Sure, but there's no historical context there whatsoever, or even a present-day framing to narrow it down. The main thing it achieves, as a one-word response, is declaring a kind of tribal allegiance.
If you've clearly defined you mean "any market-based system" or "a system which no longer has a landed aristocracy", among the many other possibilities, then sure, it's not worth being a pedant about the exact word used. (Although, any conversation is more likely to be productive if you just say what you mean, instead)
That suggests the problem is people don't have any experience with capitalism, doesn't it? Whatever it means to the person using the word, it's always a system we live in, or somewhat live in.
Okay, so the classical Marxist definition. If we could be sure that's what's implied, there'd be more to talk about.
The problem being, there's tons of other definitions with just as much currency. Big corporations (but not small businesses), having free markets, having anyone control a factory in any way, and just the act of thinking about things as commodities are all senses that it's used in, as well.
Lots of working also applies, in some/many cases, to periods Marx would have called pre-capitalist, so the Marxist definition isn't what OP meant.
I heard that back in the days, people used to just go when their work was done on the farms and there was no concept of 9-5 (these days seem 24 hours work).
Yup. In the ancient world, ascetics and monks would practice "having daily schedules" alongside various other harsh forms of penitence, like self-flagellation. One of the ancient Greek authors (Plato?) spoke about it unfavourably even in that context.
The flip side of that, is that if your animals or crops need something now, they need it now. There's no maximum hours or work-life balance, either. Still, it's fair to say most people that have experienced that much prefer it, if you put aside how uncomfortable the work itself is.
Because it's kind of crazy, it's also worth mentioning that people slept twice in a day, with some time spent up during the night.
There used to be a lot of holidays. Is that true?
Kind of.
Confining ourselves to Europe, there were a lot of public holidays in ancient Rome, and to a lesser extent lots of religious days and festivals in medieval Europe. The medieval holy days were more about fasting or similar than time off of work, though. And, in Rome, there were no weekends yet, so holidays basically served the same role.
Plus, most holidays were optional in both, so a deeply poor person or a slave with a tough master might work fairly continuously.
If it is, then given the abundance in technology, why our work hours increased and why do we have such weird lives that we live to work?
When industialisation came in, 12 hour days were fairly standard. Arguably, working hours have gone down.
As to why we work on schedules now, you basically just have to in a complex, highly specialised society. If you're using tools you made and maybe a couple your friend the blacksmith made, and using them to produce food and housing from "your own" land, sure, it just all has to get done sometime. If you're having a formal meeting or vote and show up 2 days late, like is recorded becoming a problem in medieval republics, it's a bit disruptive.
Yeah, it's really awful. With any luck, AI winter will follow AI summer, like usual, and the serious people can come out again. Although, aren't CNNs more of a this century thing? I guess two decades is still decades...
IIRC autoencoders actually produce the same image to within our ability to notice, as well.
To explain a bit more, most of the information in an image is actually stuff we would never notice. The very specific way a few of a pixels slightly deviate from a perfect gradient, for example.
The basic idea of a jpeg is to convert an image to a kind of frequency space, where each pixel corresponds to a specific wave-like pattern. It's reversable, preserving the information. and fast conversion to do, thanks to FFT. Even without, it would only be quadratic time. Then, the algorithm crops it in that new space. (IIRC jpeg actually has a few extra features, as well)
Well, there's reason to think it is. Or at least, is for original, insightful questions; anybody can come up with "can I have more time off?". We live in a society that rewards reliably doing and saying whatever you're told to, and critical thinking (which isn't just skepticism!) is super rare when tested for. A lot of college kids with good grades got there because they learned to mindlessly repeat whatever stuff back when tested.
Why that's rewarded so much, and if there's a way to encourage and teach actual independent though, are great questions, but that's not really relevant here.
Also, I think that behavior is more related to the employer creating an environment where employees feel safe doing that
It's also a big factor. Since that reply, it's come up that OP isn't actually management, but just does interviews. So, maybe they're looking more for a good colleague than a good employee.
If memory serves, Google used to use these kind of questions, but they stopped because that isn't actually what they wanted or needed in their workers. A code monkey doesn't need to question anything, in the end.
Bijecting to an exponential curve was also a hint. Anything that bijects to an exponential would just biject to the positive reals, since that's how logarithms work.
It could be on a different subject, but it has to be a trick question. If they were prompted to ask more, that would undercut the whole point of the test, since OP wants employees that always ask or question.
No, tribal signifiers are dumb and easy to fake. Ask anyone who's infiltrated the far right.