Giant repositories of unreadable texts do not exist, as people tended to throw them away. A few exceptional archaeological discoveries have been spared; Dr. Seales, who perfected the scroll unrolling process, looked at a couple of them on the way to analysing the Herculaneum papyri. He has given exhaustingly long lectures on the topic in the past. The En-Gedi scroll used iron-based ink, which made the actual analysis trivial once the unrolling was complete.

The data being used in this case are X-ray spectrographs captured using a synchrotron. (A particle accelerator similar to the LHC.) This is the same technology used to perform crystallography on proteins, but tuned for a large object rather than millions or billions of copies of a single small molecule. This is powerful enough to reconstruct the scrolls on an atom-by-atom level, although it is not quite high enough resolution.

I can't emphasise enough that after 2000 years, there is no chemical difference between the burnt papyrus of the page and the burnt pine resin of the ink. All that exists in the physical object are patterns of how the stylus deformed the parchment during the writing process, and how the ink caused the fibrous structure to change as it dried. This is why many letters are damaged or left no trace at all.

Anyway. Image processing as a field is no longer a major topic that has large research grants behind it, and the experts who know the techniques are ageing. The field as a whole was basically killed dead in 2012, after the AlexNet model (a neural network) grossly outperformed the state of the art on the ImageNet challenge. I wouldn't go so far as saying all the researchers got sacked, but they definitely had to make a hard turn into new areas of research to keep their jobs.

This was an example of "the bitter lesson": There is no point in hand-crafting a large algorithm using expert knowledge when you can train an AI model to do the job 95% as well with 1% of the development time. Since expert knowledge of the data doesn't exist (and would take many researchers decades of work to divine, researchers who no longer even exist), there isn't a practical alternative.

Here are a few things that the article couldn't hope to be able to tell you (and that are somewhat absent from scrollprize.org also):

- "Porphyry" exists in English as the typical word for the red rocks called porphyrite (using old-school greekscii, I think it would be written porqurith) in Greek and Latin, so it's not entirely unknown. The colour is also familiar to us as "Tyrian purple," although many armchair classists have no idea that our modern concept of purple originated after several breakthroughs in dyes and pigments in the 19th century. This is the colour beloved by Roman emperors and aristocrats that required immense numbers of crustaceans to produce. (It was eventually replaced with cheaper red dyes.)

- The actual source image looks more like this. Luke Farritor produced the black and white base image. The coloured boxes were added by linguists, not Farritor's model.

- The Herculaneum scrolls come from the private "working library" of an Epicurean philosopher, Philodemus. Most of them are different drafts of his writing. He was a Greek who had emigrated to Rome, and lived in the early 1st century AD. The library seems to have been left untouched for decades before the eruption.

He appears to have adopted what we barbaroi call early Roman cursive, which has many differences from how Greek was written by professional scribes elsewhere in the Empire. In particular, "A" often just looked like a lambda, and "R" had many strange shapes, usually looking somewhat like a "C" or "T" with the bottom extending far below the baseline, and has more in common with the letter "r" than the letter "R".

Once you understand these peculiarities, it looks like the word is written with a mixture of Greek and Latin letters, which is par for the course when dealing with old texts that weren't written by professional scribes for a wealthy client.

First: you are erroneously hallucinating that there is a difference between "ML" and "a boatload of maths." Machine learning is a branch of statistics. It is the biggest boatload of maths.

Second: the raw data looks like this: researchers are looking for a "crackle" pattern indicative of where ink should be. Nothing is visible to the naked eye because the black carbon ink is chemically indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus beneath.

The picture in the article is misleadingly taken out of context: it shows the output of Farritor's model with coloured annotations manually added by linguists. No machines were involved in assigning identities to the letters, since there was so little information that needed parsing. Maybe someday an OCR algorithm will be developed for preprocessed Herculaneum scrolls, but there's no shortage of expert human labour, as most Classics departments haven't had a new manuscript to edit in a very long time.

Farritor's model was trained on manually-labelled data; he identified the "crackle" patterns in smaller sections of the available images, as Casey had before him, and enlarged the training set until it was adequate to start finding new signals on its own. This is by far the least human-effort-intensive approach to the problem, and it still took many months to surface because of the extreme barrier to entry in terms of expertise.

If there were another way, it would have been done by now.

It sounds like a great plan, but I can't help but wonder if this will create a uniform surface for attackers trying to get at deallocated memory. I imagine the WasmGC folks are going to have a hard time convincing the Rust-on-Wasm folks to remove all their free()s and just trust WasmGC to do everything for them.

The data in the paper actually show a stronger comorbidity between depression and Alzheimer's than between ADHD and Alzheimer's. Since the authors didn't provide any other correlative data that can be used to rule out an indirect link, the whole article should be pulped as a matter of course.

That's partly because the Reuters article is wrong—the Five Star Movement is a "syncretic populist" party which supports an eclectic collection of anti-authoritarian ideas. Some of those include green and progressive policy positions, which is probably why a Reuters journalist erroneously reduced them to a straight-ticket left-wing party. In reality they used to caucus with UKIP and other Eurosceptics because their main agenda was opposing The Establishment, whatever form that took. Since then they formed a minor part of a fairly aggressively right-wing coalition.

If you remember your history, WikiLeaks was lauded for taking a lot of corrupt governments to task, long before Assange redpilled himself out of existence. The M5S was forged in that time period, when basically all we heard in the English-speaking world about Italy was how flagrantly corrupt and greasy Berlusconi was—from the thousands of real estate lawsuits he's been slapped with, to his fondness for underage teenage girls, to his bromance with Putin... WikiLeaks played a role in breaking some of that news, and so the modern state of Italian politics (which is just shy of being openly fascist) owes its existence to Assange.

The man just wants to have a LAN party like it's 1998. That's as non-evil as it gets with gaming execs. It's the parasites he's replacing who should be tarred and feathered. Bobby Kotick sold toothpaste before he became Activision's CEO. Toothpaste!

Wearable electronics have always suffered from a lack of creativity on the part of the people who actually build them. Frankly, the most impressive thing about this dress is that scale mail is "in". You go, girl! Conquer Ctesiphon! Show those Sasanians you mean business!

...I believe you've just made it 2003.

The creator's hopes are actually not too far off for how large wheeled robotic systems have been used in the past. In the late 50s, the USAF sought a radiation-hardened robot for refuelling nuclear-powered bombers. The result was the GE Beetle, and though the project was ultimately scrapped, it does have something of a resemblance to the ARCHAX structurally, so that's neat. The anthropomorphism is probably wasteful, though!

Oh, no, the delay itself is good; I wouldn't want the previews (which are also useful) to get in the way instantaneously. It just sucks to have no other way to find individual windows.

The first image shows a preview pop-up—the existing behaviour that was introduced in Windows 7 and became mandatory in previous Windows 11 versions. The previews are good, but having to wait for the pop-up window to appear in order to select one window from a multi-window application is annoying. Everyone agrees on this.

The author specifically states that he wants the labels completely gone (emphasis added):

It's baffling that Microsoft can't get this feature right after three years with it being one of the most highly requested features.

A simple toggle to disable the showing of Windows titles could have been added, or Microsoft could have replicated the Windows 10 feature many of us requested.

What TFA wants isn't an option in my Windows 10 settings, either, despite what he claims; I think it might have existed in Windows 7 (and earlier 10 builds?), but it doesn't exist now. I'm guessing he's in a very small minority of people who ever used it this way.

That said, if I recall my old registry black magic correctly, the maximum taskbar button width used to be based on the size of the caption bar for iconified windows; a remnant from early builds of Windows Chicago when programs still minimized to the desktop (something similar can still be occasionally encountered in MDI applications or when Explorer crashes). The setting should be somewhere in HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics, but I don't see anything that looks like a likely candidate; must've been removed at some point. Back in the days of NT 4, I distinctly remember using taskbar buttons that were extra-wide, just for the novelty.

Actually, the author of TFA is deranged: he wants individual icons but no labels on his taskbar. That's what the article is about. (Which is sort of amazing since he gives the example of having 10 Notepad windows open at once, which are indistinguishable when they're all just iconized...)

The feature as implemented works as intended, which is to say it works the way anyone who's ever used Windows 95 or fvwm95 would expect.

Rest assured, there's prior art for everything.