I'm no expert, but having read some archeological papers that do make conclusions like that, the evidence is often quite compelling and well-supported. The context we find something in can convey a lot of data, and conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence are frequently argued against by other archeologists. Granted, if you only read the university press releases or the popular summaries thereof it can be somewhat misleading, but that's more down to the journalism than the research.
Readit Newsijk commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
ijk commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
Loved the article, the author is a smart person to doubt the changing taste hypothesis, I think everything based on "we are smarter and have better taste that the ancients" have to be extremely doubted, knowing we, the west, are the same society since the romans is so humbling
Is there a changing taste hypothesis? It's honestly the first time I've heard that suggested as the explanation, versus the more plausible to me idea of reconstruction from incomplete evidence.
ijk commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
In the case of the humanities, art, or architecture in academia if you disagree with the orthodoxy you might end up labeled something you don’t want to be labeled as, and you don’t get very far.
In architectural design I think it’s rather pronounced. We already know how to design great buildings for the human environment. There ain’t anything new to learn here, so in order to stand out in the field you have to invent some bullshit.
Well, you do that, you create Brutalism or something similarly nonsensical, and in order to defend your creation you have to convince a lot of other academics that no, in fact, buildings that look like bunkers or “clean lines” with “modern materials” are the pinnacle of architecture and design.
And as time has gone on we still go and visit Monet’s Gardens while the rest of the design and art world continues circle jerking to ever more abstract and psychotic designs that measurably make people unhappy.
Not all “experts” in various fields are weighted the same. And in some cases being an expert can show you don’t really know too much.
Eh, that's overstating the case. There's clearly some aesthetics that are more appealing to more people but for many architectural movements in particular the reason that they look that way is for the way that specific ideological reasons interacted with material constraints and the intended message. Brutalism in particular was intended to be cheap and honest; given the constraints many of these buildings were designed under, it makes sense. There are some quite appealing brutalist buildings; a core tenet of the style was integrating the buildings into the natural landscape, in contrast to the artificial styles that had previously been popular. The post-war shortages limited the available materials, shaping the constraints they were operating under. Raw concrete was honest, cheap, and was allowed to weather naturally.
There's a lot of ugly brutalist buildings, but there's a lot of ugly buildings in every style. At lot of them look cheap because they were supposed to be cheap; to a certain extent looking inexpensive was intended. In some cases the hostile nature of the institutional building was part of the point, conveying strength unstead of offering a pleasant experience, but there's also some quite pleasant brutalist buildings that have a lot of nature integrated into the design.
ijk commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
If only there were some system that could start from some sparse and noisy observations and weave together a plausible completion...
Interestingly to me, generative AI is often used to get results that commit the opposite error compared with these statues: they are, essentially, too confident in their choice of details. For any random topic, the average member of the public is likely to believe the AI's results are more accurate than can be backed up by the evidence.
I was hoping that this would be about Llama 1 and comparison with GPT-contaminated models.
ijk commented on Mullvad: Shutting down our search proxy Leta mullvad.net/en/blog/shutt... · Posted by u/holysoles
I've started to wonder/worry that maybe it's not the search engines (excluding Google, I won't apologize for them). What if there's just nothing to search for? If there is little on the internet besides trash and a few big portals? Much of what you might be searching for whether you know it or not will be a reddit post, or Facebook, or Stackoverflow. And some of those places don't even allow for proper indexing by crawlers. Worse than that nightmare fuel is the idea that 2025 just isn't the same internet as we grew up with, where everyone was racing to shovel as much real content onto it as they could... today it's a bunch of grifters hoping to be influencers or Youtube personalities or skeevy scammers AI-generating slop but not much else.
And so, even if Google was the same thing it was back in 2010, there's no longer anything for "search" to find. And I hope you all downvote me to -50 and scream at me for being a retard with some snarky-assed abuse detailing how and why I am wrong. Because I don't want to be correct about this.
Unfortunately, I am also worried that is the case.
There was an era where there were a lot of completely free sites, because they were mostly academic or passion projects, both of which are subsidized by other means.
Then there were ads. Banner adds, Google's less obtrusive text ads, etc. There were a number of sites completely supported by ads. Including a lot of blogs.
And forums. Google+ managed to kill a lot of niche communities by offering them a much easier way to create a community and then killing it off.
Now forums have been replaced by Discord and Reddit. Deep project sites still exist but are rarer. Social media has consolidated. Most people don't have personal home pages. There's a bunch of stuff that's paywalled behind Patreon.
And all of that has been happening before anyone threw AI into the mix.
ijk commented on Books by People – Defending Organic Literature in an AI World booksbypeople.org/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect
This depends on the subject of the book, but there are enough books written pre-1970 (or some other year one is comfortable with, before the era of “book spinners”, AI etc) to last multiple lifetimes. I used to spend hours and hours in bookstores, but so many books these days (AI or otherwise) don’t seem that interesting. Many, many books could just be 3 page articles, but stretched to 150 page books.
So yeah, simply filtering by year published could be a start
Buying a book scanner and frequenting used book stores seems like a past time to start that'll pay off in the long term.
ijk commented on The case for the return of fine-tuning welovesota.com/article/th... · Posted by u/nanark
Transfer learning is a thing. But the issue with the gap is that the datasets for "applying X" aren't easy to come by.
There is an awful lot of "looking for my keys under the street light" going around these days. I've seen a bunch of projects proposed that are either based on existing data (but have no useful application of that data) or have a specific application (but lack the data and evaluation required to perform that task). It doesn't matter how good your data is if no one has any use for things like it, and it doesn't matter how neat your application would be if the data doesn't match.
I'm including things like RL metrics as data here, for lack of a better umbrella term, though the number of proposed projects that I've seen that decided that ongoing evaluation of actual effectiveness was a distraction from the more important task of having expensive engineers make expensive servers into expensive heatsinks is maddening.
I've read/heard that the Sahara was a rainforest around 6,000 BCE (or at least the area around the Great Pyramids was).
Why do we believe that what is now Saudi Arabia was a desert in 11,000 BCE?
Not rainforest, but rather savanna [1].
The Arabian desert is technically considered to be part of the Sahara, climate-wise, and participes in the same cycle [2].
This article is about researching evidence for ehat those transitions looked like, focusing on evidence that dates around the end of that particular dry period, pre-Holocene.
> Prior to the onset of the Holocene humid period, little is known about the relatively arid period spanning the end of the Pleistocene and the earliest Holocene in Arabia. An absence of dated archaeological sites has led to a presumed absence of human occupation of the Arabian interior. However, superimpositions in the rock art record appear to show earlier phases of human activity, prior to the arrival of domesticated livestock25.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
[2]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/green...
ijk commented on Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji? vgel.me/posts/seahorse/... · Posted by u/nyxt
There is no mechanism in transformer architecture for "internal" thinking ahead, or hierarchical generation. Attention only looks back from current token, ensuring that the model always falls into local maximum, even if it only leads to bad outcomes.
Not strictly true: while this was previously believed to be the case, Anthropic demonstrated that transformers can "think ahead" in some sense, for example when planning rhymes in a poem [1]:
> Instead, we found that Claude plans ahead. Before starting the second line, it began "thinking" of potential on-topic words that would rhyme with "grab it". Then, with these plans in mind, it writes a line to end with the planned word.
They described the mechanism that it uses internally for planning [2]:
> Language models are trained to predict the next word, one word at a time. Given this, one might think the model would rely on pure improvisation. However, we find compelling evidence for a planning mechanism.
> Specifically, the model often activates features corresponding to candidate end-of-next-line words prior to writing the line, and makes use of these features to decide how to compose the line.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
[2]: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...