If I look or go outside, I’ll notice the blizzard, and adapt accordingly (get a scarf, umbrella…). If there’s a blizzard but I don’t even look outside to notice it, that means I don’t have to adapt to it, and thus not even be informed of its existence.

Yeah, totally makes sense, “they” attacked IA one month in advance before the elections, knowing that IA would spend around a month rewriting and improving their site code until the Save Page option would be enabled again (unless IA themselves are a part of the plot???), so that news articles could be “edited on the fly” (with what result?) until the election day, while other similar web archiving services such as archive.is would keep working just fine.

clbottomt when the chtopt shows up [imagine this as that popular GIF meme]

And that’s more or less what I was aiming for, so we’re back at square one. What you wrote is in line with my first comment:

it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines

The point is that there isn’t something that makes AI inherently superior to ordinary search engines. (Personally I haven’t found AI to be superior at all, but that’s a different topic.) The difference in quality is mainly a consequence of some corporate fuckery to wring out more money from the investors and/or advertisers and/or users at the given moment. AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.

Reminds me of the “help me budget this” meme.

“Have fewer genocides.”

“No.”

Germans excused Holocaust by… saying that it would prevent trans genocide?

This is too stupid even for a troll.

Then, you end up finishing the game

I.e. you do win…

AI LLMs simply are better at surfacing it

Ok, but how exactly? Is there some magical emergent property of LLMs that guides them to filter out the garbage from the quality content?

Christianity developed in the Roman Empire?

I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the pictorial representation of Jesus, not when Christianity itself developed. Christian figurative art in Rome was rare and undeveloped, I highly doubt you have on your mind some examples of Roman portrayal of Jesus that actually support your idea. That’s why I described what I have found to be the situation in the middle ages, when the typical iconography zook shape - to the best of my knowledge, but maybe I’m talking with an actual art historian in which case you should have no problem with proving me wrong with examples.

I’m also confused about how you actually imagine the development of the supposedly racist Roman images of Jesus went about. At which stage did that happen, before or after Christianity became the state religion? Were Romans racist against the Middle East populations before Christianity too? Were Romans from the Apennine peninsula racist against them based on their darker skin colour, while themselves certainly being darker-skinned than e.g. Gauls?

If you don’t feel like discussing this and won’t do anything more than deliberately miss the point, you don’t have to reply to me at all.

Frankly this comes off almost as a conspiracy theory. Christian art in Europe developed its typical imagery when the vast majority of Europeans could have no direct contact with non-Europeans, before colonialism or coherent ideas about racial identities, when far-off lands were thought to be occupied by one-legged giants…

The comparison with your own childish vs adult drawings is simply off the mark. A more similar comparison could be provided by how artists depict the Vikings. It is well known today that the helmet with bull horns is made-up, and was probably never used by actual Vikings. Yet tons of people still portray them with such helmets, and most non-artists still have that same association in their minds. Why? Because a child growing up and developing their observational and artistic skills is not the same as a culture with its century-old symbols and images.

Admittedly the depictions of Jesus in art today are frequently done by more or less amateurish artists and are meant to be traditional in their style, which additionally makes them less likely to move away from the inherited imagery.

they’re a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it

This is what I’ve seen many people claim. But it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines. Why is that information unavailable to search engines, but is available to LLMs? If someone has put in the work to find and feed the quality content to LLMs, why couldn’t that same effort have been invested in Google Search?

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Want to make a comic that’s just four panels of an unmoving rock? Still a comic.

Sure, except that would be a somewhat shitty comic and anyone would have the right to say that if that’s their opinion.

Between this and all the “how is this a meme?” comments. Most inane, useless comments. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t meant for you? Clearly it’s getting upvotes

Maybe my comment wasn’t meant for you if it bothers you this much? Just move on bro.

You’d expect a sub that’s about memes to contain memes, or, if not quite memes in the “proper” sense of the word, at least generally funny or entertaining content. This is just a brief lecture in four panels. McCloud’s wonderful comic is pretty much the last thing this could remind me of.

Ok but where’s the punchline? Why is this even a comic?

Here in my southeast European shithole I’m not worrying about my tax money, the upgrade is going to be pretty cheap, they’re just going to switch from unlicensed XP to unlicensed Win7.

Yep, but I didn’t mention that because it’s not a part of the “Wayback Machine”, it’s just the general “Internet Archive” business of archiving media, which is for now still completely unavailable. (I’ve uploaded dozens of public-domain books there myself, and I’m really missing it…)

You can (well, could) put in any live URL there and IA would take a snapshot of the current page on your request. They also actively crawl the web and take new snapshots on their own. All of that counts as ‘writing’ to the database.