cheetah7071 posted:

that distribution looks like 'i don't know but the form requires me to pick a location; I can't answer that I have no idea' so they just click randomly

Tunicate posted:

People rate every interaction as 5 because they know the survey's actual checkbooks are 4 'screw this guy over' choices and one neutral.

zoux posted:

Personally, I think Iran is at Point Nemo

Yeah but no one thinks Iran is in the ocean or in America

Pendevil posted:

I am reminded that a lot of years ago, I worked with a guy who, on a break, very sagely and confidently told me that he was certain that Osama Bin Laden was hiding out in Islam.

"Where is Islam?" I asked.

"Somewhere by Iran."

FreudianSlippers posted:

zoux posted:

You guys should stop calling people fuhrers.

Michael Ende posted:

Lokomotiven haben zwar keinen großen Verstand – deshalb brauchen sie ja auch immer einen Führer.

Telsa Cola posted:

Me being asked to identify Baghdad and pointing to Bagdad, AZ. When I am told am incorrect I nod sagely and point to Bagdad, CA

Arglebargle III posted:

What did Titus build that arch to commemorate, Italy???

Arglebargle III posted:

What did Titus build that arch to commemorate, Italy???

Mr. Fix It posted:

doesn't the lack of 'w' save us from it being spelled "weni, widi, wici"?

zoux posted:

Does carbonized mean burned?

zoux posted:

Does carbonized mean burned?

Grand Fromage posted:

I hope that is legit, I saw it earlier but the guy behind it is a tech weirdo whose first instinct was to tag in Elon Musk so I don't trust him. But if it really is a way to read them then sure whatever, let's see them scrolls.

Benagain posted:

C'mon Lives of Ancient Whores!

Grand Fromage posted:

They were basically turned into charcoal by the intense heat of the eruption. Different from burning since they still exist.

I hope that is legit, I saw it earlier but the guy behind it is a tech weirdo whose first instinct was to tag in Elon Musk so I don't trust him. But if it really is a way to read them then sure whatever, let's see them scrolls.

skasion posted:

Unfortunately, Suetonius was a kid when Vesuvius blew up

Koramei posted:

eke out posted:

more details here

https://scrollprize.org/firstletters

some complicated series of machine learning stuff, first to "flatten" the 3d CT scans of the still-rolled originals, then to detect ink itself, then to detect characters. that then gets independently verified by a bunch of experts.

first guy found 'porphyras' then a second guy independently found the same word with a different method, plus a couple more words (and supposedly has even more promising model runs more recently, but that first bit was enough for second place)

quote:

Why were we successful?

There were many contributions from different people in the critical path for these discoveries. Our combination of competition and open source (through “progress prizes”) seems to work! To highlight a few key contributions:

Youssef used a model from the Kaggle competition and was inspired by Luke’s results to look in the same area.
Luke’s search for crackle was directly inspired by Casey’s work.
Casey was able to look through many sheets of papyrus because our segmentation team had mapped out hundreds of cm2.
The segmentation team was able to map out a lot of papyrus because of tooling built by contestants who worked on “Segmentation Tooling Prizes” (work by Julian Schilliger, Chuck, Yao Hsiao, and many others).
The segmentation tooling advances were possible because contestants built on top of existing open source tools by professor Seales’ team (work by Seth Parker, Stephen Parsons, and many others).

And of course, the contest itself wouldn’t have been possible without the foundation that Dr. Seales and his team, along with their funders, have laid out and continue to support.

Looking back at what got us to this point, it seems that almost every single thing we did in running this contest so far has been load-bearing. We’re not quite sure what to make of this! Perhaps that progress is more fragile and success is more contingent than it often seems in retrospect.