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eszed 2 days ago [-]
Setting the AI angle entirely aside, this has always been the value of the humanities: learning how to inhabit an unfamiliar point of view. That's immensely valuable, no matter what you end up doing with your life.
jsrcout 1 days ago [-]
That was my experience as well. I took a humanities class in college as a semi-random choice from a list of electives, and gained an entirely new perspective. As a budding computer geek I'd always thought of history, art, architecture, music, writing, language, all these things, as kind of a list of separate fields that all changed over time for whatever reasons. It was truly eye-opening to learn how interrelated all these things are, and the implications for how history has progressed for millenia and how it has affected our own time.
bananaflag 8 hours ago [-]
Indeed, and it is one of the things AI can't do for you for the same reason a friend can't do it for you.
forshaper 8 hours ago [-]
They also made it harder in the name of safety, in the sense that frontier models used to be more amenable to trying to do this, but now can't.
pridy 2 days ago [-]
Isn't learning base-60 math helping to understand time calculations? I mean, didn't the author didn't get that or am I simply wrong with that assumption?
webdoodle 5 hours ago [-]
It reminds me of the story of Yutaka Taniyama. He was trying to solve elliptic curves, and took a very different approach, that unfortunately didn't work, but it was so unique it got people looking into it, and eventually it was solved. It may not have been solved if this one guy hadn't failed at solving it so uniquely. He committed suicide in part because of his perceived failure.
A co-worker of his, Goro Shimura stated:
Taniyama was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction and so eventually he got right answers. I tried to imitate him, but I found out that it is very difficult to make good mistakes.
Learning base 2 arithmetic is arguably more useful today, as is hexadecimal. Base 60 is fine if you're only interested in ancient civilization.
wondering5du 5 hours ago [-]
Just learn how the base notation works and then you can easily explore more any base you like.
Starman_Jones 5 hours ago [-]
That misses the point of the article. We live in binary/hexadecimal world already. Learning those bases doesn’t require you to change your perspective or shift your way of thinking. Of course, we only live in a binary world because 80 years ago, Shannon and others forced themselves to learn a then-useless way of doing mathematics.
A co-worker of his, Goro Shimura stated:
Taniyama was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction and so eventually he got right answers. I tried to imitate him, but I found out that it is very difficult to make good mistakes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutaka_Taniyama