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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The physicist who named the particle apparently liked to come up with nonsense words in his head. Later, when trying to decide the spelling, he came across a quote by James Joyce and spelled it “Quark”. Unfortunately, the particle rhymes with fork, while the german cheese rhymes with Mark.

According to his own account he was in the habit of using names like “squeak” and “squork” for peculiar objects, and “quork” (rhyming with pork) came out at the time. Some months later, he came across a line from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Sure he has not got much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

The line struck him as appropriate, since the hypothetical particles came in threes, and he adopted Joyce’s spelling for his “quork.” Joyce clearly meant quark to rhyme with Mark, bark, park, and so forth, but Gell-Mann worked out a rationale for his own pronunciation based on the vowel of the word quart: he told researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary that he imagined Joyce’s line “Three quarks for Muster Mark” to be a variation of a pub owner’s call of “Three quarts for Mister Mark.” Joyce himself apparently was thinking of a German word for a dairy product resembling cottage cheese; it is also used as a synonym for quatsch, meaning “trivial nonsense.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/quark

However, there is another interpretation of the quote.

This passage from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, part of a scurrilous 13-line poem directed against King Mark, the cuckolded husband in the Tristan legend, has left its mark on modern physics. The poem and the accompanying prose are packed with names of birds and words suggestive of birds, and the poem is a squawk against the king that suggests the cawing of a crow. The word quark comes from the standard English verb quark, meaning “to caw, croak,” and also from the dialectal verb quawk, meaning “to caw, screech like a bird.”

https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=quark

This sounds very learned and all, but I can’t find that standard English verb in the dictionary.

It used to be, you got 3 quarks for a mark, but then it was 6 quarks, because the euro was 2 marks. Now you only get 2 quarks, though, because of inflation. It’s always just up and down. Stupid cosmologists.

While the possession and cultivation of marijuana are already banned in Japan, the country will prohibit its use as well, setting a prison sentence of up to seven years for violation.

Ok, so that clears that up.

I have no intuition for how hot or bright these trees would be. They certainly would be very different from the sun. The sun is literally incandescent; white-hot glowing. Trees would presumably use a mechanism comparable to glow-worms to generate radiation only in a very narrow frequency band. The fair skin color of elves suggests that they do not come from a high-UV environment.

Somewhat less than half of the sun’s energy reaches us as visible light (43%). There are a few other factors that might allow the trees to glow brighter than the equatorial sun at noon. Unfortunately, the intensity per area diminishes with the square of the distance, so that doesn’t get us far (no pun intended).

It would be much better if that world was basically rectangular (with reflective sides and top); basically a terrarium. That would also explain why you would place 2 light sources at 1 end. The length of a long rectangular box would only be limited by absorption of the light. The trees should glow brighter at the top. Plants, animals and structures on the surface, near the trees, are hit with only “mild” power, while the high-intensity light near the top of the box is absorbed or scattered by the atmosphere over a long distance. I’m not sure how to work out how long such a box might be. Mainly, I don’t know what assumption to make about that high-intensity light at the top.

Anyway, we should consider that elvish anime eyes originally evolved as an adaption to low-light environments and only later became useful for seeing over long distances, because originally there possibly were no long distances.

Hmm. That should allow us to estimate the size of that world. The light of the trees must not be so bright as to cook everything in the vicinity; just make it nice and balmy. But, on the opposite side of the world, there must still be enough light to see. Having the occasional photon bounce back would eventually be enough to make out a static scene, but, apparently, it’s possible to see things happening in real time, yes?

Does flat mean that we are talking about something like a simple disc here, or just that a beam of light travels parallel to the ground? The latter would imply a rather strange geometry, which I can’t wrap my mind around. It would make more sense, though, as, obviously, we couldn’t assume that light intensity diminishes with the {ETA:] square of the distance.

Publications in peer-reviewed journals are how a career in science is built. It’s impossible to measure the productivity of a scientist. What is done, is that one looks at their publications. How many publications do they have? How often are they cited? What is the quality of the journal?

This creates very bad incentives, leading to things like publication bias. It also means that you must publish in prestigious journals. You don’t have a choice but to accept their terms. Libraries don’t have a choice but to stock these journals. It’s a straight-forward monopoly racket. These publishers make fantastical profits.

All that money can be used for PR campaigns and lobbying to keep the good times rolling.

The boomers had cars and flexed being able to drive stick or know what a carburetor is, unlike those feeble Millennials. They had that greaser subculture. Hmm. I guess that makes the movie Grease the equivalent of War Games or Hackers.

So what is the zoomer thing? What eye-rolling help do they give to doddering old gen-Xers? What will they flex in their old age?

No, you cannot patent an ingredient. What you can do - under Indian law - is get “protection” for a plant variety. In this case, a potato.

That law is called Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act, 2001. The farmer in this case being PepsiCo, which is how they successfully sued these 4 Indian farmers.

Farmers’ Rights for PepsiCo against farmers. Does that seem odd?

I’ve never met an intellectual property freak who didn’t lie through his teeth.

Heh. Funny that this comment is uncontroversial. The Internet Archive supports Fair Use because, of course, it does.

This is from a position paper explicitly endorsed by the IA:

Based on well-established precedent, the ingestion of copyrighted works to create large language models or other AI training databases generally is a fair use.

By

• Library Copyright Alliance
• American Library Association
• Association of Research Libraries