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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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This is fascinating and it suggests that training AI on 'incomplete' information archives could lead to it making some weird inferences or blind guesses about pieces of historical information is simply never encountered.

I now have to wonder if there are any humans out there with a somewhat comprehensive knowledge of the evolution of revolver lockwork.

And now we have to wonder just HOW LARGE the corpus of undigitized knowledge is, almost by definition we can't know how much there is because... it's not documented well enough to really tell.

This is fascinating and it suggests that training AI on 'incomplete' information archives could lead to it making some weird inferences or blind guesses about pieces of historical information is simply never encountered.

Well this is basically how C&Rsenal started their revolver thing... doing episodes on multiple late 19th century European martial revolvers and realizing that the existing histories are incomplete.

I now have to wonder if there are any humans out there with a somewhat comprehensive knowledge of the evolution of revolver lockwork.

Probably the best one right now would be Othais from C&Rsenal.

And now we have to wonder just HOW LARGE the corpus of undigitized knowledge is, almost by definition we can't know how much there is because... it's not documented well enough to really tell.

I would guess that a huge amount of infrequently requested data is totally undigitized still.

Actually, another area that demonstrates this: I frequently watch videos about museum ships on youtube and so much of the stuff they talk about is from documents and plans that they just kinda found in a box on the ship. So much undigitized.

Probably the best one right now would be Othais from C&Rsenal.

And this is my thought now, that he has a potentially valuable cache of information in his head he could sell the rights to digitize for use training an AI.

I don't know that he can really monopolize it--on the C&Rsenal website itself, there is a publicly-available page where they've put together a timeline of revolver patents. I think Othais's passion as a historian outweighs his desire to secure the bag.

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