News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
This is really cool.
Basically, these are a bunch of burnt scrolls. When you try to open, they're just carbon and they crumble really easily.
The AI was trained on some of the ruined fragments, then the intact scrolls were scanned, and the AI is able to decipher spots that were basically "differently wrinkly" because of the organic ink that had been used on top of the papyrus, which caused it to wrinkle a bit differently when burnt.
So in this case, the AI actually helps us read scrolls that would be destroyed if a human were to try to pick apart the burnt remnants.
This whole thing is significant because this library of burnt scrolls might have original writing by both known and unknown authors from that period.
There's a lot of classical works we only know of because other writers referenced them. The originals are lost, and the citations are the only remains. Also, some works we only know because scribes copied and re-copied books over the centuries to preserve them. And with copying and re-copying, mistakes or changes might happen.
It's possible in this library of burnt scrolls that we might find an original uncopied/unaltered work so we can compare the ancient version of it with versions copied and re-copied over centuries, or a work that we know from citations but don't have an actual copy of.
It's really exciting.
AI has been really exciting in general where it comes to deciphering lots of old text. Personally, I'm waiting for tons of unread/unstudied cuneiform tablets to be scanned/auto-translated, because even if the AI has some errors, being able to text-search in English (or whatever language) for certain keywords will make it easier to realize one of those unstudied tablets might hold something unusual or interesting. Basically, it'd give an easier way to triage which ones might be useful for an actual human to study.
To piggy back on this, there are a lot of groups that the only things we know about them is from what their adversaries wrote about them. These are obviously not truly reliable sources. We're not there yet but I imagine this is what it must have been like when the Nag Hammadi collection was found in the 40s.