

I wouldn’t buy a new Seagate drive, let alone a refurbished one. Every Seagate I’ve ever owned died in less than five years. Every WD I’ve owned lasted until long after their capacity was so far outpaced by newer drives as to be useless.

Anecdotal, yes, but it’s happened enough to me that I’ve been soured on them for life.

KITT is self driving in the same way that people are self walking.

“Clean” because all the code that does anything is split into countless three line “atomic functions” and buried under layers of observables and factories I bet.

Two and a half months is insane for a practical skills demonstration for a job interview. Those should be a couple of hours at most.

My interest in anime has waned pretty significantly in recent years but did check out this one when I first heard about it. Absolutely excellent, fun, and very moving towards the end.

YouTube shorts as well. I long ago stopped bothering to look at any of them after the 666th one that was like “this incredible unknown fact about (insert franchise)” that is invariably someone basically pissing themselves in excitement reiterating a main story beat as if it was some kind of hidden secret.

Durkey Tinner

Leet Moaf

Chotato Pip

Rizza Poll

I think you are conflating a few different concepts here.

Can you comment on the specific makeup of a “rendered” audio file in plaintext, how is the computer representing every little noise bit of sound at any given point, the polyphony etc?
What are the conventions of such representation? How can a spectrogram tell pitches are where they are, how is the computer representing that?

This is a completely separate concern from how data can be represented as text, and will vary by audio format. The “simplest”, PCM encoded audio like in a .wav file, doesn’t really concern itself at all with polyphony and is just a quantised representation of the audio wave amplitude at any given instant in time. It samples that tens of thousands of times per second. Whether it’s a single pure tone or a full symphony the density of what’s stored is the same. Just an air-pressure-over-time graph, essentially.

Is it the same to view plaintext as analysing it with a hex-viewer?

“Plaintext” doesn’t really have a fixed definition in this context. It can be the same as looking at it in a hex viewer, if your “plaintext” representation is hexadecimal encoding. Binary data, like in audio files, isn’t plaintext, and opening it directly in a text editor is not expected to give you a useful result, or even a consistent result. Different editors might show you different “text” depending on what encoding they fall back on, or how they represent unprintable characters.

There are several methods of representing binary data as text, such as hexadecimal, base64, or uuencode, but none of these representations if saved as-is are the original file, strictly speaking.