Aiui, back-feeding uncurated slop is a real problem. But curated slop is fine. So they can either curate slop or scrape websites, which is almost free. So even though synthetic training data is fine, they still prefer to scrape websites because it's easier / cheaper / free.
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Harvard Law Paid $27 for a Copy of Magna Carta. Surprise! It’s an Original. Stephen Castle 9 - 11 minutes
Two British academics discovered that a “copy” of the medieval text, held in Harvard Law School’s library for 80 years, is one of seven originals dating from 1300. A large, framed, yellowing document. A “copy” of Magna Carta owned by Harvard Law School was, in fact, an extraordinarily rare original from 1300.Credit...Lorin Granger/Harvard Law School
May 15, 2025 Updated 2:23 a.m. ET
Bought for $27.50 after World War II, the faint, water stained manuscript in the library of Harvard Law School had attracted relatively little attention since it arrived there in 1946.
That is about to change.
Two British academics, one of whom happened on the manuscript by chance, have discovered that it is an original 1300 version — not a copy, as long thought — of Magna Carta, the medieval document that helped establish some of the world’s most cherished liberties.
It is one of just seven such documents from that date still in existence.
“I never in all my life expected to discover a Magna Carta,” said David Carpenter, a professor of medieval history at King’s College London, describing the moment in December 2023 when he made the startling find.
The manuscript’s value is hard to estimate, although it is fair to say that its price tag of under $30 (about $500 today) must make it one of the bargains of the last century. A 710-year-old version of Magna Carta was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million.
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A man looks on as a woman arranges a sheath of parchment on a wooden table. Lights and equipment are also present. To help authenticate the document, researchers photographed it under ultraviolet light and then subjected it to various levels of spectral imaging, a technique which can enhance aspects of historical documents undetectable to the human eye.Credit...M.B. Toth/R.B. Toth Associates
Nicholas Vincent, a professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia, in eastern England, helped authenticate the text. He noted that the document, which bound the nation's rulers to acting within the law, had resurfaced at a time when Harvard has come under extraordinary pressure from the Trump administration.
“In this particular instance we are dealing with an institution that is under direct attack from the state itself, so it’s almost providential it has turned up where it has at this particular time,” he said. “You and I both know what that is!”
Providential or not, the discovery happened largely by chance.
Professor Carpenter was at home in Blackheath, south east London, plowing his way through Harvard Law School’s digital images as research for a book when he opened a file named HLS MS 172 — the catalog name for Harvard Law School Manuscript 172.
“I get down to 172 and it’s a single parchment sheet of Magna Carta,” he said. “And I think ‘Oh my god, this looks to me for all the world — because I read it — like an original.’”
Professor Carpenter emailed Professor Vincent, who was, at the time, at work in a library in Brussels. “David sent it with a message saying, ‘What do you think that is?’” said Professor Vincent. “I wrote back within seconds, saying, ‘You and I both know what that is!’”
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Professor David Carpenter of King’s College London.Credit...King’s College London
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Professor Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia.Credit...Phil Barnes Photography
The two academics were able to confirm the manuscript’s authenticity after Harvard Law School photographed it under ultraviolet light and then subjected it to various levels of spectral imaging, a technique which can enhance aspects of historical documents undetectable to the human eye.
Comparing it with six previously known originals from 1300, the professors found that the text matched, as did the dimensions — 489 mm x 473mm. The handwriting used in the manuscript, with a large capital “E” at the start in “Edwardus” and elongated letters in the first line, also tallied.
“It’s the best sort of thing that can happen to a librarian,” said Amanda Watson, assistant dean at Harvard Law School’s library. “This is our daily work to digitalize things, to preserve things, to save things, to open things up for people like David Carpenter.”
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The top left corner of a framed, yellowing piece of parchment. The text is largely out of focus or illegible, but the first line contains an extra-large “E,” and then a line of large letters. The 1300 version of Magna Carta was issued by King Edward I, the grandson of the monarch who originally issued the charter in 1215. The large “E” at the start of “Edwardus” can be seen in this photo of the document.Credit...Lorin Granger/Harvard Law School
Ms. Watson said that the document itself had sometimes been put on display, but, as part of a large collection, it was not kept out permanently. The library has yet to decide whether it will now be made available to the public, but Ms. Watson said she “can’t imagine” that it would be sold.
“In the United States having things that are seven hundred years old is special,” added Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law and chair of the Harvard Law School library. “The law of the land”
Magna Carta — “Great Charter” in Latin — has been used to justify many different causes over the centuries, sometimes on shaky historical ground. But it has evolved into a global symbol of the importance of fundamental freedoms, including habeas corpus. By limiting the power of the monarch, it came to represent the right to protection against arbitrary and unjust rule.
One of its most famous passages states: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”
First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore.
He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.
The document influenced the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights includes several provisions that are thought to descend from Magna Carta.
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A man in glasses sits at a desk with two laptops in front of him, and two large screens on the wall behind, all of which are displaying images. Few doubt the significance of Magna Carta in the evolution of Western notions of rights and freedoms.Credit...Debora Mayer/Harvard Weissman Preservation Center
There are 25 original manuscripts of Magna Carta in all, produced at various times. Including the one at Harvard, only three are outside Britain.
Harvard Law School bought its version from a London legal book dealer, Sweet & Maxwell, which had in turn purchased the manuscript in December 1945 from Sotheby’s, the auctioneers.
In the 1945 auction catalog it was listed as a copy and with the wrong date (1327) and was sold for £42 — about a fifth of the average annual income in the United Kingdom at the time — on behalf of Forster Maynard, an Air Vice-Marshal who had served as a fighter pilot in World War I.
Air Vice-Marshal Maynard inherited it from the family of Thomas and John Clarkson, who were leading campaigners in Britain against the slave trade from the 1780s onward.
Professor Vincent believes the document could be a lost Magna Carta that was once issued to the former parliamentary borough of Appleby-in-Westmorland, in the north of England, and which was last mentioned in print in 1762.
While it is undoubtedly famous, many Britons seem to have a hazy knowledge of the document. Former prime minister David Cameron was famously unable to translate the term Magna Carta when asked by David Letterman on his late-night talk show in 2012.
But few doubt its significance in the evolution of Western notions of rights and freedoms. With some of those now more under threat, Professor Vincent said the discovery at Harvard was timely.
Magna Carta, he said, places the king under the rule of law. The “head of state cannot simply go against somebody because he doesn’t like them, he has to do it using the law,” he said.
The text of the charter is incorporated within 17 state constitutions of the United States, he added, “so there is more of it in American state law than there is in the U.K.”
Professor Vincent likened the discovery to happening upon a masterpiece by Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch artist, only 36 of whose paintings are known to have survived. “He is regarded as the rarest of all the great masters, so there are significantly fewer of these than there are of Vermeers,” Professor Vincent said.
Both he and Professor Carpenter plan to visit Harvard Law School next month to see and touch the document for the first time, a moment that Professor Vincent predicted would be “emotional.”
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A table with a document, illuminated in purple U.V. light. Using the images from the ultraviolet photography and spectral imaging, Professors Carpenter and Vincent determined the copy in Harvard Law School’s library matched the other six previously known originals from 1300.Credit...M.B. Toth/R.B. Toth Associates
Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe.
I used to get corrupted SD cards all the time when running Pis 24/7 (remote, outdoor, in an enclosure) so I finally switched to the white industrial SD cards and haven't had an issue since, so maybe that's worth a shot. I only use regular SD cards for temporary testing now.
(Edit: the ones I use are SanDisk industrial for reference)
Immich is pretty good for this if you take pictures at each location. It has a global map that shows all your photos with a heatmap-style display and a drawer that shows a grid of the photos within your viewport as you can and zoom around. It doesn't seem like you can view a specific album on the map currently but you can at least filter the map to favorites or a date range.
The !mutual_aid@hexbear.net community seems similar to what you're asking for. I'm not sure if there are more similar comms on other instances but that's just the one I know of.
Yeah I thought odometer fraud was like a serious thing, I wonder if it applies here.
The other servers do cache the content for some time yes, but if your server is based in a country not friendly to your posts then you are vulnerable to takedowns as you say and you could be inconvenienced by having the admins of your server delete your account or something.
The benefit I'm saying we have in the fediverse is that you can pick a server in a politically safe area (ie outside Turkey in this case), so they are less likely to comply, especially if they are small or don't care about being blocked by that country (that's usually the only thing they can do unless you have an office or staff there that can be arrested - less likely to be the case if your server is run by some dude in another country).
I'm saying that if your home server (mastodon.social in your example) is outside of Turkey, then there is less reason for them to comply in the first place because they only risk the mastodon.social server being blocked in Turkey. That one is a bad example because they're one of the largest and they might have a bunch of users in Turkey, so if you want to be extra safe, you'd want to pick a server that isn't so big so that they are less likely to care about complying with some other county that they might not have any users from.
If the server you use is based inside the country that has a problem with your content, then you'd be screwed - though all the other servers will still mirror and cache your content for a bit even if you get taken down.
The resiliency lies in the fact that you can choose to register in a country that is politically friendly towards your posts or if your home country is friendly but you want to avoid being taken down, you can self host a single user instance and refuse any requests from other countries.
Edit: Now that I think about it, there's also the fact that as long as the account itself isn't limited by their home server, the content in question would be accessible through the federated copies, so if the home server isn't within Turkey / jurisdiction and doesn't take down the account, the country trying to take down the content would need to send takedown requests or request to geofence the content to each individual server on the entire fediverse - since the home server would be freely federating it to every server with users who follow the content, otherwise they would need to block every fediverse server and every new one every day that more pop up.
The difference is that if your home server is outside of Turkey then you can tell them to kick rocks. Bluesky probably complies because they don't want to be blocked from Turkey. In a truly decentralized system like activitypub, only the server hosting the account / content in question risks being blocked, which means almost nothing the closer you get to a single account instance. Meanwhile every other server not in Turkey would not notice a difference.
Edit: this was under the assumption that they took it down completely, but it looks like they only geofenced it. Regardless, if they are pressured enough they would be capable of completing hiding an account worldwide, which isn't possible with activitypub without the legal alignment of every instance's country since bluesky on the other hand has sole control of the only relay.
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I use a .dev and it just works with letsencrypt. I don't do anything special with wildcards, I just let traefik request a cert for every subdomain I use and it works. I use the tls challenge which works on port 443, so I don't think HSTS or port 80 matters, but I still forwarded port 80 it so I can serve an http->https redirect since stuff like curl and probably other tools might not know about HSTS.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree then, I don't think that is at all the obvious interpretation and I don't think everyone needs to clarify where they live when talking about it to "avoid the issue".
Imo if people making assumptions about others living in the US annoys you then you should find it more annoying when someone assumes where you live AND assumes you intended to be presumptuous about it.
Is it wrong to want to talk about the place you live in without telling people where you live? Should everyone be required to state the place they live in any time they talk about it? I don't really see what the problem is with speaking about your place of residence without revealing where you live. I don't get how not mentioning where you live means you assume everyone knows. Maybe you not knowing is intentional.
While I think it's annoying when people assume others live in the US, I think it's even more annoying to both assume people who don't mention where they live must live in the US and also assume they intended you to know that they live in the US.
Doesn't "as a city" just tell you who the "we" refers to? As in "we, the people of our city, need x"? That's how I understand it.
It's all good! For some reason your comment still shows up in my inbox in Sync so I didn't realize
Gotcha thanks for the info! It looks like I would be fine with ocis or opencloud, but since my main use case and pain points are with document editing which is collabora, it probably wouldn't change much besides simplifying the docker setup (I had to make a gross pile of nginx config stuff pieced together from many forum help posts to get the nextcloud fpm container to work smoothly). But it already works so unless it breaks there's little incentive for me to change.
talking like your city is the default and everyone knows which one you’re talking about.
Does this mean that everyone must always specify the geographic area they are from when they talk about it lest they risk being accused of assuming everyone knows? I often say that "we need public transit in my city" and it never once crossed my mind that other people would know or assume what city I'm referring to.
I still don't see how saying that you want x or y in your country is equivalent to talking like your community is the default.
I would totally agree if the statement was "we need x in my country and you all should vote for it" because that would be assuming everyone reading is able to participate and therefore lives there. But that's far from what the statement was, which made no assumptions and didn't even mention a country. All they said was that they want something in their country.
I agree it could be more clear, but I don't think it's fair to jump down their throat when they didn't even mention the US. It just strikes me as an uncharitable interpretation.
Considering that Israel does the equivalent of an October 7 against civilians in Gaza roughly every few weeks, yeah whether or not rapes happened on October 7th doesn't really change the overall situation.
To put it into perspective, the October 7 death toll is roughly 1,200. Since then, the death toll in Gaza has been around 40,000. No amount of rapes on October 7th will absolve Israel or change the dynamic.