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…)

Is overcooking not visible?

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.

I’m betting chicken always could have cooked faster.

A few months ago my mother bought a free range chicken for lunch. It took over twice the ordinary time needed for cooking a chicken. The difference was massive and obvious, no way is there an another explanation.

They just used to overcook chicken.

Do you look at the old pictures (photos, paintings) of food and see overcooked chicken?

Borrowings sometimes do displace native words, even ones with a similar meaning. English for example has plenty of pairs like owndom/property, blee/colour, selfhood/identity, where the native word is mostly gone.

English has a very, very specific sociolinguistic history that has resulted in such deep changes in the lexicon. The relationship of early English towards Romance languages is very different from early Slavic towards Latin/Romance.

Personally what I find the most convincing part of your argument is the map of the native spread of the pigeon. I still would find it odd that the word would be loaned either in the early period that you propose (no apparent practical need for such a word to be loaned, esp. considering the spread of the species, it simply wouldn’t be needed for the Slavs).

I don’t have much to add to your comment, since my knowledge of historical linguistics is still limited and focused on Slavic languages. I just saw this on reddit and found it interesting (esp. the first two articles, which I’ve only skimmed for some interesting remarks for now). But still, I must say I find the idea that Slavs would adopt the word for the pigeon from the Romans a bit odd. Would they really not have a native word already, and why would it specifically be the Romans that they got the word from? It would certainly have to be loaned very early on, as it is used across all Slavic languages, it’s not just OCS; possibly it could have been mediated through Germanic (as was e.g. *Rimъ = Rome).

G. Holzer has proposed that it was loaned into Slavic from “Temematic”, an extinct substratum language that was supposedly the source for a number of Balto-Slavic words related to farming and similar activities, and which (among others) underwent PIE *k > *g, thus explaining the g-.

I don’t get the impression you’ve ever made any substantial contributions to Wikipedia, and thus have misguided ideas about what would be actually helpful to the editors and conductive to producing better articles. Your proposal about translations is especially telling, because the machine-assisted translations (i.e. with built-in tools) have already existed on WP long before the recent explosion of LLMs.

In short, your proposals either: 1. already exist, 2. would still risk distorsion, oversimplification, made-up bullshit and feedback loops, 3. are likely very complex and expensive to build, or 4. are straight up impossible.

Good WP articles are written by people who have actually read some scholarly articles on the subject, including those that aren’t easily available online (so LLMs are massively stunted by default). Having an LLM re-write a “poorly worded” article would at best be like polishing a turd (poorly worded articles are usually written by people who don’t know much about the subject in the first place, so there’s not much material for the LLM to actually improve), and more likely it would introduce a ton of biases on its own (as well as the usual asinine writing style).

Thankfully, as far as I’ve seen the WP community is generally skeptical of AI tools, so I don’t expect such nonsense to have much of an influence on the site.

As far as Wikipedia is concerned, there is pretty much no way to use LLMs correctly, because probably each major model includes Wikipedia in its training dataset, and using WP to improve WP is… not a good idea. It probably doesn’t require an essay to explain why it’s bad to create and mechanise a loop of bias in an encyclopedia.

Tbh these really are low-usage features, I didn’t know about any of them, aside from the snoovatars that I’ve always found stupid. So I don’t think anyone could be pushed away from the site because of this.

OTOH, if they’re low-usage, why remove them? Do they spend too much bandwidth, CPU, whatever??

Even though they could just make their own Lemmy communities, or ask to be appointed as mods of existing ones…

It has custom user-made themes that are dark mode, so it probably has dozens of dark modes.

Hell, a lot of the time I just go directly to Sci-Hub / Anna’s Archive because it’s literally faster than searching for my university and logging in.

This hasn’t been reported on much, but I actually checked what that “competition” really was, back when the image won the prize. It was some local festival in Bumfucknowhere, USA, which among various other events (sport events, food tasting, that sort of stuff) included an art competition. I doubt the jury was made up of highly experienced art critics.

And besides, people should trust their own eyes. If you like the picture, you like it, and if you don’t, you don’t. Appealing to the critics as a source of objective artistic judgment is naive, and I say that as someone who has published some art criticism myself.

Wasn’t that just recently?

That might depend on where you live, but generally no, I think.

(Sorry for the late response.) Well it depends a lot on the site. Since I focus on books and scholarly articles, the ideal way is to find the URL of the original PDF. The website might show you just individual pages as images, but it might hide the link to the PDF somewhere in the code. Alternatively, you might just obtain all the URLs of the individual page images, put them all into a download manager, and later bundle them all into a new PDF. (When you open the “inspect element” window, you just have to figure out which part of the code is meant to display the pages/images to you.) Sometimes the PDFs and page images can be found in your browser cache, as I mention in the OP. There’s quite some variety among the different sites, but with even the most rudimentary knowledge of web design you should be able to figure out most of them.

If need help with ripping something in particular, DM me and I’ll give it a try.

I never said I follow the law, I’m just wondering what the law says ;)

Honestly much of your reply is confusing me and doesn’t seem to be relevant to my questions. This is what I think is crucial:

Just because a file is cached on your device does not mean you are the legal owner of that content forever.

What does being “the legal owner forever” actually entail, either with regards to a physical book or its scan? And what does that mean regarding what I can legally do with the cached file on my computer?

https://github.com/elementdavv/internet_archive_downloader

This one? I’ll definitely give it a try.