Discussion
1/n
I saw this heat wave map of India and immediately found myself wondering what would the equivalent for late May have been like for my mother and aunt growing up as young girls in India in the 1930s.
I’ll get to some hints of answers in a bit, but first just wanted to note the cognitive surrender being fed by LLMs (next post)
…2/n
I have an old iPhone, so although I use DuckDuckGo I have no means to default its search to noai.duckduckgo.com, and although I tell DDG I want no LLM summaries, when the cookie for that expires I get them anyway.
Which is how I come to note how confidently the ‘AI Assist’ reports temperatures in the 1930s based on essentially nothing. I followed its cited sources, where there is nothing whatsoever about any temperature data at all prior to the 1980s
You can never trust an LLM to provide a factual answer - only one that sounds plausible.
Glad you fact check and impressed you use DDG.
…3/n
What a fucking shit show. Absolute bollocks being spewed on the basis of nothing. Just making shit up and misleading people.*
(Edit: *more measured thoughts in posts 10-12 below.)
It’s automated Trumpism.
Anyway, I’ll get somewhere close to some actual answers about 1930s Indian temperatures later today, by putting some actual work in with a semblance of diligence and discernment.
While the web still has an uncountable number of documents that aren’t distilled bullshit
…4/n
My mum was born in Quetta in 1932 – then India, now Pakistan. Her dad had poor heart health from the mid 1930s onwards, retired from the (Raj) Army to the UK, but was then called up again in 1940.
My mum, her sister and mother followed him back out to India later that year.
But in Indian heat, his heart could not maintain his utility to the war effort. He was re-retired and the family moved to the Nilgiri Mountains of Tamil Nadu, for its temperate climate, to see out the war
…5/n
The May 2026 temperature snapshot of India at the top (repeated here) portrays a 13°C spread, with Ahmedabad and Kolkata the hottest at 47°C (’kinell) and Bengaluru the coolest at a mere 34°C.
My guess is that the Nilgiri Mountains would be a lot less than that 34°. (They’re where my mum’s family would have been in the mid 1940s).
But as the context here is temperature extremes, I’ll go down a Kolkata rabbit hole https://mstdn.ca/@dbattistella/116649502661415044
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