Risk/cost ratio? A pedestrian acting irresponsibly can of course do a lot of damage, but the likelihood of killing someone is much lower than if a vehicle is breaking the rules.

Isn't that the argument for the alternative? The risk of being distracted by other traffic and missing a pedestrian who was obscured by another vehicle is much lower when there are no other vehicles or traffic, and then the rules are indecorous for not taking into account the change in risk.

It's interesting considering that based on the German military doctrine at the time low ranking officers on the ground had a huge amount of independence while the French ones were stuck doing nothing and waiting for orders to be signed and approved..

Of course maybe that didn't apply to committing atrocities to the same degree.

That's kind of interesting, though considering that the German army (and presumably Prussian before that?) was know for giving a relatively huge amount of leeway and authority to more junior officers.

Supposedly while the French and British officers were frozen waiting for new orders to be telegraphed when something didn't go according to plan, Germans took the initiative based on what's happening on the ground. US and other countries adopted this doctrine after the war because of how unexpected successful the German army was (despite being outgunned by the French and the soviets who had better tanks and more trucks just couldn't figure out how to use them efficiently)

GLM 4.6 was kind of meh. Especially on Claude code since thinking was seemingly entirely broken. This week I've been playing with 4.7 and it seems like massive improvement, subjective pretty much almost at Sonnet level (it's still using a lot less thinking tokens, though).

Z.ai (at least mid/top end subscription not sure about the API) is pretty slow too especially during some periods. Cerebras of course is probably a different story (if its not quantitized)

>They force us to confront how contingent our tastes are

Have you seen any ancient frescoes or the handful of surviving paintings, though?

The white marble is of course in-accurate but that doesn't mean our tastes were inherently that different.

I fail to understand what's the point in even having those reconstructions there if we are fairly certainly they looked nothing alike the originals. Making them pure white seems less dishonest.

I do agree, but there is still a valid logic behind what is shown because it's only using the pigments that there is direct evidence on the statue for - but to stop this confusion, maybe there should be three versions of each statue at these kind of exhibitions (assuming these are all replica castings and they're not re-painting the originals!) - a blank one to appreciate the unpainted form, the reconstruction of the base layer that only has the pigments found in the crevices (what this article is complaining about), and then an artists impression of what it probably looked like properly shaded (given that we have the evidence of painted statues as shown in the article).

Then you could still have the evidentially "pure" one, but also have a more likely rendering to reduce confusion.

Why would the painting style they used for statues be so massively different from frescoes, mosaics and paintings during the same period, though?

Statues were typically large and outdoors and viewed at a distance, frescoes were typically viewed in close proximity and needed details adding to not look completely flat. Some of those also were rather "garish" compared with modern tastes, particularly when freshly painted and not after years of fading and being covered up (and very sensitively restored according to protocols which frown on adding pigment)

I did find it odd that there was no discussion about whether those other media now represent the exact colors that they had when they were originally created. I know from experience that colors fade, but the argument seems to ignore that.

I also know that most of the old paintings that we have today have been though multiple rounds of "refreshment" in order to counter both the fading and dirt/soot that they were exposed to over the years (remember: most of these were displayed by torchlight/lamplight/candlelight for centuries). Nowadays there is a real emphasis on trying to produce an original ascetic, but that has not always been the case.

So I would want a better discussion of how accurate those "standard candles" are.

We do have a non insignificant amount of ancient frescoes, mosaics and even a handful of paintings. As the author has pointed out they generally seem much more appealing to modern aesthetic sensibilities. That seems like reasonably strong evidence than whatever thought processing went into making these so called. "reconstructions".

> To me TFA reads mostly as "this reconstruction looks bad, I refuse to believe ancient Romans painted statues like this, therefore it must be an incorrect reconstruction."

Which I agree is not a reasonably view IF we had no other data. Imposing the garrish 5-yeard old colouring book style is no less biased.

> Imposing the garrish 5-yeard old colouring book style is no less biased.

I don't think they claim this is what the statues actually looked. In fact, the article quotes an expert saying the opposite: "we can never know what they looked like".

These are conservative but incomplete "this is the part we have strong evidence for".

Idealy, for me as a layperson who is only going to see these in a museum, I'd love to see a series of pieces...

First, the original, untouched (preserved but not restored?) sculpture.

Second, the reproductions highlighted in the article. With appropriate notations about "these are the base layers, not complete, etc"

And third, a best-guess at what the original could have looked like, based on the first two. Yes, this might be wrong and need to change over time.

They show us what the base layers were, and what pigments of the day looked like.

It may be an academic point. But they are academics.

Well they might as well show the texture of unprocessed marble as well. This is not particularly different.

I mean, showing the texture of the underlying stone is how the vast majority of statues from classical antiquity are displayed, and indeed how most pastiches are created.

(and half the objection to the paint jobs comes from the fact we've come to incorrectly associate decorative elements from the classical period with the colours of bare stone)

Associating them with garishly and almost certainly inaccurately (based on pretty much all the indirect evidence we have) painted sculptures doesn't seem like much of an improvement, though?

I totally agree with. This is not a reconstruction because the shading, detail and subtler colors are completely left off. It's just a reconstruction of the statue as it would have been in an incomplete state!