raynor

These are great, your passion is clearly visible in your work. I saw some absolutely insane antique examples some years ago in a London museum, since then I've only seen fairly decent modern ones in plastic of fantastical creatures from Japan show up on ebay and the like when looking for other things so your idea of a Dune sandworm should not be too radical.

Anyone knows where to get more insight into the "workmanship" part of judging a sword hozon vs tokubetsu hozon. Is it things like cosmetic, blade integrity/structure, a mix of both?

I have no idea how postal systems work but that back and forth seems hard to accomplish without a certain level of incompetence.

This. Airtags absolutely terrific in locating "lost" valuable shipments. It is still a fairly new thing for most people to consider but in a hobby like nihonto where you have relatively small items with potentially very high value these are now a must have in my opinion. I have unfortunately no experience with the French postal system but do recognize exciting looking shipments getting "lost" when I lived in Miami, once after they "misplaced" one of my wife's shipments I emailed and called the local postmaster a handful of times and after a few days the lost package turned up, taped shut and with some opened articles inside, and we never hand and problems the remaining time I lived there. Complaining to the bosses as already people have suggested definitively increase your chances!

Great! I recommend not using USPS for items like this. Although no where near the same value, we had a lot of items "found" when making noise after them not showing up or bringing up fake deliveries. Sometimes there was clear signs of opening and tampering, and this only happened with USPS.

Look at the kissaki,, clearly this is a work of the legendary yokai master who taught Masamune

I never use USPS now either for sending or receiving. When I lived in Florida during the pandemic I was shocked how they stole as ravens, mostly my wife's shampoo and beauty products for some reason but I have never encountered another organization where it was treated as normal and how hard you have to work to get someone to do something about it. Once had an open package with opened products "found" and delivered after a couple months with about half a bottle of shampoo used Never had any problems with any other US shipping companies, they usually came through as good if not better then the couriers I'm used to here in Europe.

A discussion is most fruitful when debating not stating. Taking things personally always ends up derailing things into senseless bickering, trust me there are never any victors in a forum fight. This thread is to me, very educational but it is starting to turn into the teachers fighting. Gentlemen, agree to disagree the subject is open to different perspectives this is not about whether the earth is flat or not.

This is exactly why it needs laws and regulation, I rarely agree with Elon Musk on much, but he is spot on with how urgent it is. The technology is too impactful to just be left for companies seeking profit.

I disagree that AI is the end of thinking, but together with say autotune it will be a heavy blow to creativity. It will however be hard to catch people cheating in academia now, until they have to actually do the job. Hopefully many steps from the operating table... This varies through models, but it is a shared path - models like chatgtp get a lot of free training through user usage, but they also do a lot of in house specific feedback training by personnel so the answer is yes and no depending on the model.

A large part in how these language model interfaces (chatgpt and similar) works is that a large part of the training is done by humans, not just the massive calculations carried out by data centers. Actual humans sit down and give feedback on the answers the bots put out, so that they and their creators learn what language carries best when giving feedback to users (customers). Here is a experiment I think members of this forum is rather uniquely qualified to carry out - many members here are a lot more knowledgeable about nihonto then the average Joe. Ask chatgpt questions with variable degrees of difficulty on nihonto or any field you are confident in and you will see it is correct on many things, but also incorrect. When incorrect it will, until corrected speak, in other words "lie" with the utmost confidence worthy of any politician. This is one of the problems, for most people the answers about nihonto when presented with confidence by the allmighty AI will in many cases pass as facts, truth. This of course applies to any other field not just nihonto, wherein lie a tremendous challenge unless these systems are subjected to quality control and regulations.

Speaking as someone with an education in the IT field - Large language models like ChatGPT are getting more accurate every day, but I firmly place them within a rule as old as the internet: Do not take serious medical or academic advice from an online generated source, chatGPT and its like should be treated as a fancy version of wikipedia, nothing more.

Same oil I use. If you can see droplets on the blade or the rainbow sheen you're using too much.

Leave the thread up, it is good education for novices and for anyone that humility is better then hubris - by asking his account deleted the op has closed himself off from further learning, a missed opportunity in any field. Last I checked starting a thread did not automatically give any rights of ownership, been like that since dawn of the internet.

shameless necrobump