Yes, I shouldn’t bother replying in these threads. In truth, I’ve already given up on this community but sometimes when I’m bored I can’t help a little peek. Maybe in a few years, some of the smarter ones will wonder why nothing ever came of this. Anyway, be careful with those AI detectors. They don’t work and sooner or later someone is going to get in trouble over that.

They don’t love all of it, just 3/5ths.

There is no problem with ingesting synthetic data. Well, at least none coming from the fact that it is synthetic. If there was a fundamental difference between the 1s and 0s encoding synthetic data and the 1s and 0s encoding any other data, then you could easily filter it. But there isn’t. The ideas that this community has are magical thinking.

How am I supposed to take seriously an article that misuses a basic term like “scraping”?

No. I simply don’t see a plausible scenario for that. The social media comments are quite deplorable. You really have to look for bubbles with educated people. I don’t know why this gets so much traction. Maybe it’s because the copyright industry likes it, or maybe it feeds some psychological need like Intelligent Design.

It depends on what you are looking for. Identifying AI generated data is generally hard, though it can be done in specific cases. There is no mathematical difference between the 1s and 0s that encoded AI generated data and any other data. Which is why these model collapse ideas are just fantasy. There is nothing magical about any data that makes it “poisonous” to AI. The kernel of truth behind these ideas is not likely to matter in practice.

hindered.

I doubt that.

Das Gutachten hatte die Stadtinitiative Heilbronn, ein Zusammenschluss von Gewerbetreibenden, beauftragt.

Ach so. Die wollen Konkurrenz verhindern. Ich wüsste gerne, was für Fehden das innerparteilich gibt. Die Immobilienbesitzer sind ja auch CDU-Klientel. Nicht gut für die Mieten, wenn die Nachfrage beschränkt wird.

I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.

This was, altogether, a remarkable experience - both in its sudden onset and its extraordinary course. It seemed to have resulted from some external toxic influence; I surmised a connection with the substance I had been working with at the time, lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. But this led to another question: how had I managed to absorb this material? Because of the known toxicity of ergot substances, I always maintained meticulously neat work habits. Possibly a bit of the LSD solution had contacted my fingertips during crystallization, and a trace of the substance was absorbed through the skin. If LSD-25 had indeed been the cause of this bizarre experience, then it must be a substance of extraordinary potency. There seemed to be only one way of getting to the bottom of this. I decided on a self-experiment.

Exercising extreme caution, I began the planned series of experiments with the smallest quantity that could be expected to produce some effect, considering the activity of the ergot alkaloids known at the time: namely, 0.25 mg (mg = milligram = one thousandth of a gram) of lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate.

From LSD: My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann. I will leave it to others to explain all the ways in which this is absolutely hair-raising.

In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server.[11][9] Users became concerned that fees might also be charged for independent implementations.[12][13] Gopher expansion stagnated, to the advantage of the World Wide Web, to which CERN disclaimed ownership.[14] In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU General Public License.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Decline

It’s probably not quite right to call it an open source alternative, though. I don’t think that gopher or anything was established in a monopolistic way, but that was before my time. Besides, the internet was all universities back then.

It was 1943 and even in Switzerland fuel was not to be had. Incidentally, it was the same day that the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began.

Meh. The guy wanted to integrate micropayments in HTML as soon as it took off. Would you like that better?

To be honest, I wouldn’t have been much impressed by the HTML specifications, either. An open source alternative for gopher? Oh, how cute. Be sure to tell all your geek friends.

Today, LSD would never be discovered. Guy didn’t even use gloves and lived to 102.

Hmm. Per Facebook v. Power Ventures, it could be a (criminal) violation of the CFAA to “circumvent” IP blocks.

I’m glad to hear you say that, cause after sending I worried that I didn’t make much sense.

I used that text as a little test for the AIs at DDG. Here’s from Claude 3 Haiku.

Here is the translation to English:

Complex Numbers and Polynomials

Something that hardly anyone knows is that complex numbers, in addition to their application in Complex AC Calculations (known to HTL students), also have a second, important use.

In mathematics, there is often the problem of finding a number x for a given function f(x) such that f(x) = 0 holds.

This is often the case for polynomials, as many important mathematical functions can be well approximated by polynomials.

The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra states that if we allow x to be a complex number, then there is always a solution to the problem such that f(x) = 0.

Restriction: but the polynomial must not consist of only a constant term, i.e., f(x) = 5 would be inadmissible. The x must appear at least once in the polynomial. Otherwise, there are really no restrictions :-)

PS: In the example given in the image (f(x) = x^2 + 2 = 0), a solution would be approximately x = √2 i ≈ 1.4 i.

Then I asked: “Please make it understandable to a general audience and phrase it like a pop-science author would.”

Here is the translation in a more accessible, pop-science style:

The Hidden Power of Complex Numbers

Most people think complex numbers are just some obscure math concept, useful only for electrical engineers. But these mysterious numbers actually have a hidden superpower - they can solve all sorts of important math problems.

You see, in math, we often want to find a number x that makes a function f(x) equal to zero. This comes up a lot when working with polynomials - those nice, smooth equations made up of powers of x.

The problem is, sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be any real number x that does the trick. That’s where complex numbers swoop in to save the day!

The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra proves that as long as we allow x to be a complex number (a number with both a real and imaginary part), then there will always be a solution that makes f(x) equal to zero. No exceptions!

So complex numbers unlock the ability to solve all kinds of polynomial equations that would be impossible with just regular old real numbers. It’s like they have a secret mathematical superpower.

Of course, there is one small catch - the polynomial can’t be a simple constant, like f(x) = 5. It has to actually contain the variable x somewhere. But other than that, complex numbers can tackle any polynomial problem you throw at them.

So the next time you see an imaginary number like √(-1), remember - it’s not just some weird math trick. It’s a powerful tool for solving important equations. Complex numbers may seem strange, but they’re secretly the heroes of the math world!

Electrical engineers use them for calculating AC-circuits. In a DC circuit, you only have to worry about how much volt and amperes are in each part of the circuit. In an AC circuit, you also have to worry about the phase, cause the voltage goes up and down. The phase means where in that up and down you are.

The complex number is interpreted as a point on a 2-dimensional plane; the complex plane. You have the “normal” number as 1 axis, and orthogonal to that the imaginary axis. The angle of the vector to that point gives the phase.

They can be generally used for such “wavy” (ie periodical) processes. But I think this particular field of electrical engineering is the main application.

https://annas-archive.org/volunteering

Be aware that helping Anna’s Archive may be illegal, or even criminal.

A different, more legal archiving effort is the Archive Team. It focuses on public data on the internet. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

In some places without a strong freedom of information tradition (like the EU), this may still be illegal.

Huh. I thought I did check OED. Maybe it’s cause I don’t have a subscription. Or maybe I just mucked up the search.